“If’n! Say If’n!”
Flannel pretended not to hear the voice.
“Hey! C’mon, say If’n!”
The voice came from his coworker at the army staffing office, Thunderhead. Thunderhead and his marefriend, that pretty blonde pegasus who worked as an aide for general Romulus, liked to hang out at the corner cafe across from the office and swill turkeyish coffee. It was an after-work tradition of sorts for them. That, and tormenting him every chance they got.
A wadded up napkin glass flew through the air and hit Flannel squarely in the head. He leapt up in surprise. The decorative cloud shrub he’d spent the last twenty minutes sculpting burst apart.
Flannel took off the special gardening mitts that allowed earth ponies to shape clouds. “Why’d you do that?” he asked Thunderhead.
“Say it,” Thunderhead replied. “Dropsy said she heard you say it yesterday.”
“I didn’t.” Flannel was lying. He’d stood in this exact same spot yesterday, talking to another work colleague, when the countryism had slipped out. He’d heard a laugh and turned around to find Dropsy in the same exact spot she sat now, holding the same exact drink, eyeing him with that same disquieting mixture of flirty and fighty that all pegasi wore as a resting face.
“Yeah you did!” the mare, Dropsy, chimed in. “You said it, and when you did your big buck teeth stuck out.”
Not entirely true. His buck teeth always stuck out no matter what he said. All he had to do was open his mouth, and there they were. Another fine bit of earth pony genealogy biting him in the butt. Or in this case, the lower lip.
“Corny, please, just say it, it’s so funny.”
Corny was a reference to his cutie mark: three smiling ears of corn. All that famous earth pony constitution snapped like a twig underhoof. “My name’s Flannel.”
“It’s just a nickname,” Dropsy said. “It’s cute.”
Cute. Flannel could call a plow cute, but that wouldn’t stop it from chopping a pony in half if they fell under it. He had a nickname for her too, one he dared not speak out loud but relished internally. One day, she’d say something really nasty and he’d snap and say, Dropsy, more like dropped on your head at birth.
“You’re a comedian, Corny,” Thunderhead went on. “Say it. You know it’s hilarious.”
Flannel’s nickname for him was Emptyhead. Just like with Dropsy, he’d never say it out loud, though in Thunderhead’s case it was because he was full of enough piss and lightning to fight Flannel despite the fact the earth pony stood a full head taller than him.
“Hey.” Thunderhead whistled, snapping Flannel’s attention back to him. “Say it.”
If. If. If. Flannel screwed up his face in concentration and said, “If you don’t shut your trap, I’ll shut it for you.”
This time, Thunderhead threw his glass. It hit him Flannel in the flank, bouncing harmlessly and falling through the cloud streets into nothing. “Dirt licker,” Thunderhead said. “Spoilsport.”
Flannel looked at the soft spot in the clouds where the glass had fallen through. It would shatter when it hit the ground, if it didn’t hit anything—or anyone—before then. The shards would sink into the ground and last a long while. Longer than any of them would ever be around. Thunderhead would call him Corny for the last time, and that glass would still be down there somewhere, a hate-marker lodged in some farmer’s field. All fields turned to farms eventually.
All fields turned to farms. The thought took the edge off Flannel’s anger. He stood up straight and was about to laugh the whole thing off when he heard Thunderhead say, “Going back to the farm, Corny?” He peeled his lips back, exposing his front teeth in a twisted smile. “If’n yer momma wants to churn my butter later, she can walk them thick thighs over to—”
Flannel lunged across the street, clearing it in three loping strides. His accent really came out then. “Ah’ll fix ya! Ah’ll set’cha right!”
Then the two collided and tangled up right there on the sidewalk. Flannel didn’t stop swinging until Thunderhead’s nose was broken and the guards came around and pulled the two apart.
There was a simple fact of life that Flannel knew better than most: in Derecho, earth ponies had it worse.
Earth ponies couldn’t fly. They couldn’t even walk on clouds without complex and expensive spells. Their magic was limited to their farming ability, which in a cloud city like Derecho meant nothing, and their strength, which made them ideal candidates for menial labor.
This made it tough to hold down a job. A budding criminal record didn’t help. But Flannel’s mother, Babska, at least understood the cycle was self-sustaining and systematic. So when he arrived back home flanked by guards, she didn’t make any sudden moves and answered their probing questions with one-word answers and a stoic glare that could cut through cloudstone.
When the guards left, she wrapped him up in a crushing hug and dragged him inside.
