Say no more
We're still in the past
Nobody’s ever heard of Seckelville, Equestria. It’s very much like Ponyville, except that the foundational farm is a pear farm, and ponies have pear cutie marks and names like Pearjack, Big Bartlett, Pear Bloom, Golden Spice, Harrow Gold, Moonglow, Stinking Bishop, 豊水, and Perry [which is a much closer pear-themed Applejack than ‘Pearjack’].
If you were to find yourself suddenly appearing via random portal in a good gem-searching spot on the outskirts of Ponyville—’outskirts’ being a rather broad term—and you had to choose a direction to go to find civilization, if you did the opposite of the thing that would take you to the manticore (Manny) and then Ponyville, you’d wind up meeting the anticore (Annie) and then get to Pearville.
In Pearville, there was a bar, and—although she didn’t know it—Amey the Hoof wasn’t banned from that bar. They served pear-themed drinks, like Peary Bird, Daphne Martini, Christmas Hearth’s Warming Mule (seasonally), and Spiced Sailor.
KitKat was at the bar enjoying a Spicy Sailor when he came in, accompanied by screams and ponies fainting in terror. Pearville doesn’t see the same share of monsters that Ponyville does, so an unfamiliar biped in clothes was a cause for alarm.
[It’s worth pointing out to readers who are unfamiliar with this abomination franchise holiday tradition abomination, KitKat knew a thing or two about humans and had every right to shun them. Screaming or fainting in terror weren’t really her thing, though, so she finished off her Spiced Sailor, tightened a hoof around her tabarzin (تبرزین), and turned to face the newcomer.
He wasn’t a wizard, which was already a point in his favor. He was dressed in respectable clothes—khaki pants, a tan button-down shirt, sun-faded campaign hat, and had an undersized pickaxe stuck in his belt. Kind of like a cross between Indiana Jones and Theodore Roosevelt.
KitKat had been wandering around looking for work; the civilized areas of Equestria had better inns and hostels but fewer opportunities for her particular set of skills. The two of them were out of place, especially here, and would make a great team.
Maybe. KitKat knew better than to look a gift human in the mouth or anywhere else. She’d done some research since the last time and prepared her own legal document for the next human she might hire, thanks to her friend Mia Fey (known as Chihiro Ayasato in Neighponese). She tapped her hoof on the empty barstool next to her, and as soon as he sat down she bought him a Sultry Sailor, then got the contract out of her saddlebags.
For when things got down to business.
📜
Okay, now it’s in the present.
“A murder victim?” Twilight asked once Rarity had recovered from her heroine’s hebetude1 and explained what had brought her to Twilight’s doorstep in such a state. It was a long, shaggy dog tale, rambling in its nature, overly dramatic, overwrought; in general one of those things that continues on and on when it really shouldn’t and really brings one to appreciate the advice in Alice in Wonderland that she [Alice] should start at the beginning and when the gets to the end, stop; or perhaps for a more modern reference William Shatner commenting in the music video for Celebrity by Brad Paisley (for some reason the singer who came to mind was Blake Shelton even though I knew it wasn’t him) that the part of the song he enjoyed the most was when the end (“You know when the song ends and you come to a stop? I love that.”)—like this paragraph, Rarity was stringing various bits of vaguely coherent narrative elements together into one long thing that upped the word count but provided no actual value to the reader: all that was missing was a colon to make it even longer!
“Are you sure he was dead?” was the first thing that Twilight replied with, at least after she’s parsed the long rambling tale which was rambling in its nature &c. Not exactly the best response, but given that Twilight was at best an ad hoc detective, it was a logical reply. “Maybe we should bring along Nurse Redheart.”
Rarity sighed, semi-swooned, and called upon her vast repertoire of euphemisms for death. “He [REDACTED] snuffed it. He’s rolled up the curtain and joined the b——dy choir invisible!”
[She’s a Monty Python fan]
Say no more
[Wait, we’re putting pictures in this now? Is this a blog? Has this gone completely off the rails, or can it be pulled back?]
“There were—” Rarity took a deep breath, sniffed some smelling salts, downed a shot of brandy to fortify herself. “Parts scattered all around.”
“Oh.” Twilight wasn’t a doctor or a nurse, honorary doctorate from the Saddle Lake Universite TechnicaB notwithstanding. Nonetheless did understand that ‘parts’ ought to remain on or inside a pony, rather than be scattered around. “Well, we ought to go out to the scene and gather evidence, I suppose. According to my Lady Mallowan books, that’s what a good detective does.”
As she gathered the things she thought she’d need in her saddlebags—Twilight didn’t have a specific checklist for ‘investigate a crime scene’—she started musing about the circumstances of their mission. “Gosh, I think this is the first murder ever in Ponyville.”
“Near Ponyville,” Rarity corrected.
“Near Ponyville.”
“Really, closer to Pearville as the pegasus flies.”
“Pearville? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Good.”
“I’m more into peaches anyway. Say, you never said who it was—a pony you recognized?”
“Oh, darling. I couldn’t possibly have brought myself to get that close to a dead body,” she said dramatically. Plus that would spoil the surprise, she added under her breath.
Twilight furrowed her brow*. “Say, aren’t you a Noir detective?”
🚬
Now it’s the future
An older and wiser Torch Song looked dubiously at the stately ponyless carriage, the first Ateliers d’Automobiles et d’Aviation 10A Luxe from Prance. It was electric and came with a ten-year warranty and despite the ‘aviation’ clearly in the brand name, it couldn’t fly. She—
Oops, we went too far into the future
A marginally wiser and slightly older Torch Song, one who had, thus far, only learned to not push buttons on a found portal gun lest a weird biped in clothes come out of a flamy hole in the ground was at the bar, the one where Sparker was banned, sipping on a cool refreshing Flaming Green Fairy, so named because it contains absinthe and is on fire.
Besides enjoying pressing flowers, she also enjoyed things being on fire, as her name would imply.
She had a sympathetic audience of ponies around her as she regaled her tale of finding the portal gun and pressing the button not once but twice, producing not one but two weird bipeds wearing clothes, one of them being Chell and the other one being Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy♣ (who had, at this point in the future of the story, left the bar in Pearville in the company of KitKat).
Or maybe they were enjoying the whimsical green flares of the Flaming Green Fairy—that was a drink that the bar didn’t make all that often, due to the fire hazard and the hallucinatory nature of wormwood. Fun fact! Wormwood is toxic to horses but not to sheep, as Merino well knows.
🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑
Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy was a paleontologist, and he’d been minding his own business as he carefully extracted trilobite and blastoid fossils from a layer of rocks (a very deep layer as anyone who knows what both those things are will appreciate). Trilobites are vaguely related to horseshoe crabs, and blastoids are only found in fragments because part of their life cycle is exploding, hence the name.
One of those facts is true; the other is my own personal theory.
He’d suddenly found himself in a portal and before he could do more than swear (in French) he found himself in Equestria, where he appeared in front of a rock that contained fossils he’d never seen before. There was also a human female walking off in the far distance and an equine with a recently-used portal gun galloping off . . . he was a paleontologist and focused his attention on what was really important.
🔨🔨
Eventually, his glassine sample bags were full, his hand was cramped from rock-hammering and meticulous note-taking, and he fancied a drink.
He couldn’t remember which direction the equine and human had gone off in, so guessed, and after walking for a while found himself entering a bar.
Many of the equines freaked out at the sight of him, but a bulky mare with feathered hooves, scars in her coat, and a notch out of her ear tapped the stool beside her and he gratefully took it.
She ordered a drink for him, produced a stack of papers out of her saddlebags, and asked, “Are you a wizard?”