//------------------------------// // Babe, Why Is She Saying That Word? // Story: Babe, Why Is She Saying That Word? // by Soaring //------------------------------// “Babe, why is she saying that word?” Shining Armor and Princess Cadance were sitting at their dining room table. Their daughter, Flurry Heart, was finally quiet as she sat across from them in her high chair, gnawing on the top of her formula bottle. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Princess Cadance replied to her dear husband. She said this with a noncommittal shrug, like she was trying to featherdust the question away. Unfortunately for Cadance, Shining Armor wasn’t finished beating that feather duster against every surface his mind could come up with. He leaned forward, his brows furrowed. “Cady, I don’t want to say you’re lying, but I’m going to anyway. You’re lying. You know what I’m talking about.” The princess sunk back in her seat, eying down her empty plate like she wished she had something else for her hooves to do. Instead, she just levitated it a bit before letting out a harrumph, the plate falling back onto the table with an inharmonious clickity-clack.  “Then what do you want me to say, Shiny? That I shouldn’t speak to our daughter? She’s the firstborn fruit of our royal loins. Communication is essential right from conception!” Shining Armor rolled his eyes. “No, that’s definitely not what I’m wanting you to do. I’m just… worried. Flurry Heart and I were playing with her playset we got her last week when suddenly, out of nowhere, she just got up and said—”  “Abortion!” The couple glanced over at their filly who had placed her empty bottle of formula right next to her empty bowl. They were so befuddled by the shock and awe of her verbose verbiage that their common sense was no longer within the ballpark. In fact, it was so far out of left field, it was still at home digging through the couch cushions for change to get bus fare to go to the stadium. She was sitting all delightfully, while sporting a toothy grin that made Shining Armor’s stomach queasy. “There she goes again.” “I know.” Shining Armor growled. “So, what do we do then? We can’t have her out in public, especially while saying… that.” Cadence just sighed. “Well, I can’t tell her to not say that word.” “Why not?” “That would just stunt her growth, Shiny. If we tell her she can’t say a word, then she might become a silent baby, who chooses not to speak because her mother said so! It starts with a single word she can’t say… then there will be full sentences, then paragraphs! Soon we’ll be adding Prancer in the Sty back to the banned reading list in all our schools and society will crumble!” Shining Armor clanked his head against the desk. “You’re just being over dramatic! The worst thing that will happen is she’ll have that goth phase for a few years where everything has to be about screamo and death, and to be honest, I don’t think it will be an issue. Colts nowadays like the quiet ones.” Shining Armor sighed. “All I’m saying is that she just can’t say that word.” “Abortion?” Cadance said with a raised brow. “Yes, Cady! She shouldn’t be saying that at her age! That word is reserved for the clergy and fifteen-year old mothers! That’s just asking for the Crystal Empire’s Foals and Family Services to launch an investigation on us, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to hear from Princess Celestia that she wants to abort us from existence!” Cadence waved a hoof nonchalantly at her husband. “Pfft, now that is highly unlikely. You know I have connections, right? Besides, nopony said this parenting thing would be easy. There are actual books written about how hard it is. And even if it were easy, we would probably have three Flurry Hearts running around. Wouldn’t that be… a delightful experience?” Shining Armor opened his mouth to reply, but their foal ruined his chance to jump in when she let out a loud earthquake-inducing burp. The walls of the Castle rumbled under the power of it. When Flurry Heart’s stomach finally subsided, so did the Castle, leaving Cadance and Shining Armor with windswept manes and a whole plate full of whiplash. “Uh… well... that happened,” Shining Armor muttered. “That definitely did happen,” Cadence said with a nod. “Was that the same formula we gave her last week, Shiny?” “Thought so. It was right next to all the other bottles we had in the ice box. Unless somepony grabbed the other bottle…” “Was that the one labeled ‘Liquid Laxative?’” Shining Armor raised a brow. “That’s a thing? Back in my day, we just ate some Mexicolt food, closed our eyes and hoped for the best.” Princess Cadance frowned and looked at her filly. She was sitting there still in that chair of hers, rocking back and forth like a crazed psychopath with a thirst for bloodshed that was ready to launch herself out of her seat. “Luckily for us, we don’t have to use that tactic. Luna had bought some for us off some seller out East. Thought that if we needed it, that we should make sure it’s preserved in ice, otherwise that laxative would turn into a bomb that could take out the whole entire Crystal Empire!” Shining Armor’s eyes widened. “And we just gave that to the baby? We gave explosive materials to an infant… as nourishment?!” “No, I’m pretty positive we gave her the right bottle.” “Neckbeard,” Flurry Heart replied, before yeeting the bottle of empty formula into the next room. “I’ll check for you real quick, Shiny. Don’t get your hooves all bunched up like