//------------------------------// // Ponin's Spirit Guide // Story: A Ghost of a Chance // by Epsilon-Delta //------------------------------// There wasn’t exactly a lot to do around here. She could play with the dog, do her chores, and train, but that was it! There was nowhere to go and nopony to talk to save Sugarcoat who liked to keep conversations short. Zest certainly wasn’t going to leave the safety of Sugarcoat’s territory knowing what horrors awaited her out there. Not until Sugarcoat said she was strong enough to leave the nest, that was. That meant she had only a small tract of forest to explore. They didn’t have a movie projector and Zest honestly wasn’t sure if she’d see the picture with her new eyes if they did. “What I wouldn’t do for some kind of music player.” The library remained her only option for entertainment. Incidentally, that was always where she found Sugarcoat during her free time. Zest wondered how long before Sugarcoat finished all these books. Zest spent most of her time down there too, as she had a strong preference to have another pony in the room even if they weren’t talking. What she wouldn’t give to have some more ponies living here, too. Shadowbolt Academy remained unbearably lonely. Sugarcoat wasn’t kidding when she said Zest was more alone than ever. She felt stranded on an island most days. She’d read just yesterday how ponies theorized their early pegasus ancestors likely lived in herds of about two hundred ponies. Therefore, some guy reasoned, that was the most natural and healthy way to live. She also learned that ‘herd’ only referred to a mixture of ponies. If it was just pegasi, the group was called a ‘constellation’. Yep! All sorts of useless trivia to be found here. So just 198 more ponies to go to get her ideal family unit. To that end, Zest moved over to the newspapers and found the latest obituaries. A plan began forming in her mind that was just crazy enough to work. Zest dug into the newspapers, taking out the latest obituary as well as those from the past ten months. Sparky, ever by her side, leaned over her shoulder as if he could read it too. He really was like a dog. Before long, Sugarcoat glanced over to her. Reading, Zest found, was the one surefire way to get her attention. “You’re still looking through obituaries?” Sugarcoat asked. “Are you hoping you’ll get a second?” “No! I’m looking for ponies who died in a fire.” Zest lowered her paper. “Think about it! How cool would it be if we gathered an elemental strike force! One of each type of elemental! We could be like fire, earth, lightning, wind–” “There aren’t any wind elementals.” “Huh?! But ponies get killed by tornadoes and stuff, don’t they?” “If you think about it, it’s the debris from tornadoes or else the flooding from a storm that kills ponies, not the wind itself,” said Sugarcoat. “It might be possible, but a wind elemental would be an astonishingly rare event. Even your goal to find a fire elemental like this is in vain. The chances of becoming one after being burned to death is closer to one in twenty thousand.” So it’d take decades of haunting burning buildings to find one, most likely. Sugarcoat had one of her orbs float off to the bookshelf where all the encyclopedias and textbooks were kept. “Here.” Sugarcoat flicked a hoof in her direction without looking up. “You should start reading this. We’ll likely start meeting other high ghosts soon and it’ll be nice if you aren’t completely ignorant for that day.” Zest grabbed the textbook and looked down. She recognized it immediately, being a textbook she’d once had a copy of. Ponin’s Spirit Guide was a thick book considered to be the most comprehensive guide to ghosts even nearly a hundred years since its publication. Ponin, as the story went, spent fifty years compiling the entire net-sum of information on ghosts into a single volume. Every school pony was forced to buy and read a copy and as such Zest resisted learning anything from it to the maximum degree. Once she’d regurgitated the information back on the test it was out of her system. Her retention of its contents was maybe one percent at best. Though now that she wasn’t in school and didn’t have any tests the idea of learning seemed almost appealing. Zest really should read through this whole thing. Admittedly, it would have been better had she paid more attention in slayer class the first time around. Curiously, the volume was thicker than Zest remembered it. The first few pages were a table of contents. Every type of ghost was organized neatly in a taxidermical model that went plane – kind – type. The ‘planes’ were lesser and high ghosts. Lesser ghosts were divided into four ‘kinds’ – orbs, apparitions, sprites, and amorphous. Then you had each type of ghost listed under which kind of ghost it was. Wraiths, for example, were sprites along with bogeys and kodama. Zest was surprised to see how many types of orbs there were. She knew about wisps and o’-wills but didn’t expect there to be nine of them. All of her little buddies, she learned, were merely ‘common orbs’. Her hopes of getting a collection of all nine to come live in Sugarcoat’s aura were immediately squashed. The accursed orb was, allegedly, extinct. She soon found this copy heavily annotated. Sugarcoat had taken it upon herself to make corrections to the inaccurate information it contained. This included crossing out entire sections that made false statements, though thinly enough to still be read if you wanted. She’d even gone as far as to rebind the book with her own additional pages, immediately recognizable as the added paper was just a little whiter. The section on ball-lightning, a legendarily rare subtype of orbs whose existence was supported by only a single documented sighting, was heavily edited. Sugarcoat had crossed nearly all of this out and wrote in her own corrections. As it turned out, ball-lightning was a well-known hoax among ghosts. She traced its origins to 1145 and noted one could be reasonably certain these were not a real type of orb. Zest supposed that a predead would get things wrong, even after fifty years of compilation. She wondered how valuable a corrected version of the text must be. She decided to read the section about herself first. The order went high ghosts – elementals – lightning elementals. The sections added by Sugarcoat drew most of her curiosity. Ponin’s calculations of the odds of how many exist are a far underestimation, due to this being written before much electrical infrastructure was built. This was also before ponies decided that electrocuting themselves was the best way to get psychic powers. A better estimate at the time of this writing is one every two years or so. To the living, they may be a borderline mythical finding but ghosts attract one another rather than repel. Among our own kind, they are a merely uncommon sight. Lightning elementals are generally seen as good luck charms among ghosts. This stems from much older times when electricity was rare. Historically, this was the more common reason to recruit lightning elementals– as a living good luck charm. They’re still valued in modern times due to their ability to power electrical devices in remote locations. Their hair can be easily made to stand up. Specifically, rubbing their heads until this happens is considered to give one good luck. Zest liked that stereotype! She wanted other ponies to rub her hair for good luck. That sounded like fun. It Seemed Sugarcoat made mostly cultural notes, which made sense. That was the sort of thing Ponin would miss. Ghosts who died from being struck by lightning are given the nickname of ‘royal flush’ or ‘flushes’ in general. They are considered to be a herald of astounding fortune. Zest wondered how hard it would be to convince other ghosts she was a flush! ’The problem, of course, is that every lightning elemental claims they died from being struck by lightning whereas most of them these days ‘bit the wire’. The nickname for this more common category is ‘dumb luck’. Lightning elementals are stereotyped increasingly as being somewhat dim. “Gah!” Zest pulled the book away from her and pouted at the revelation of her kind’s reputation. “Yeah! Dumb luck. That sums me up pretty good!” Zest sighed miserably. Still, she vowed to read more of this later.