With her mane back in reasonable order, Zest brought her latest clump of pine needles back to the school and set them down. She'd been at this for hours and after her long day of work, Zest looked down at her work - a small pile of them not big enough to hide a filly.
Zest's first job could be described as ‘mulch mare’. Sugarcoat sent her out into the surrounding forest to gather pine needles and cones to throw them into a pile. Sometime next year these could hypothetically be used for the garden, though Zest had little hope she'd ever get enough at the rate she was going.
To a pony with all their motor functions, this would be nothing more than menial labor. To Zest, it doubled as mildly intense training meant to develop her ability to move around and carry things. Trivial stuff like that.
Eventually, she would move on to making pots and charcoal and gathering woods. For now, those chores were too much for her to handle.
Maybe being so helpless should have worried her, but Zest only liked this ghost stuff more each day. Under the safety of another pony’s wing, she had the freedom to bumble around as much as she needed to. Now she had the privilege to see all of this as an adventure– an entirely new world to explore.
The job also gave her the chance to get familiar with the school grounds, which she was still exploring after two days.
The school had been abandoned long enough for the woods to overtake most of its grounds. She only knew the place had a sports field because the bleachers were still there. The audience now consisted of some vines, maybe a squirrel on a good day, that watched over an overgrown patch of shrubbery and a few short trees.
The whole of the facilities truly was inside the woods, not merely next to them. Wild trees grew inches away from even the main schoolhouse and weeds piled against every building. The overgrowth even reached inside some.
If you counted the remains of the bleachers, the place had six structures in total. Sugarcoat left most of these fallow to focus on keeping the boy’s dormitory and the main building in reasonable condition.
The boy’s dormitory acted as a storehouse for fuel. Or perhaps she was better off calling it their larder, given her new diet.
Inside, Zest founds stocks of firewood, coal, charcoal, gunpowder, paper, pinecones, sticks, and even some propane tanks. Zest sniffed around and decided that potential heat didn’t smell tasty. It had to be on fire.
‘The good stuff’, kept in the basement, consisted of a cabinet of cooking oils and ancient, gnarly woodchips that Sugarcoat called agarwood.
Apparently, that agarwood stuff was like ghost caviar. You only got it on special occasions. Zest tried to convince Sugarcoat that becoming her first underling was a special occasion only to get shot down. Sugarcoat simply told her that her ‘pallet wasn’t refined enough’ to appreciate something this fancy. She did, however, promise to give Zest one chip for the first anniversary of her death, when she might be able to enjoy it.
That’s what she found on her first day of exploration. Sugarcoat wanted her to do two hours of picking stuff up each night and Zest had passed that mark today. What was more, she had a big pile of stuff for mulch to show for it.
Zest beamed down at her small pile with far more pride than it warranted. She supposed this was the first time she’d ever done honest work. It felt good to do something helpful, rather than work that actively harmed other ponies. At least she didn’t have to go home feeling disgusting and miserable.
Zest looked left and right noticing the orbs converging on her. Somehow she couldn’t help but see these things as cute now. They were like little bunnies to her new ghost brain. Making them even cuter was how they appeared to be attracted to happiness. They swarmed her whenever she got like this.
She decided to lead them on a parade through the schoolhouse itself – where she’d be exploring tonight. Zest started singing a little song, smiling wide at the orbs as they followed her.
“Let the rainbow remind you!” Zest even got them to bob up and down to the beat by doing the same herself in an exaggerated fashion.
The school building was where they’d live and where Sugarcoat kept everything that wasn’t a fire hazard. However, few rooms were even cleared of all the clutter left behind. Sugarcoat told Zest she could turn any of the classrooms into whatever sort of space she wanted, were she so inclined. Maybe the offer would have been tempting if Zest had even a single personal affect to put in any of them.
Zest soon found the library, the most heavily reworked room after the cafeteria. Sugarcoat had, by some means, gotten about two hundred or so books, in addition to large stacks of newspapers and magazines, to fill out the library. Looking at the poor quality of the magazines, Zest decided Sugarcoat collected discarded material rather than stealing all of this.
A cursory glance showed a good quarter of them were romance novels – specifically ones about two colts falling in love. Zest nodded in silent approval of her taste. Another quarter made up every other genre of fiction and the whole of the second half comprised of practical information. They had the complete Encyclopedia Equestria and plenty of atlases to look through.
Zest went through the remaining rooms hoping something cool had been left behind. Nothing remained in the school store. The register was there but contained no money.
