The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville
Chapter 3: “Why Am I Surrounded by Idiots?”
Once Rarity had caught up, Vinyl was led to a large tree at one end of town. A hard-carved sign declaring that the tree was the location of the town library had been knocked down and replaced with a flat board, with the following words stenciled upon it:
Temporary World Domination Headquarters of Apple, Inc.
After a sharp knock on the door by Rarity, the door attached to the front of the tree was opened by a dark gray unicorn colt.
“Apple Incorporated, what can I do for...oh, it’s you.” Upon saying this, the unicorn was instantly surrounded by a pale blue force field, accompanied by the sound of a harp glissando. “Boss, it’s Rarity again!” he shouted into the interior of the tree.
“Are you still mad at me for temporarily taking over your mind?” Rarity asked the unicorn in surprise while he awaited the arrival of his employer. “I had no idea you were off-limits!”
The unicorn responded by making his force field even stronger.
Stepping forward to join the unicorn was a blonde-maned earth pony with an orange coat and a black Stetson hat. Her cutie mark was a dense orchard of apple trees. She carried an air of authority with her, mixed with a good measure of annoyance. Upon setting eyes upon Vinyl Scratch, however, she did her best to replace this with an air of goodwill. “Miss Rarity!” she exclaimed in a smooth non-regional accent, the kind market research says inspires trustworthiness in 88% of Equestrian shoppers. “What a pleasure it is to see you on this fine morning. And who have you brought to...wait a minute! Wait an apple-pickin’ minute! That’s not the Princess’ representative, is it? Please tell me that you didn’t dust the representative?”
“Applejack...?” asked Vinyl with a faraway voice.
How does she keep recognizing these ponies?
“Be quiet while the grown-ups are speaking, dear,” Applejack replied.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Yes, but you see...” began Rarity.
“And here I was thinking you were ever so slightly less stupid than every other unicorn on the planet!” exclaimed Applejack. “At what point was it going to penetrate into your thick skull that you are completely out of your league?”
“Aw, but look how easily I can control her!” protested Rarity. “It’s like she had no grasp on reality for me to take from her!”
“And what happens tomorrow morning?”
“What?”
Applejack sighed loudly. “Tomorrow morning. You know, when the God Empress of Equestria makes her scheduled appearance?”
Rarity fumbled for an answer. “I...well, I guess I’ll wipe her memory, or something.”
The earth pony face-hoofed. “‘Or something’...Equestria help me, I’m surrounded by idiots! You need to come up with a cover story, and you need to do it now. Get upstairs and start studying that memory-rewriting spell I found for you. You are going to come up with the most airtight, ordinary and obviously believable story of all time by dawn tomorrow, or so help me...what is she doing?”
Unnoticed by the arguing ponies, Vinyl Scratch had begun absently tapping a rhythm into the cobblestone outside of the Temporary World Domination Headquarters: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap...
“Oh, that?” replied Rarity. “That’s just the drum part from some song she’s been humming to herself...”
Applejack’s response to this was to pop off her hat, grab it in midair with her teeth, and hit Vinyl’s head with it until she stopped tapping.
“What did you do that for?” Rarity asked. “It seemed harmless.”
“Sure, everything’s harmless to you!” said Applejack around the hat, her lack of accent slipping as she got more nervous. “But how do you know that ain’t some kinda universal counter-spell that Celestia imprinted in her mind just for this sorta circumstance!”
“Weeellll!” exclaimed Rarity, stretching the word out as a way to come up with a good response. In the end she failed. “That possibility never even occurred to me.”
Applejack dropped the hat onto an upraised forehoof. “That’s because you’re entirely too trusting,” she said. “I can assure you that you do not become matriarch of the Apple clan by charm alone. It takes strength, cunning, and the knowledge that everything can be a trap!”
“Can be a trap...” the words echoed inside Vinyl Scratch’s head. “Can be a trap...can be a trap...it’s a trap!”
“Aw, Applejack, you think everything’s a trap!”
