//------------------------------// // Chapter 17 - Toolbox Spatials and Table Appraisals // Story: Equestrian Celestial Forge // by TheDriderPony //------------------------------// "Are you ready, Pinkie?" "Aye aye, captain!" She gave a sloppy salute that would have made Shining Armor wince. Her toolbox clattered as she dropped it onto the Hub's table, the lid already open to an inky void. “One question, though.” “Shoot.” “How come you’re doing this and not Twilight?” Spike leaned back in the wooden chair he’d dragged through Twilight’s Door. There was no shortage of them in the library these days, and one wouldn’t go amiss if it ended up breaking or disappearing through someone else’s Door or accidentally falling into that fancy alchemy box that made really tasty gems. It’d be a terrible shame, but what can you do? Accidents happen. “Because Twilight got all excited about Dash’s new thing so now they’re having a wood-off.” “A wood-off?” “A wood-off,” he confirmed. “And that’s probably going to take all day so she asked me to handle some of her easier research projects that have been piling up.”  ‘Asked’ was a strong word to use. What she’d done was set up a corkboard with dozens of projects she planned to research but that kept getting pushed back every time someone got a new power. Each task had a list of the specific data she wanted to collect and, more importantly, a listed reward he’d get if he helped out. Sure, it wasn’t polite as actually just asking him to help out, but the chore wheel never had rewards on it and half the crazy stuff that was going on had him just as interested as she was. Win-win, in his opinion.  Plus, it never said he couldn't farm out the research to others either. He glanced again at the ripped page that had the instructions for his current assignment. It was one of the simpler ones, and also one that involved hanging out with a friend.  Investigate the limits of Pinkie’s tool box.  Reward: One triple-refined gem per new discovery He dipped his quill in the ink and hovered it over the top of the scroll. "Let's start with some easy ones. How many tools does it have?" Pinkie shrugged. "I dunno. A lot? I've never managed to take them all out." “Okay. Let’s start with the screwdrivers and we'll go from there. There can’t be that many." "Okie Dokie Lokie." Pinkie reached in and pulled out a normal-looking flathead screwdriver with a rigid red grip. "One." Spike marked a tally on his sheet. She tossed it onto the table and pulled out another, similar, but slightly shorter and with a textured blue grip. "Two." Then she pulled another. "Three." And another. "Four." "Five... Six... Seven... Eight... Nine... Ten... Eleven..." ~~~ Spike woke with a start, the faint memory of a dream about being adopted by a Timberwolf already fading from his mind. A small avalanche of screwdrivers fell away from his head as he shook himself back to total awakeness.  "Two thousand three-hundred and forty one... Two thousand three-hundred and forty two... Two thousand three-hundred and forty three..." The table was full. So was his lap and a good portion of the floor. An ocean of screwdrivers in a rainbow of colors had consumed the room, leaving him adrift amongst the metal. "Pinkie?" he ventured tentatively. “Yep?” She remained seated where she’d been what felt like a minute ago at screwdriver number one and looked, surprisingly, not bored in the slightest. “What’s up? Lose your place?” “Uh… maybe.” He’d lost his entire scroll. And his quill. And the ink. “How long have you been counting?” “About twenty minutes, maybe a little more. You wanna keep going? There’s more in there—” She pulled out a decidedly weird screwdriver as long as her foreleg with two flexible joints, three gripping areas, and a head that looked more like a diecast inkblot test. “—but I think we’re starting to blur the line of what counts as a screwdriver.” Spike groaned and rubbed his eyes. So much for that being an easy task for an easy reward. He started to reply but stopped as he noticed how still Pinkie had gotten. Then she twitched, a slow vibration that ran up her legs through her body and dissipated out of her mane and tail in tiny little whip cracks. He’d never witnessed Pinkie get a power before, but he’d seen it often enough in Twilight to make the connection. “New power?” She shook her head. “Not me, but I caught a whiff of it as it went by. Felt like an odd one.” His ear frills perked up at the sound of a potentially reward-worthy discovery. “You can feel them? Or, I guess, smell them?” “Sorta, kinda, iffy-whiffy.” She waggled her hoof. “It’s a lot like when I was just figuring out my Pinkie Sense. Lots of new feelings but I don’t know what means what yet.” Spike shrugged and mentally tossed the idea aside. If it was anything like her Pinkie Sense, it wouldn’t be worth the headache. “Whatever. You wanna just toss some stuff in the alchemy cube and see if we get anything fun?” “You had me at ‘fun’!” she grinned before gesturing to the still very-much-present-and-door-blocking ocean of metal and plastic. “Just let me clear a path.” She grabbed an armload of tools and dumped them back in the toolbox. “Cool. I’m gonna go get a snack. You want anything?” “Cupcakes if you have ‘em, anything else if you don’t.” Spike shot her a pair of finger guns then hop, skip, and jumped his way over the landslide and out the door into the library.  