“I wanna hit you so bad,” Babska fumed in her thick country drawl. She rolled up a towel and slapped it over the countertop. The whole house trembled. “I just, wanna...”
Instead of hitting him, she resumed mashing the potful of potatoes on the stovetop. “Y’all made me leave right when I was... and now they’re all stuck to the bottom... you... y’just...” She trailed off again, lost in labor.
“I gotta find a new job,” Flannel said in a low voice. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“You’re not quittin’.”
“Mom—”
“I didn’t move us all the way up here so you could spit on an honest opportunity.” Her nostrils flared. The masher bent a little. Flannel felt for those poor potatoes.
“Lemme take tomorrow off and see what other jobs I can find in the city.”
“Absolutely not. If you wanna be a big stallion and look for a new job, you’ll do it after your shift.” Babska gave the potatoes one final twist. Then she leveled the masher at him. Bits of starchy gore clung to the end. “Not a moment before.”
Flannel gulped. “Yes, mom.”
Flannel was true to his word and returned to work the next day. It wound up not mattering anyway, for as soon as he walked into the office he was called into the manager’s office and chewed out for nearly half an hour.
“You think you can just bludgeon another worker and get away with it?” the manager screamed.
“Well, technically, it was off company property, so—”
That got him another twenty minutes of shouting. The manager screamed so much Flannel honestly thought the fur on his face would fry.
When the screaming was done, he was unceremoniously fired and escorted out of the building.
Just as the guards were about to kick him to the curb, a breathless Dropsy raced in front of them and halted their progress.
She didn’t look flirty or fighty today. Actually, she looked like she was about to puke.
“I need that one,” she said to the guards, gesturing to Flannel. “General’s orders.”
“Get out of the way.”
“If you value your jobs, you’ll hoof him over.” She produced a scrap of paper with a big wax seal on the bottom. “Romulus requested him personally. So back off.”
The guards snatched the paper from Dropsy’s hooves. With a shrug, they took their hooves off Flannel and left the two ponies alone.
“Dropsy,” Flannel started, “I—”
“Shut up.” She breezed past him with icy smoothness and motioned for him to follow. “Romulus wants you, not me. Now c’mon, or I’ll tell Thunderhead you called me a slut.”
Flannel followed, fuming.
Every staffer in the building, from the lowliest janitor to the subordinate generals, knew that Romulus despised being groveled at. But Romulus was the kind of pony to which groveling was a natural response. Flannel wanted to cower every time he crossed the general’s path.
“You’re the one who does the cloudscaping?” Romulus asked, looking up from the stacks of papers on his desk.
“Yes, sir.”
The general’s eyes returned to his work. “Your team does a nice job.”
“Actually, it’s just me, sir.”
One of his eyebrows went up. “You do the whole building?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Every day.”
“Every day, sir.”
Romulus nodded intently. “You’re not a Derechan native, is that right?”
“Yes, sir. Born and raised in east Griffonia.”
“You’re pretty young.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you must have been there when they ran all the ponies out.”
“Uh. Yes, sir. I was six.”
An awkward silence filled the air. Flannel could tell the general wanted to talk about it. Years of relative peace had muted the terror of those early memories. But it didn’t make it any easier to talk about it. The feathered, beaked, and clawed elephant in the room still lorded over Flannel anytime someone brought up east Griffonia and its takeover.
Romulus asked, “If there were a way to make all the hatred in the world go away, would you do it?”
“Uh.” The question threw Flannel for a loop. “I dunno. Seems silly to think about it, sir.”
“Just go for it. No wrong answers.”
Flannel chewed on his lip. “I would. I guess there’d be consequences, but the consequence of not doing it would be more—” He stopped himself before he could say, more griffons. “More ponies doing bad stuff.”
“Have you ever thought about committing a serious crime? Think, robbery or murder.”
Flannel’s mind instantly went to Thunderhead and Dropsy. “No, sir.”
“Be honest. You aren’t in trouble. This is an interview for a special position. I need you to be candid with me. I need to know who you are.”
A special position? Sweat beaded on the back of his neck. “Well—uh—” He swallowed the lump in the back of his throat. “No. I wouldn’t commit any serious crimes. When I was back in east Griffonia, we had to steal food to survive, and sometimes ponies would try and take what you had, so you had to fight. But that was years ago, and times were hard. I would never do that here.”
Romulus rose from his desk, which given his stature wasn’t saying much. “Flannel, I think you’d be a good fit for a new program I’m starting. It doesn’t officially exist, it pays eight times as much as you’re making now, and if you tell anyone about it I’m going to have you, and whoever you told it to, thrown in prison. Do you understand?”