She went down to the gym and briefly got her hopes up.
Outside the gym itself, she found a row of glass cabinets filled with trophies. They left all the trophies behind! The Shadowbolts won so many that there was hardly enough space to contain them all. Like weeds, the trophies seemed to strangle one another, desperate for any space.
She wondered why they’d do that briefly before remembering that trophies were useless. It was unlikely they were real gold.
Banners still hung from the high ceilings of the gymnasium itself, declaring all manner of achievements of their team ‘The Shadowbolts’. Zest thought that name was so cool! And from the looks of things, the Shadowbolts killed it!
They got to nationals every year and won almost every time. They had major victories in every sport Zest could think of from bowling to hoof ball. It got to the point of excess. There wasn’t any room for more victory.
Her own high school only had the one trophy, put high on a pedestal, from the one time they’d got to nationals fifteen years ago. Or maybe it was twenty years now.
Looking at the dates on the trophies, she got a sense of the timeline. It’d been open for four years only and shut down twelve years ago. It seemed odd, given how successful their sports team had been, for the school to have had such a short life.
That feeling grew as she visited the rest of the rooms.
Every room she visited suggested that the Shadowbolts dominated in every field. They were number one in music, science, and frankly everything else. Newspaper clippings listing impressive achievements of the students filled every bulletin board she found.
The more she looked, the harder it became to imagine why this place got abandoned. Eventually, the curiosity became too much, and she sought out Sugarcoat for the answer.
Zest found her in the library, reading the encyclopedia of all things. The moment she entered the library, most of her orbs decided they liked Sugarcoat more and floated towards her.
“Do you know why this school got shut down, anyway?” Zest floated through the wall, looking down at Sugarcoat from atop the stairs.
“Hm?” Sugarcoat put down the thick book she’d been reading. “It was a charter school. The EEP didn’t like their methods and shut them down.”
“Really? It sounded like their methods worked great. The Shadowbolts rocked! They won every award ever.”
“Perhaps. But it came at a price. They pushed the students a little too hard. Over the four years the school was open, seven students committed suicide and six more had mental breakdowns. I think a teacher killed themselves too.”
“Yowch!” Zest put her hooves over her headphones and winced. “That got dark fast! And I was having such a good day too.”
She noticed her remaining orbs break rank and drift away just then.
“There’s a reason nopony bought the building afterward,” said Sugarcoat. “Its reputation is too bad for them to turn it into anything else. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Shadowbolt Academy already. Didn’t you live around here?”
“Huh? Nah, I’m from Cinder Cone County. Nothing ever happens there. Unless you count the vampires.”
“I trust you’ve completed your work for the day?” Sugarcoat lifted the encyclopedia back up.
“Yeah! And as per our deal, you answer my question in exchange for me working for you, yeah?”
“What else did you want to know?”
“Is there something special about me?” Zest flew down the stairs. She tried to rest her hooves on the table Sugarcoat sat at, but her hooves went straight through. Before Sugarcoat could give her a ‘clearly not’, Zest cleared her throat and clarified. “Like, how exactly is it determined if you become a ghost?”
“No one knows.” Sugarcoat kept her muzzle in the book.
Zest blinked. Nopony knew?
“Okay.” Zest flew through the table now, so that her head alone poked up above it. “Well why do I need to eat heat? Where does it go? I mean, I don’t feel warmer after eating. And what’s special about body heat?”
“No one knows.”
“What are we made of?” Zest inched closer. “Is it ectoplasm?”
“No one knows. It isn’t ectoplasm. They call it auric matter but that’s just a meaningless, arbitrary name they came up with to make themselves feel better.”
“And what about these headphones?” Zest flew up above the table and put her hoof on her head. “How can there be ghost headphones? And why can’t I take them off? And if this is possible why aren’t there ghost rocks and ghost trees all over the place? Or ghost toilets or– or ghost dogs for that matter!”
“Nopony knows any of that.”
“Guh!” Zest let the front half of her body dangle down. “Did I really agree to be your servant in exchange for you telling me nopony knows anything?”
Sugarcoat sighed and put her book down.
“We call it grafting.” Sugarcoat tapped her glasses. “If you’re wondering, there’s no way to take it off. It’s essentially part of your body now. Even if you slice it off with an enchanted dagger, it will grow back. Sometimes, something you were wearing upon death gets ‘grafted’ to you like this. Nopony understands how it works better than that. They often say that it needs to be something you have an emotional connection to, but I didn’t particularly care about these glasses. Nopony really understands how any of this works.”
