//------------------------------// // Lesson Six: Old Pony, New Tricks // Story: Schadenteacher // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// “Oh, sweet Celestia, how much did I have?” Applejack groaned. Applebloom helped her with a glass of water, as she was curled up on her bed beneath a large blanket. Granny Smith was still fast asleep, up in her room, sawing logs like she was building a cabin. Bloom looked at her older sister reproachfully. “Y’all know better than t’ challenge Granny Smith like that!” “I didn’t challenge nothin. That varmint Schadenfreude’s the one who got Granny all riled up for drinkin’,” AJ argued. “An’ who’s the pony too stubborn t’ walk away from a drinkin’ contest?” Bloom retorted. “...’s not mah fault. He said somethin’ about pacin’ myself cause I didn’t need to impress nopony. Made it sound like I was some little filly just drinkin’ the milk too fast.” “tch,” Applebloom made a disapproving noise. “So you let the stallion with a reputation for makin’ trouble stick a key in your back an’ wind you up? Thank Celestia Rainbow Dash wasn’t there, y’all woulda killed yourselves.” AJ felt a tinge of guilt, knowing her little sister was right. Schaden had of course been goading her, knowing she only had herself to blame if she fell for it. Ain’t a creature in Ponyville could outdrink Granny Smith. Even the brown-and white troublehorse had known that. “Well, he probably ain’t doin’ much better anywho. Where is he?” “Schaden? He left like an hour ago, fit as a fiddle. Told me t’ tell you thanks fer the crate, and drink plenty of water,” Bloom said, refilling the cup from a nearby jug on the nightstand. “Wait, so he’s fine?!” AJ barked, then flinched as her voice echoed in her head. “Not a hair out of place,” Bloom said with a chuckle. “...I hate him.” ----------------- I felt great. You ever feel great? I felt great. I had a whole two days off work, an extremely generous supply of barely-legal booze to send home (not all of it, mind. I still had a few weeks left, and a few friends to share with), and literally nothing on my schedule. So much to do. My first stop was Sugarcube corner, to check in on Pinkie Pie, grab some breakfast, and maybe poke my nose in somepony’s business. The bell rang lightly above my head as I stepped into the shop, and was instantly assaulted by the color pink. Like my retinas had sold out and accepted pink as their new sponsor. Of course, part of that was Pinkie Pie, waving frantically behind the counter as I walked in, over the shoulder of a rather long line of ponies. Ah, my first idea. See, I did not get hangovers like normal ponies. No headaches, no nausea, just… shenanigans. Over the years, I’ve discovered that a large part of my more irritating tendencies depends largely on my mood. Sometimes a joke is just too good to pass up, but for the most part, my penchant for obnoxiousness is largely tied to a small Schadenometer in the back of my head that reads ‘Professional Courtesy’ on one side and ‘Discord Was Here’’ on the other. Hangovers tend to bury the needle in the red. There’s a reason I’m not allowed to buy any for myself or by proxy in Canterlot. In Canterlot. Another thing I’ve discovered in my travels is that most ponies don’t tend to pay too much attention to others when they’re waiting for something. They’re only focused on when the line gets shorter, and figuring out what to do when it’s their turn. Or talking to the creature next to them in line. Nopony likes waiting in line, and usually doesn’t care too much about the feelings of anypony else suffering the same fate. Which is why they don’t usually notice the pony singing under their breath while they’re waiting. I mean, we all do it. Nothing special, right? “..I am Ornery the Eighth I am, Ornery the Eighth I am I am…” I muttered. I heard the stallion in front of my start humming the same tune. “...I got married to the widow next door, she’d been married seven times before…” Then the griffin behind me. “...every one was an Ornery. Ornery the Eighth I am I am, Ornery the Eighth I am…” There was a slight pause, and I said quietly, “...second verse, same as the first…” ------ I left Sugarcube corner with a large supply of doughnuts in a saddlebag, and made my way over to Carousel Boutique, as somepony at a table near the door grumbled ‘Eleventh verse, same as the first…’ over a half-eaten croissant. Pinkie Pie herself had been doing well, but rather busy, and so I’d made my order and left. The boutique I actually had a reason for visiting; the chalk cloud that caught fire earlier in the week had singed some of my work clothes and Rarity had volunteered to repair them. Well, demanded was a better word, as she’d almost fainted when she saw the burn marks. Which has better than her initial reaction to my outfit, by far. I’m pretty sure that qualified as attempted murder. Once again, the bell above the door rang lightly as I walked in, and set my bag off to the side. No point in risking Rarity’s wrath over doughnut powder on fine fabrics. “Coming!” I heard her say from a back room. “Ah, Schaden! Perfect timing! Come in, I have your things ready for you.” “You don’t need to take my measurements again, do you?” I asked cautiously, having flashbacks to the last time I’d asked her to make me something. My back leg twitched involuntarily. “Hardly. After your third date with Derpy I’ve had a mannequin of you at the ready for whenever something explodes near you,” she said dryly, her horn lighting up. A rather thin mannequin adorned with