There was a deadly serious in the general’s voice that made Flannel want to cry and puke at the same time. “Yes sir,” he mumbled. His tongue scraped the top of his dry mouth. “Will I still have to do the clouds outside, too?”
Hypha took one look at Flannel, turned to Romulus, and said, “This is a sacred process. I’m not training a stranger.”
Romulus took a long, steadying breath in and out. “Please think practically. You’ll need help to get this operation running. Flannel is a farmer. He knows everything there is to know about the subject.”
“I don’t doubt his competence. But I don’t even know if they can grow up here.”
“Prairie Sky did it.”
Hypha furrowed his brow. “Prairie Sky wasn’t supposed to do what he did.”
He looked so serious for someone so young, Flannel thought. Must be the prosthetic leg. He’d seen a similar face on ponies back in east Griffonia. Losing parts of yourself made you more aware of just how much could be taken away.
The two ponies engaged in a brief duel of silence. Romulus eventually decided he didn’t want to fight for this particular hill. “Fine,” he said, “if you really don’t need the help—”
“Tubes!” Flannel jumped in. He felt his new raise evaporating right before his very eyes. He had to do something. “Hypha, sir—”
“Don’t call me that,” Hypha hissed.
Great start. Flannel stumbled over another sentence, paused, then started over. “Tubes. This is a hydroponics operation, right? But it’s different from the other city-sponsored ones. We’re growing something that’s watered indirectly.”
The prosthetic leg went, click, click, click, as Hypha leaned against one of the room’s several empty work tables. Flannel waited to be scolded and sent out of the room. When they didn’t, he went on, “We can’t feed the soil with water directly, or we’ll risk washing the plants out. If we get plastic tubes and some little pumps, we can run ‘em to the ceiling and have ‘em mist out at a controllable rate.” He put on what he hoped looked like a sincere smile. “I can do that for you.”
The table squeaked as Hypha stood up. The look on his face had gone from dismissive to merely annoyed. That was a good sign. “This is a big room. We’d need to control temperature as well as humidity.”
“Easy. Seed clouds. Small enough to be controlled by a couple’a big humidifiers. We could suck the moisture out, or keep the room at a full-blown fog all day, if that’s what you wanted.”
“Where can I get seed clouds?”
“We’d have to source ‘em from the local weather department. But don’t trouble yourself, I’ll get those for you, too.”
“These plants need zero contamination from the outside. How would you keep the place sterile?”
“Tarps. Lotsa tarps. The entrance is basically one long hallway, so we could set up cleaning stations for our hooves, then a station for washing, then a station to put on coats if you wanna get that heavy with it. Tarp it all down. If the entry procedure’s good, we won’t have to clutter the room itself. I know where to get good tarps, too.”
His accent slipped out. He said, “I’ll get it,” but it came out sounding like, “Ah’ll git it.” He snapped his mouth shut. This was the part of the conversation where they’d start hurtling humiliating nicknames at him. But much to his surprise, neither seemed to notice.
Hypha said, “If he handles tubes and tarps, I can go down to the ground and find rocks.”
“Rocks?” Romulus shook his head. “We can get you cloudstone from the quarry.”
“It needs to be real rock. The Canary’s Cage operation had a big rock beneath each plot. We can try using cloudstone, but I’ll bet my other legs it won’t work. We need mountain rocks, or at least something from deep underground.”
“I don’t want you leaving the temple.”
The distance between the two shrunk considerably. “I can have this whole thing up and running in three days.”
“You’re not leaving. That’s my decision, and it’s final. Let Flannel get the rocks.”
“He doesn’t know what kind of rocks to look for.”
“Then tell him which ones to get.”
“Uh.” Flannel strained to recall his home-school geology lessons. “I’m pretty good with rocks.”
“See? This is gonna be fine.” Romulus seemed excited now. His small form swayed from side to side ever so slightly. Light danced in his eyes. “You’ll be in charge of materials, Flannel. Can you do it?”
In charge. Flannel had never been in charge of his own life, let alone a function essential to a top secret operation. If getting rocks and tubes and tarps was his ticket out of poverty, he resolved to become the smoothest, slickest materials importer in all of Derecho. Just wrapping his head around it made him giddy.
“If’n I—” His jaw locked shut on instinct. He felt two sets of eyes on him, weighing him down. “I mean. I’ll have it done as soon as possible.”