“Nopony understands any this?” Zest held onto her headphones. “After all this time? Really?”
“You’d be surprised at how little scientific inquiry has gone into our kind,” Sugarcoat admitted. “Ghosts don’t have the infrastructure or resources to develop anything without immediate benefit. Predeads find it too dangerous to study us. We really are mysterious.”
“But come on!” Zest floated on her side to look at Sugarcoat sideways. “There’s gotta be at least a couple of scientists who became ghosts. And decided to do a little bit of research?”
“The largest ghost city has about one thousand ponies in it,” said Sugarcoat. “That’s like expecting some small, backwater town to have built its own science facilities. We can’t manufacture advanced instrumentation and equipment. All we have are hypotheses”
“So we just don’t know anything?” Zest spun back upright and dangled her head and legs down in defeat.
“We understand it on one level. It’s just black box to us.” Sugarcoat closed her book. “You can take your unfinished business, for example. I can’t tell you how it's determined– it’s rarely actually the most important thing to a pony. I can’t even tell you how subjective completing the condition on it is. But I can tell you every ghost knows what there is and that you’ll die if you ever complete it.”
“I’ll die?” Zest straightened and grabbed onto her headphone dongle to look down at it.
Oh yeah. Ghosts were supposed to have unfinished business. What was her unfinished business again?
Even though it was something she’d never once thought about up until now… somehow Zest did know the answer. It was as simple as if somepony asked her what her hometown was. She simply knew it.
“Mine was… well there was that now Zounds cylinder coming out in six months. The Cyan Cylinder. I never got a chance to hear it,” Zest explained. “Can I hear a cover of the album? And does that mean I’ll die if I hear a single second of it? Or do I have to hear the whole album? Does it have to be once all the way through or will listening to all the songs one at a time still go through?”
“You got a relatively merciful one,” said Sugarcoat. “I can’t say. Likely the last one. However, you should assume even one second of that album will kill you for now.”
“Ah, great!” Zest winced and clamped down on her headphones. She’d really been looking forward to the Cyan Cylinder too! That’d been on her list as one of the reasons to not go through with the whole electrocution thing. Now she’d never get to hear it. “So anypony with a music cylinder player can kill me instantly! Isn’t this supposed to be like moving on or something?”
Sugarcoat closed her book and shot a sharp frown at Zest, one that made her retreat halfway underground.
“You’ll dissolve. Your form will burn away into nothing. Ghosts scream as it happens, so we assume it’s a painful death.” Sugarcoat’s tone remained clinical even when describing the gruesome destruction of other ghosts. Though Zest did hear a rare tinge of harshness in her. “Anything you’ve heard to the contrary is just propaganda designed to make killing ponies like you and me more palatable and acceptable. It is death and forcing a ghost to complete theirs is murder.”
“But what about the afterlife?”
“This is the afterlife.” Sugarcoat gestured to the dark school.
“Oh.” Zest floated out of the ground. “Well what about the post-afterlife?”
“The post-afterlife?”
“There’s gotta be something after this right?”
“Hardly. You could simply cease to exist.”
Zest looked down at her hoof. She always figured that was the most likely outcome of death. Though to be fair she had gotten this second, unlikely chance after her first demise.
“Are you confident enough that there’s a happy post-afterlife waiting for you that you’re willing to essentially kill yourself?” Sugarcoat asked.
Yeah. Based on how cruel and bizarre the gods were, little hope for a happy afterlife could be had, even if you believed in the concept itself.
“Hm. No.”
“That’s how most ghosts see it,” she said. “We avoid completing our unfinished business like our lives depend on it because that is the case.”
Geeze! The world was a dark and scary place for ghosts! Zest had never been happier to have a friend in this new, lonely world she now found herself in.
“So what’s your unfinished business?” Zest asked.
“It’s better for nopony but myself to know that. You won’t trigger it by accident,” said Sugarcoat.
“How mysterious.” Zest folded her forelegs. “Where did you learn all this stuff anyway? I thought you were just starting out.”
“I lived with another specter for some time before heading out on my own,” said Sugarcoat.
“Oh?” Zest floated up close to Sugarcoat, eager for some gossip. “Who was it? Was it a boy specter? Were you two in love?”
“Unimportant. I think it’s time for you to begin auric training,” Sugarcoat changed the subject. “Two days of rest should be enough.”
Was that a sore topic? What if that other specter was her mentor who got killed? Or what if it really was a boy specter? And they were dating but then he cheated on her?!