Pinkie continued to toss her tools back into storage with the kind of reckless abandon of someone who didn’t have to pay for them if they broke. As she pulled a load-bearing pile from the lower level, a portion on the table were able to slip off and bounce and roll beneath. "Whoops! Get back here you little scamps!" She hopped out of her chair (further disturbing the delicate pile) and shimmied her way underneath. "There you are! Now I—  Ooh, that's neat. I wonder what all these carvings mean?" The life of a carpenter was a straightforward one, or so was the philosophy of Wicker Mare. Furniture was not a heavy-turnover market. She got by day-to-day making simple, functional pieces to supply Barnyard Bargains and other resellers and when she had the time she made more artistic pieces (though no less functional for their beauty) which she sold out of the first floor of her home. Once in a blue moon she’d get a commission for a custom piece—usually by a neighbor or friend of a friend who needed a peculiarly shaped table to fit an awkward corner of their home or a chair made in a particular outdated style to replace one of a set that had broken—though those were few and far between. She wasn’t rolling in wealth, but neither was she destitute. She got to do what she loved for a living and had never made the mistake of working for a furniture manufacturer (unlike her cousin Birch who had spent six years making identical cupboard doors for home-installation kits day after day). What was unusual was the amount of consultancy gigs she’d found herself getting paid for in recent days. Consultancy was not the realm of the woodworker. If you wanted an expansion for your wooden house, you called a contractor. If something broke, you hired a dedicated repair pony. Rarely was she needed to look at a piece of furniture that had already been sold, let alone to look at something that somepony else had made. And yet, she’d been asked to do so three times in the past two weeks. And paid handsomely for it too. Today, there were three objects awaiting her appraisal. End tables all, but they couldn’t be more wildly different. The first was finely made. The lines were clean, the sides straight, the chamfering was smooth and even.  A fine piece of work that nopony would mind having in their home. …but that was it. It was simple. Straightforward. There was nothing particularly special about it; just a fine, serviceable end table. There was no real spark to it. No sign of passion from its creator. It reminded her rather a lot of Birch and his factory-made parts. There was nothing wrong with it, but nothing terribly interesting either. Like someone took the pony out of the design process and just gave them a set of finely detailed instructions. The second table was different. There was a style to it. All the technical details were just as finely applied, but this one took some bold design choices where the first kept it safe. The asymmetric trim should have looked poorly cut, but combined with the bowed legs and detailed carving, it gave the impression that the whole table was somehow lighter than air and about to float off. It was the kind of piece only particularly eccentric ponies would be interested in buying, but aside from that she would put it on par with her own experimental pieces. The third table was undoubtedly the odd duck out. A shoddy replica of the second, riddled with shortcuts and questionable design choices. It still looked decent: to the untrained observer. But to Wicker’s eyes it was clearly inferior. She doubted it could take the weight of more than a book or two. She could practically see exactly which pins would fail and predict how it would collapse into a neat pile of loose timbers. The only really impressive thing about it was how she’d personally watched a mare that she knew had zero history in woodworking craft it from a raw planks into a finished (if questionable) product in the time she would have needed to properly measure and cut the pieces. She sighed as she took a long draw from her doctored coffee and thanked the stars that she was an earth pony. Magic had some truly crazy depths if it could teach a pegasus to do that in no time flat. She took another slurp and wondered just how she was supposed to summarize all her assessments up in a way that would satisfy Twilight.  And also if Rainbow Dash would mind dropping by to give her apprentice a lesson or two on how to properly bevel corner pieces. His always ended up uneven while hers (when she wasn’t rushing) looked like a single carved piece.