Vinyl suddenly found herself plunged into a very familiar darkness, but her other senses quickly picked up the slack. She was standing in Celestia and Luna’s throne room in Canterlot, and the pony who had just spoken was Rainbow Dash. She wasn’t Empress of the Pegasi, she wasn’t even a Wonderbolt, but she was an Element of Harmony, and she was here with the other Elements to receive another mission from the Princess. As was becoming an increasingly-common occurrence, Vinyl Scratch had been dragged along with the rest of them, despite being nothing more than a disk jockey (under the alias of DJ Pon-3) and business-pony (co-owner of Equestria Acoustics with Twilight Sparkle). As always when finding herself beside her friends in their official capacities as Elements of Harmony, she felt completely out of her league.
“That’s because everything the Dragon Emperor sends us is a trap!” replied Applejack.
The problem facing them this time was to judge the sincerity of the peace offer given by the Emperor to the Princesses after what, for Equestria, had been a pretty long war, a grueling three months of waiting to see which supreme magic user would manage to outwit the other, while the Equestrian Army attempted to take Stalliongrad back from its own mesmerized inhabitants. Only a maniac with delusions of grandeur could possibly think that anypony other than the Princess had been the victor of that contest. Unfortunately, that was exactly what the Dragon Emperor was.
There was the sound of a large sheaf of paper being pulled from a saddlebag. “According to my calculations,” Twilight Sparkle said around a mouthful of parchment, “the Emperor has used up every possible attack spell in the dragon grimoire.” From the outbreak of hostilities, the Princess’ prized student had devoted herself to the study of both battlefield and mage war tactics. The computer in her basement had been repeatedly pushed well past the theoretical point of collapse, the result of a revolutionary technique she had invented based on a chance remark by the time pony Doctor Whooves (she called it “overclocking” in his honor), and the walls of the library had become covered with topographic maps and third-order thaumatical phase diagrams. “He has no choice but to surrender!” she concluded confidently.
“But maybe he has Princess Luna,” suggested a timid voice.
“Now Fluttershy,” replied Rarity, “we do not know for sure what has happened to Princess Luna. She was after all leading the troops in the field. She may have become lost.”
“...Or she might be leading a top-secret commando mission to take out the Emperor single-hoofedly!” proclaimed Rainbow Dash.
“Possible, but unlikely, Rainbow Dash,” said Princess Celestia from her throne. “I am currently unable to track my sister, but that simply means that she is in an area where magic use is so strong as to make it impossible to pick out a single signal clearly. Now as to the proposal, the Emperor is insisting that the Elements of Harmony, and one friend of Twilight’s choosing, be teleported to the coordinates I have been given. In return for meeting the ponies who have defeated him, he agrees to sign any terms we are prepared to offer.”
“Well if you ask me...” began Applejack.
“We don’t need to ask you, Applejack, as we already know what you’re going to say,” Dash complained.
“Of course it’s a trap,” said a new voice from next to the Princess. “The question is, how can we make it spring on him instead of on us?” The voice belonged to the Emperor’s “secret weapon”, Waking Terror, a corrupting spirit that had been implanted in Celestia’s mind at the moment of her birth many millennia ago, and had been meant to convert her into a twin of Nightmare Moon the instant war was declared. Instead, the Princesses and the Elements (with some technical assistance from Vinyl Scratch) had managed to redeem the spirit with the power of friendship. It was thanks to Miss Terror that the Princesses were able to anticipate almost all of the Emperor’s moves before he had even made them. In return, Celestia had created the form of a baby dragon for Miss Terror to live in.
“The invitation was for the Elements of Harmony and one friend,” said Celestia. “Now who would be your most obvious choice to invite, Twilight?”
“Well Spike has been getting interested in his heritage,” answered Twilight with some hesitation, “and he has been bugging me to take him to Draconia for quite some time before the war began, so he would be the most obvious.”
“Indeed,” replied Miss Terror, “and since the Emperor’s ability to control dragon minds is absolute, this would be an extremely unwise idea.”