That jerk! Zest didn’t even know if he existed and she was already mad at him!
Zest’s mind burned with curiosity and the desire to know! But then again, she didn’t much want to talk about her own backstory. Sugarcoat was missing a few critical details there. Maybe it was best to just leave the past behind for now?
“I’ll begin teaching you how to exercise your aura control.”
Sugarcoat seemed to think that was the most important power to train. To Zest, its usefulness was far more abstract than the other powers she had now. Ice magic, possessing objects, and inserting her energy into things all had more practical applications in her mind. Allegedly, she could shoot lightning one day too.
“What about my lightning bolt attack?” Zest held her foreleg out. A convenient ripple of electricity came to her aid, though she still had no control over it. “You told me being an elemental was my free ticket to appreciation. I want to be appreciated so bad, you have no idea!”
“The most help I can give you there is to tell you to forget about it for the next few months. Preferably a year,” said Sugarcoat.
“A year?!” Zest withdrew her foreleg. “You’re gonna make me wait an entire year to shoot lightning? But why?”
“You don’t want to overexert yourself.”
“Isn’t training just overexerting yourself repeatedly?”
Sugarcoat shook her head.
“You should think of yourself as recovering from a terrible injury. You may think you're fine, but to me, you look like you've just crawled out of a train wreck. You're shambling about with barely enough strength to get around the house."
‘Injury’ would be an understatement in this situation. Still, her analogy did make sense. Zest felt as strong as a kitten since the accident.
“What you need is closer to physical therapy. If you got hit by a train, you’d be learning to walk again. Marathon training during that time would only slow your recovery. It’s unintuitive, but you’ll be able to use your elemental powers faster if you give up on them in the short term.”
“That makes sense to me.” Zest straightened up. “But it’s not really ‘physical’ therapy if I don’t have any physicality, is it?”
“If you must make the distinction, what I’m showing you is ‘aetheric resititution’. We’ve developed these techniques to help new ghosts recover and develop their senses.”
Sometimes Zest felt like she was throwing all her puns into a black hole.
“You understand why the ability to use your aura is important, yes?” Sugarcoat asked. “I’ve explained it already. It’s vital for you to function as a ghost.”
“It’s what I need to safely go outside your aura, right?” Zest recalled. “And to keep other ghosts from forcing their will on me?”
“More than that. You’re essentially missing one of your senses. It allows you to feel psychic and magical energies as well as the presence of other ghosts.”
Zest looked up and tapped her ethereal horn. She used to have something remotely similar before ditching her body. A substitute for her mana-sense would be nice.
“It will also allow you to directly control lesser ghosts.” Sugarcoat held out a hoof and an orb landed gently on it. “Furthermore, it will allow you to communicate with other ghosts properly. You’ll be able to feel our emotions and project your own onto us.”
At that perk, Zest stopped nodding along.
“That one creeps me out a little,” she admitted. “You’re saying you’ll be able to feel all my emotions?”
“I already can.” Sugarcoat sent her orb away with a flick. “I can feel it when you’re hungry, afraid, or happy.”
“What?!” Zest floated back to the stairs of the library, putting a little distance between the two. “Sorry, this is taking on a kinda dystopian vibe to me. I don’t want you feeling my emotions. Can you stop?”
“That’s like asking me not to notice if you’re smiling.” Sugarcoat shook her head. “It’s not something I can turn off. Besides, aura suppression is the only way you could hope to hide your feelings from me.”
That was a good point. But she still didn’t like it.
“This isn’t as dramatic as you fear.” Sugarcoat beckoned for Zest to come back. “Imagine describing talking to a pony who’s never experienced it before. You can implant an image of a tree in another pony’s head against their will simply by making the right noise. Likewise, you can use it to make them angry or happy or transmit your very thoughts to them with the right sounds. It would sound like a horrid power, mind-control even.”
Zest hummed to herself. Thinking of this as an alternate form of communication made it an easier pill to swallow. Zest hated pills all the same.
“I get your point.” Zest sighed and floated back to her boss. “But how would you describe something to a pony who doesn’t know what talking is?”
“It’s an analogy.”
“Right. Right. So then how do I start?”
Sugarcoat beckoned to them and a dozen orbs came from the walls to circle her.
“Mentally, orbs are like rocks that move,” said Sugarcoat. “They’ll show zero resistance against your will. It should come naturally if you try projecting your aura. Try pushing this one out of the room. Just focus on it and you’ll feel its presence.”