my usual suit rolled out from behind a rack of dresses and came to a halt nearby. “I feel it necessary to point out that almost nothing in Canterlot explodes when I’m near it,” I drawled. Rarity gave me a sardonic grin. “Quite. They usually wait for Twilight and company to arrive. Now, I trust this…” she gestured to the outfit on the model, struggling not to use any pejoratives, “Is sufficient?” she finished with an eye twitch. “Naturally. I usually buy off-the-rack-” “Please don’t say those words in this store,” she groaned. “-as I was saying, my… usual shopping habits are rather… pedestrian, so I’m always pleasantly surprised with your designs. Even if you aren’t too fond of my particular tastes,” I conceded. “Schaden, as pleasant as you are to have around,” she said, and to her credit I only detected the smallest amount of sarcasm, “Working on your particular wardrobe feels like self-flagellation, and I have worked in Manehattan.” “Ok, ow,” I said with a laugh. “At least I didn’t ask for anything that glowed in the dark.” Rarity glanced sideways at the rack of dresses she’d pulled the mannequin away from. “Yes, well… Ponyville’s clientele has always been a bit eccentric. Not to mention I have a laundry list of ponies who’s favorite colors seemed to be pulled from my nightmares. Magenta, honestly.” I felt a familiar lightbulb kick on in my head. One that had been flickering threateningly all morning. Followed shortly by a rather Twilight-shaped idea. “Did you know magenta doesn’t actually exist?” Rarity scoffed over her shoulder on her way to a nightstand. “Right, darling. Next you’ll tell me brown doesn’t either.” “Well… technically it doesn’t?” “...excuse me?” “Just something Twilight taught me,” I said casually. “Apparently because we only have two color cones- those are things in our eyes that perceive color, she said- one for blue and one for like, yellow kind of? So your eyes are only designed to pick up these specific colors. See, vision works by picking up signals on the electromagnetic spectrum and translating it through the color cones in our eyes. Technically speaking, we only see those two. Everything else is guesswork your brain does based on averaging out the difference. Like, if you ‘see’ a color between blue and yellow, or something like red, it’s your brain making an estimated guess based on what colors it can see, and what frequency of light is is seeing. I’m no great shakes at explaining it, but basically every single color you’re seeing outside of blue and a very specific shade of yellow are made up by your brain. We actually have no idea what half these ‘colors’ are in reality!” “Whu… wah… I don’t… what?” Rarity stuttered. “Oh, but it’s fine, because the vast majority of ponies process color in exactly the same way, barring stuff like colorblindness, so even if reality says that color isn’t what you think it is, to the best of our knowledge our brains are all telling us the exact same lie! So, like, whatever your brain thinks brown is, there’s a high probability everyone else’s brains think the exact same thing,” I added. “I… can you… what… no. Just no. Just grab your stuff and leave. I’m going to have a very serious conversation with Twilight about letting you near… facts,” she grumbled, taking the outfit off the model and wrapping it just a tad hastier than was necessary. She certainly gave it to me quicker than I expected. I happily packed the outfit into my saddlebag, put the bag on, and waved goodbye. “Have a great day!” “...yes, fne. You too, Schaden.” --------- On my way back to the middle of town, I passed a pony grumbling under their breath “...I am Ornery the Eighth I am…” and smiled. Then I spotted Rainbow Dash. Now, Rainbow and I have built a kind of… rivalry. My particular taste in pranks is vastly different from hers. She seems to take this as a challenge, and we’ve slowly been escalating since. I will have to check my luggage before I leave town. “Hey Rainbow Dash!” I said cheerfully. She looked down from her Napping Cloud™, and saw me waving. “Oh, hey,” she said lazily, and rolled off. Coming to a stop about a foot above me in the air, she said, “What’s up, Schaden? Heard you got plastered with AJ last night. I mean, I heard it. Was flying past the orchard and you guys were makin’ some noise.” “Surprised you didn’t join us,” I replied. “I would’ve, but then I heard Granny Smith hollering. And the last time I tried to drink with that mare I woke up literally two days later. Slept through an entire day,” she groaned, reliving what I’m sure was a most grievous hangover. “Yeah… AJ’s not doin’ too hot,” I said sympathetically. She might have done it to herself, but she did seem to be in pretty bad shape. I’d have to drop by with some apology fries later. “So howsit you’re walking around just fine?” Click went the lightbulb. “Same way you’re flying. One muscle at a time. Like breathing. Did you know you’re breathing right now?” “Well duh, of course I’m breathing.” “And flapping your wings. Both at the same time. Amazing.” “Well yeah, it’s not hard. You just-” she stumbled a little in mid-air. “You just flex muscles and-” another stumble. “Oh you are such an a-hole,” she groaned, now unable to get her mind off the idea of flying and breathing simultaneously. Now that she was paying attention to it, her brain had gone into manual override. “Ok, it’s fine. Just relax…” she said slowly. “One thing at a time. Breathe…” she added through gritted teeth. Her slight imbalance wore off as she steadied herself in the air. “Man