an accordion.” With that, the alicorn blinked out of existence, leaving Shining Armor with a ticking time bomb thy name is Flurry Heart. “Flurry Heart?” The filly stopped rocking her chair and stared up at her father, her eyes beady and glistening in the light. “Diabetes?” Shining Armor’s heart nearly came out of his porthole when his daughter said that. She was so damn adorable, even if she was saying horrific words that would cause the whole entire nation to wonder if royalty meant living in a luxurious, traveling dumpster fire. Shining Armor hugged the filly close. “Even though you’re saying things that you shouldn’t be saying, I’ll be here while your mother figures out what she gave you.” The filly sighed and hugged her father back. They stayed quiet for a moment. Everything was well. Flurry Heart wasn’t calling him a neckbeard. She wasn’t proclaiming abortion. She was just Flurry Heart. “Say, honey, I don’t know about you, but we may have given her a completely different bottle.” “Euthanasia!” His world crashed back into reality, where his daughter was rocking around in her seat again, while his wife was trying to read the back of the poison that she gave that poor filly of theirs. Shining Armor groaned. “So, what’s the verdict?” “Guilty, of all charges,” Princess Cadance said, giggling to herself behind her forehoof. She levitated the bottle over to her husband. “Looks like we gave her her normal formula, but I think this bottle had something else in it.” “Why do you say that?” Princess Cadance flipped a hoof in her husband’s direction, all while plainly displaying her case to the court. “Well, I did tell you about Luna, right?” “Yes, the one that could destroy all of the Crystal Empire, right?” “Right…” She coughed. “I’ll make sure the guards dispose of that later. There was one other bottle that we used to dispose of leftover poison joke for the apothecary. Unfortunately, I may have not gotten all of it out and it seems that our daughter possibly, maybe, perhaps... has the case of ‘the joke’.” “ABORTION!” Shining Armor gasped. “So, she’s saying these words because you used a baby bottle to dispose of poison joke?!” Princess Cadance tapped her chin. “Actually, it was to give him it since it was all liquefied and what not. Don’t want it to go to waste!” She sang those last few words like they were fluffy and not something she could care about. “Don’t worry, Shiny. I think this will wear off in the next few hours. Or maybe a few days. I can’t remember what Twilight told me the last time she mentioned poison joke.” Shining Armor was baffled. How does he deal with something like this? Maybe he should just stay in bed… until Flurry was eighteen. Groaning, the stallion held his head in his forehooves. “I need to reconsider my life choices…” “What?” Princess Cadance said with a head tilt. “Nothing,” Shining Armor replied lamely, his eyes drifting to the empty bottle of formula in the corner. He’d have to pick that up later. “Anyway, now that we know our daughter is dealing with poison joke, then all we need to do is take her to the apothecary and—” “Steroids!” “Honey, I think I broke our daughter.” Shining Armor stifled a chuckle. “Glad you figured that one out so quickly.” He reached over the nearby countertop to grab a contact list of all the street addresses in the Crystal Empire. His eyes darted over each page, before finally landing on the exact listing he needed. “Ah-ha! He’s apparently a few blocks away. As long as we can restrain her to the point that she’s in that room, then we should be fine, right?” “Right,” Cadence said, her eyes bouncing with the hyperactive cracked-induced alicorn known as Flurry, who was carrying her own high stool with her magic. “So how would we do that?” Shining Armor ignored her daughter’s journey as she slammed against the fridge. “You know that spell I taught you last week with Celestia?” Cadence nodded. “Yeah. Although Celestia was there to make sure I wasn’t going to blow a hole in the castle’s walls.” “Right…” The stallion cleared his throat before continuing, “So if you could cast that spell nullifier, then maybe it would buy us a couple hours before she’s able to levitate the entire apothecary off his hooves.” “Wait, you were talking about the spell nullifier?” Cadence blinked twice, her maw agape. “Erectile Dysfunction!” Flurry Heart hummed, before she slammed into a wall. Shining Armor nervously chuckled, pushing her most recent choice of words to the shame corner of his mind before he slowly lit his horn and settled Flurry Heart’s high chair back into place. He then quickly morphed his frown into a smile. “Of course! What did you think I was talking about?” “Oh… N-Nothing, then.” His wife’s blush told him everything he needed to know. She looked so cute when she was embarrassed. “I see. We will... re-enact that later when Flurry Heart inevitably knocks herself out from a concussion.” Shining Armor paused to make sure his daughter wasn’t looking like a Department of Foal and Family Services case. The little filly smiled back, which made his heart feel more conflicted than ever. “I just want to make sure our daughter isn’t going to have any side effects from this. Well, and making sure my wife wasn’t waging a war against our foal.” Cadence cracked a smile through her facade. “Honey, this is why we’re married. If you weren’t around, I’d get an—” “Abortion!” Shining Armor couldn’t take it anymore. He fell on his back, laughing like a maniac too. “What? What’s so funny?”