Zest frowned over at the nearest orb. Interestingly, that made it float away however slightly. Maybe this really was easy.
She focused on it, and sure enough, she could feel what Sugarcoat meant. Putting her focus on that orb made her feel a slight connection towards it.
Please leave? Zest thought.
“There’s no point in asking a rock a question, is there?” Sugarcoat tsked her. “You just make it do what you want. It’s an object, not a pony. You don’t need to feel bad.”
Zest shuddered. It almost felt like Sugarcoat read her mind just then. But she nodded and moved on.
She puffed her cheeks out and glared hard at her target orb. She tried pushing as much anger towards it as she could muster. She thought all kinds of bad things about orbs, told herself it was just a stupid rock.
That orb booked it, flying right out of the building.
“Hey! It actually worked!” Zest put a hoof on her headphones and bobbed her head back and forth in a happy little dance. Things were going great! “That was easy!”
All the orbs started floating towards her.
“Eh?” Her dance stopped. “You sure these things have no intelligence? I notice they follow me around when I’m happy. They kinda get spooked when I’m mad too.”
“You’ve been using your aura to push them around subconsciously,” said Sugarcoat. “Don’t equinize them too much.”
“I dunno. They seem kinda cute to me.” Zest focused on one and tried to draw it in. It didn’t land smoothly on her hoof, but she did get it there.
“You’d feel the same way about a balloon with googly eyes on it.”
“Guess you’re right.” Zest switched her focus to another orb and got that same feeling of connection. It took her some time to work out what it felt like, but decided the orb was like an extension. It felt like a fifth hoof, albeit a numb one. “I think I feel what you’re wanting me to feel. Heh! I'm a natural at this, aren't I?”
"Hardly."
"Well, okay! But for my first attempt-"
"No."
"Gah!"
“You'll have to put in some work before you can approach competency. Here's your first goal.” Sugarcoat arranged three orbs in a straight line in front of her. “Keep three orbs in this formation. Move them from the front lobby to the roof through the access door. If you can do that without any of them going through a wall or breaking formation, you’ll be ready for the next step.”
Zest shifted her focus from orb to orb. She could move them to the spot she wanted, but they’d wander off as soon as she switched focus.
“How do you make it look so easy?”
“I suppose I should explain more,” said Sugarcoat. “You’ve noticed that the orbs do my bidding? We call it ‘programming’. Essentially, you can assign a very specific and narrow task to an orb by imparting your own will into it.”
Sugarcoat closed her eyes and ten of the orbs sprang into action. Each one floated to a different section of the bookshelves. They returned, one by one, to Sugarcoat and stacked the books she wanted in front of her.
Zest marveled at this ability. You could be so lazy if you mastered this art. She decided maybe auric control was something to be jealous of after all.
“Once programmed, you need only nudge the orb to perform the right task, so long as you’re inside the same aura as them. Another advantage of living with a specter is that you can use my aura to reach them within three kilometers. On your own, your reach would be measured in a few meters instead.”
Sugarcoat showed the one task they could be ‘programmed’ to do was reversible. She had the orbs return their books to the shelf in the exact right spot.
“As I’ve said, they have no intelligence of their own and will perform the exact routine mindlessly. They’re like automata, not robots. Expect them to occasionally fail.”
As an example, Sugarcoat had an orb pick up a book. Perhaps her instruction was to ‘go to the roof’, because the orb tried flying through the ceiling with the book in tow. The book fell to the ground and the orb went clear to the roof.
“If you want it to bring an object somewhere, you need to show it the exact route. You can have the orb bring something to ‘you’ but it will try to go through walls if you don’t program a route for it to take. Also, if you want it to bring you something you want, that needs to be in the exact right spot because they can see about as well as any other rock. Visualize the path from the lobby to the roof strongly enough, and you’ll be able to get it to travel there on its own.”
“Right.” Zest crouched near one of the orbs. She supposed you’d need to put all the books back in the right spot for the book-fetching trick to work. That explained why Sugarcoat was such a stickler for everything going back to the exact right place.
Maybe her first task should be memorizing the route she’d take herself? The layout of the school remained fuzzy in Zest’s mind.
“If it's too hard for you, simply try to get one to stay still.”
“Right!” Zest floated up. “I’m going to go back and forth between the two places to memorize it first!”
Zest didn’t get close to achieving her goal, but she did get slightly better. She’d progressed from getting the dang thing to stand still, to pushing it awkwardly in the right direction. Well, the correct general direction, that is.