I hate that.” “See? Good job!” I said cheerfully. “Gotta run though, couple more things I wanna do today,” I said, trotting away. She didn’t seem to stressed about me leaving. “Happy tongue awareness day!” I called back over my shoulder. “...oh bite me!” she yelled, then flew back to her cloud. ----------------- I made my way back to the castle, still feeling the urge to mess with somepony. Like an itch in the small of your back. It was, appropriately, annoying. I almost approved. Stashing my clothes and what was left of the doughnuts in my room, I set about the castle looking for a distraction. Or a victim. Too bad Twilight had sent away most, if not all, of the staff Celestia had tried to make her keep. The guards still kind of stuck around though, even if they weren’t very obvious. I thought about poking my head in the library, but Twilight had gone out of her way to inform me that I was, in no uncertain terms, absolutely banned. Of course, there was still the study, the laboratory, and a wide assortment of other rooms that just happened to have books in them, but they were, alas, seldom used nowadays, and thus not particularly worth the effort. Plus I could only ever find them reliably half the time. Not that, on this particular day, I needed to. A rather familiar collection of voices echoed down a nearby hallway, and I felt the need to investigate. What I found was a small table surrounded by some very familiar unicorns. Twilight, Trixie, and Starlight were all gathered around a rather impressively large tome, engaged in a rather animated discussion about something. “And I’m telling you, Starlight, Clover the Clever’s Mountain Moving is absolutely overkill! We don’t need to move the entire hill, just bend it a bit!” “And I’m telling YOU, Twilight Sparkle, that a simple Terraforming Cantrip isn’t enough! We’d have to spend weeks casting it over and over, even with all three of us working together!” “Well, Trixie still thinks you could just, like, blow it up!” Twilight sighed. “It’s called precision blasting, Trixie, and it’s both extremely draining to do magically on ths scale, and extremely expensive to do without magic.” “Hi girls!” I cheered, trotting into the room. I made myself comfortable on a nearby lounge chair. Twilight looked up long enough to say “Hello, Schaden,” then turned to the book. The other two mares seemed distinctly less happy to see me. “Oh wonderful, he’s back,” Trixie groaned. Starlight rolled her eyes. “Yeah, he’s been staying here all week. He’s a substitute teacher at the school.” Trixie’s eyes threatened to pop out of her skull. “What?! Who gave him a teaching degree?!” “Substitute,” Twilight repeated. “He’s only here for a month, then back to Canterlot. I’d say thank Celestia but this was her idea.” Trixie’s eyebrow twitched. “Of course it was. Just… whatever. Where were we? Oh yeah, blowing stuff up.” Starlight groaned. “We are NOT detonating half a mountainside. We can just MOVE it-” “Only a little bit at a time! If we try to move half the mountain at once the loose soil will bury half a town!” “...Ok, what in the name of Starswirl’s sweat-stained robe belt are you all arguing about?” I asked, for once almost completely lost. Twilight sighed. “There’s a mountain in the Griffon kingdom with a rather large reservoir that they haven’t been able to access properly. I mentioned to the griffon ambassador that we might be able to magically shape the mountain to provide a small runoff river to make it easier to access the water, but so far all of our options are either too slow to make the griffins happy, or too fast to control the water flow.” “...I’m gonna take a stab in the dark and say the giant alicorn laser thing you buried Tirek with won’t cut it?” “You mean the one I could only cast with the combined strength of three alicorns, and with barely more control than Pinkie Pie has in a toy store? No.” “Then I got nothing,” I conceded. “Most of the terraforming magic and techniques are in the regular library, which I’m not allowed access to without a guard escort, and the Restricted Section’s response to a mountain in the way is usually apocalyptic in nature. Also they’re very boring.” “The apocalypse is boring?!” Starlight snapped. “No- I mean the terraforming stuff. I was never big on natural sciences, and I can’t do magic, so…” “Didn’t stop you from reading every book in the Restricted Section twice,” Twilight chided, almost playfully. “No it did not,” I agreed “Although there were a couple books in the back that I haven’t read. One of them tried to eat me, and another was just… moist. Not even the shelf or the wall it was on. Just that one book.” Twilight shuddered. “Please don’t say that word again.” “What word, shelf?” Starlight said. I felt a smile tug at the corner of my mouth. “No.” “Wall?” I asked, trading glances with Trixie. She raised an eyebrow, then the other, as something in her head clicked into place. “NO.” “Ooohhhh,” Twixie, Starlight, and I said together. “Moooiiiissstt.” “What’s wrong, Twilight, you never been to Moist Lake City?” I chided. Trixie shook her head. “I think she’s only been to Moisthatten.” “We should ALL go to Moisthatten,” Starlight said excitedly. “The moist the merrier!” “I’ll moist my calendar,” I agreed. “Do you think we should catch a show on Moistway?” “Only if it’s William Moistspear.” “To moist or not to moist, am I right?” “I preferred a Moistsummer Night’s Dream.” “Moist Ado About Nothing is a favorite of mine.” Twilight launched herself off the couch at me. “SHUT.”