“I didn’t say I was actually going to invite Spike,” Twilight muttered under her breath.
“Any choice of a guest would be dangerous,” said Celestia. “The Emperor’s bloodless takeover of Stalliongrad proves that his mind-control powers are nearly as effective on ponies as on dragons; so far, only the Elements, Luna and myself have proven completely resistant to his charms.”
“Maybe I should invite you, Princess?” asked Twilight. “After all, you’re my friend.”
“I’m afraid I must decline your kind invitation,” Celestia said with a warm smile in her voice. “With Luna gone, I must stay here to run affairs in Equestria. And I don’t think Miss Terror should go, as her magic is still rather weak.”
“Well, do you have any suggestions?” asked Twilight.
“Her,” said Miss Terror.
A sudden silence came over the room.
Vinyl Scratch began to fidget. “She’s pointing at me, isn’t she?” she finally asked.
“The Dragon Emperor knows nothing about you, Vinyl Scratch,” Miss Terror informed her coldly. “I have made very sure of that. You are different from every other pony in this room.”
“Because I can’t see?”
“That, but more importantly because you are the most stubborn pony I have ever encountered—a very useful trait under the circumstances.”
Vinyl Scratch opened her mouth for a few moments, but the scathing retort she had planned died on her lips. “I’ll just take that as a compliment and shut up now.”
“Fine, so we’re prepared for mind control,” said Dash, “but what if that’s not what he’s planning? What if those coordinates are for the middle of a volcano, or will drop us into a portal to a freaky alternate universe where I’m the only pony with one color in my mane?!”
“Ah...” said Miss Terror, stalling for time. “Well, in that case...you’ll have to improvise. You haven’t contributed to the conversation so far, Pinkie Pie. What do you think?”
“Me? Well personally, I think...that this pony needs to stop thinking!” said Pinkie, or rather Applejack, as that that was who Pinkie turned into halfway through. Also now Vinyl could see and several ponies were staring at her.
“Isn’t anypony paying attention to the ticking time bomb in our midst?” demanded Applejack, battering Vinyl’s head several times with the Stetson until the swirls settled back into her eyes. She passed the hat over to her gray-coated assistant, who then put it on. “Rarity,” she instructed, “tell the representative that Graphite here is me.”
Rarity leaned into Vinyl’s ear. “Vinyl, dear, this is Applejack.”
“Applejack?” asked Vinyl.
“Yes, Applejack,” insisted Rarity.
“Hello, Applejack,” said Vinyl to Graphite.
“Hello, um, Vinyl,” said Graphite.
“You’re a silly pony,” said Vinyl.
“Um...” said Graphite.
The real Applejack sighed, “Now ‘Applejack’,” she addressed her impersonator, “I expect you to take good care of our guest and give her the longest-possible tour of the Apple family holdings. Rarity and I will be busy upstairs fixing the mess she got us into.”
“What about the applebug?” Graphite said, using his horn to float a tiny yellow object into view.
“Pass it over,” Applejack said with a sigh.
Graphite flicked his head, which caused the “applebug” to fly into Applejack’s tail.
“I’m sure I’ll find somepony I want to listen in on soon enough,” she said.
“Any other instructions?” the unicorn asked.
“If you see any trace of that pesky free will, be sure to use that swell hat of yours to swat it away.”
Graphite nodded.
“Oh, and do remember only to swat her head,” added Rarity.
Applejack sighed in frustration. “Do you think, after all the time we’ve been doing business in this town, that we don’t know that?” She then turned her head to face Graphite. “Well go on, start the tour!”
“Oh!” exclaimed the false Applejack. “Yes, well over here is where we keep the copyright lawyers that come up with the names of our new Appletastic Treats©! Once we have a name, we can then head over to the chemistry department, where...”
“I swear,” Applejack said, shaking her head as she followed Rarity up the stairway built into the tree, “you just can’t get good slave labor anymore.”