Sadly, she couldn’t get it all the way to the roof without hitting a wall. Even with great patients, it wasn’t enough. She could swear those things could get mad at you! Once Zest forced one in the correct direction, it started avoiding her. It’d float away as she got close.
Happy thoughts would bring them back easily enough. She just needed to start singing a happy song and they’d all cluster around her for another attempt.
Sugarcoat told her that leading them in another parade wouldn’t count because she needed to consciously use her aura to develop it.
There had to be a better way!
“You’ve done enough today.”
“Gah!” Zest jumped as Sugarcoat came up behind her. All the orbs booked it.
“Your progress is hardly exceptional, but you don’t want to overexert yourself in your condition,” said Sugarcoat. “You’ll find it easier tomorrow after you’ve rested. Besides, I can feel how hungry you are.”
Yeah! Zest felt that void growing faster than ever before. She could smell the fire Sugarcoat made for dinner, too. It smelled so good!
Her hunger felt a little different this time, though. As she followed Sugarcoat to the cafeteria and smelled dinner more clearly, that itching sensation returned worse than ever. Zest hoped she’d finished with having ‘talks’ about her body by age 14. Sadly, that didn’t seem to be the case.
She hoped so badly it had nothing to do with ghost sex.
“Hey.” Zest floated out in front of Sugarcoat. “I have one more question. I feel… itchy?”
She pointed to her head, and Sugarcoat nodded in recognition immediately.
“Those are called blood cravings,” she said.
“That sounds bad.”
“It is. It’s the reason we can never live among the predeads. You want to freeze the blood of the living. You have an addiction and only body heat can keep your cravings down.”
This was it! The final boss of being a ghost. Her desire to freeze living creatures, specifically ponies, to death.
Zest gulped (though what she couldn’t say) and asked the most dreaded question she could think of.
“I– I don’t have to kill ponies, do I?” Zest kept one eye closed as she waited for the response.
“No. You can survive off forest animals indefinitely,” Sugarcoat said to Zest’s infinite relief. “Of course, they never go away. We can’t be around predeads because there’s always a chance we’ll slip.”
“Oh, you just made my day.” Zest’s body relaxed. She closed her eyes and let all that worry finally drift away. She could accept the second half of that. “Thank you.”
“Yes. I already caught a rabbit for you.”
“Huh?!” Zest’s eyes flicked back open wide.
With a small flick of her hoof, Sugarcoat summoned one of her orbs. It flew into the room, struggling to carry a small cage. Zest watched with ears flat as she realized it contained a live rabbit. Her ears and the corners of her mouth turned down even more.
Sugarcoat set the rabbit in front of her.
It looked so cute, but it smelled so tasty. Zest never felt so conflicted before in her life.
“And before you ask,” she added, “it won’t be enough to satisfy you unless you freeze its blood and kill it.”
The rabbit sat, oblivious to all danger, simply milling about the cage as it twitched its nose. Zest had no idea if rabbits even could see ghosts.
“You freeze it, throw it on the fire, then eat it a second time as it burns to ash,” said Sugarcoat. “That way nothing goes to waste.”
Instinct slowly opened Zest’s mouth and she had to will it closed again.
This close to a warm, living creature, her hunger and cravings were far worse. Her body shivered. The itch became little needles poking along her back, urging her forward. All her instincts wanted Zest to freeze this thing solid and it took effort to deny them.
Sugarcoat looked up from the rabbit, watching Zest’s hesitation with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re being foolish. Lots of species, intelligent or otherwise, eat meat,” said Sugarcoat. “This is no different than that.”
“I guess.” Zest bit her lip, looking down at the rabbit. Thinking of it as ‘eating’ helped ever so slightly. “My heart’s telling me to eat this little guy, but my head tells me I’m still an herbivore.”
“Well you’re not. You eat animals now. You need to accept that.”
“But I don’t want to eat animals,” Zest whined.
“You’re drooling. Clearly, you do.”
“Maybe.” Zest wiped her lip to confirm the truth. She could drool? What was that, even? Ectoplasm? “But I don’t want to want to eat animals.”
“You know what will happen if you don’t take body heat from animals, don’t you? If you can’t quiet your craving for warm blood?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“If you think it’s bad after three days, can you imagine what it will be like in thirty? Or three hundred? The addiction will claw at you until you lose control.”
“I get it.”
“You’ll go insane eventually and won’t be able to stop yourself anymore. Ponies will always be what you desire most deep down. You’ll hunt down a pony and kill her when you finally break. Is that what you want?”
“No.”
But she didn’t want to hurt the bunny either.
“There has to be some other way!” She looked up from the rabbit. “Can’t I just eat lots and lots of fire? And become some sort of vegan ghost? If I hold out long enough, I gotta get over the addiction eventually. You called it an addiction yourself!”
“An insignificant number overcome our addiction to body heat, I suppose,” she said. “The only known method is to quit cold turkey. It takes years, is dangerous, painful, and all but sure to be a failed attempt.”
“I feel I should at least try, then.” Zest firmed up, resolute. She knew she could resist this urge. It’d be the right thing to do!
“Irresponsible.” She shook her head.
“Huh?” Zest blinked. “How is that irresponsible? Isn’t putting myself through horrible pain for the sake of the bunnies noble?”
“Hardly. Whose life are you risking by pursuing that path?” Sugarcoat asked.
“Well.” Zest looked at her hooves. It wouldn’t be her own this time.
“If you try to get over your addiction, you will all but certainly lose control over the years it would take. Starving and crazed, you’d go out looking for ponies. You’d only regain control after you’ve killed one. That’s far more likely to happen than you ‘getting over’ yourself.”
Risking her own life didn’t seem like such a big deal, even looking back at how it turned out. Risking another pony’s life somehow felt so much worse.
“If you want to attempt,” said Sugarcoat, “then I’ll have to ask you to leave. I won’t be held responsible for something so foolish.”
Sugarcoat was tapping her hoof impatiently now. It must have been so easy for her to judge Zest. She’d been eating forest animals for years now. To her, it was no different than hay.
If one of those species that naturally ate meat were here, they’d think Zest was being a huge dork. Somewhere in the future, an older Zest might be looking back and cringing at her right now.
“Can’t I at least eat something less cute?” Zest asked.
“Like what?”
“A lizard, maybe?”
“Reptiles won’t work,” said Sugarcoat. “They’re cold-blooded. It’s the same with fish.”
What was the grossest warm-blooded animal, then? ‘Politicians’ came to mind, and she nodded silently at her private joke. No way you could get one way out here, though.
Why did mammals have to be the cutest ones? Just because Zest was a mammal herself, wasn’t it?
“You can freeze a beehive, if you want to start with that,” Sugarcoat offered.
There couldn’t possibly be enough bees for that to last long. She’d need something more sustainable. And bees were important. Rabbits just messed everything up. They really shouldn’t be cute, if you thought about it.
“Maybe a boar?” Zest decided that was the most acceptable animal to kill around here. It felt more honorable than a rabbit. “Oh! No! Turkeys!”
“Turkey?”
“They’re warm-blooded, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay! I can kill a turkey if I have to!” Zest held her hooves up against her chest and nodded. “Turkeys are horrible monsters! They’d chase me around all over the place when I was a filly.”
“Very well.”
“Yeah!” Zest flew up, triumphant!
She just saved that rabbit’s life.
“Then I’ll eat this one myself.” Sugarcoat pulled the rabbit closer.
“What?!” Zest dove down and grabbed the other side of the cage. “But you can’t after that! Please just let this one go?”
“If you promise to kill a turkey tonight,” she offered. “Stalling will only make this worse.”
“Alright.” Zest clicked her tongue.
Sugarcoat opened the cage. That’s how Zest knew she was better than her old boss.
That stupid rabbit didn’t even think to run until Zest gave the cage a rattle, but it did escape into the night.
They went out into the woods shortly after that. Zest sniffed the air as they traveled. She could smell lots of warm blood in any direction but would have been lost guessing which one was a turkey.
Sugarcoat claimed she could tell animals apart by smell and led the way.
The memory of drooling raised several questions Zest had yet to consider until now.
For the first time since dying, Zest tried to spit. Nothing came at first. She frowned and tried spitting hard, from deep in her throat this time.
Something actually came out. A wad of glowing, green goo fell into the grass.
It had to be ectoplasm.
This was amazing! A new power!
Zest smiled as wide as she could.
“Oh, hey!” Zest flew in front of Sugarcoat and pointed to the green glob of spit. “I can spit ectoplasm!”
“Yeah.”
Sugarcoat just floated on by without stopping for one second. Zest watched her motionless before darting after her mentor.
What Zest wouldn’t do for some more positive reinforcement!
They crept slowly closer to a group of animals, which Zest became increasingly certain were the turkeys. As they drew near, Zest realized that her target waited above her. They finally stopped at the base of a tall pine tree.
“There.” Sugarcoat pointed up the tree.
“Turkeys sleep in trees?” Zest sniffed and got her answer. Something delicious slept up there. How did she live in Great Pines for so long and never notice that, though? Being a ghost revealed so many secrets to her.
“They are birds.” Sugarcoat nodded. “Can you smell their hearts beating?”
“Are you trying to make this harder?”
“I’m trying to help you develop your senses,” said Sugarcoat. “Look for the pulsation of their scent.”
A pulsing scent? Zest could scarcely imagine what that would be.
Zest didn’t want to, but she sniffed around anyway. Her new nose had an incredible precision to it, allowing her to sniff out the exact location of things far better than should be possible. Animals always seemed to vibrate a little when she tried to locate them via smell.
Only now did she realize that must have been the blood flowing through them. It all made sense. Yes, she could see what Sugarcoat meant by ‘pulsating’ now. She could make out each beat of the turkeys’ hearts.
The rhythm came slow and calm, letting Zest know they were asleep.
“Hey! I can do that!” Zest’s mood brightened at her new ability.
Sugarcoat nodded and flew up the tree, Zest following close behind. She still had trouble getting up high. If nothing was beneath her, she’d need to push with increasing effort to go higher. Thankfully, she was able to use the branches to climb up, in a fashion.
Near the top, she found the prize. In all, Zest counted nine sleeping turkeys, resting all along the branches.
Sugarcoat took one glance at Zest. Then, to show her this was no big deal, she froze a turkey solid, killing it instantly, without hesitation. Zest let out an eep as the bird fell to the ground and Sugarcoat let out a satisfied sigh.
“You see?” Sugarcoat asked. “If you do it fast, it won’t feel anything.”
Zest psyched herself up. She remembered all those turkeys who wronged her in the past.
Turkeys were dishonorable. They never attacked adult ponies, but something about foals just made them angry. If a filly or colt got anywhere near one, they’d start to gobble up a storm and charge right at you, pecking wildly.
Once, a turkey had chased Zest for what felt like half a kilometer. It ended with Zest tripping and getting pecked until bruises covered her body.
She glared at her target, deciding to go for one of the smaller, sickly ones like nature would have wanted. If only it were attacking her now. Killing it in its sleep still felt dishonorable.
Yeah! She just needed it to attack her and this would be easy.
“Come on!” Zest challenged the turkey. “Fight me so I won’t feel bad about this!”
Eventually, the turkey woke up. Zest waved her hoof in front of its face, getting no response.
So it seemed turkeys couldn’t see ghosts. It could hear her, but not see her.
“Only creatures with magical or psychic abilities can see us,” Sugarcoat explained.
That meant every intelligent species but not all animals.
Zest picked up a stick and waved it around in front of her prey. It could see that. After two pokes, it gobbled and pecked at her stick.
“Oh, no! He’s coming right for me!”
Zest took the plunge! She inhaled its heat as hard and fast as she could. She doubted she’d ever gotten anything this cold this fast before. The turkey froze in a split second, leaving behind frost on the branches.
As its body heat entered her, Zest fell back. She let out a near-moan of ecstasy.
Talk about scratching an itch! Imagine if scratching felt a hundred times better and actually made it go away. It went beyond flavor but filled her entire body with a satisfying warmth that made her shudder. Only one sensation felt better and more satisfying than this and Zest didn’t want to bring that up.
More importantly, for the first time, that itch vanished entirely. Zest was free of that annoyance, that growing, dreadful feeling. Her ticking time bomb reset itself.
But for how long?
“Uh. How often do I gotta do this, though?” Zest asked.
“If you only go after turkeys?” Sugarcoat looked down at their fallen prey. “Perhaps every one to two weeks. A larger animal will last longer. Before you ask, it still isn’t entirely safe for you to go among the predeads. You should only go to town right after eating and your visits should still be as short as possible.”
Zest nodded. Maybe she could live with this. The first kill had to be the hardest.
“We’ll burn the bodies once they thaw.” Sugarcoat went down to retrieve them. “It would be uncouth to waste them.”
Zest picked up her own cold turkey. She decided she’d been as honorable as she could given the situation. Part of her still felt dissatisfied all the same.
Then she felt Sugarcoat’s hoof on her shoulder.
“Good job,” Sugarcoat said with no real enthusiasm.
Still, such praise was rare enough from her that this alone gave Zest a second thrill of excitement all in itself.