Applejack beamed across the breakfast table with her golden, smug expression that lit up faster than the morning itself. Across from her sat Big Macintosh, who met her look, unflinching and non-expressive.
“That’s it?” he said in his rumbling voice.
“That’s it,” she said. “A day without talking and I’ll do all your chores for three.”
“If I lose?”
“Then you gotta dance in the middle of town wearing a bonnet.”
Big Mac went glum. “What is with you and dressing me up?”
“It’s funny,” she insisted.
“It’s weird, is what it is.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Fine then, it’s both. Still more funny than weird,” she said with a note of finality.
All the same she’d struck the bet, though why was beyond him. If Applejack said she’d do it, her word was binding. She’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pull a fast one on him and he was always first to the table of the two. The stallion allowed himself a smile. He wasn’t going to be suckered into any traps, merely nodding to his sister.
“You can talk, ‘til we shake on it.” Still smiling, the red pony hoisted his hoof above the table. Applejack, however, frowned and did not return the gesture.
“Huh. Now that I think about it, it seems a bit off, don’t it?”
“Nope.” The monosyllable put a coy and dangerous glint to her eyes.
“Right, I got a better idea. And you’ll even get to talk with it. You pony enough to go for it?” His hoof was still out there, hovering over the woodwork, but now it was joined by Applejack’s.
“Eeyup.” Anything she threw at him, he could take. Three days off were worth no less.
“Righty then. New rules is this. You can talk, but you can’t say ‘Eeyup’ or ‘Nope’ for the day. The. Whole. Day. You get that?”
“Eeyup.” Applejack grinned. Big Mac felt the prickle of nervous sweat.
“That one slides, we haven’t shook yet. You still pony enough to try?”
“Eeyyy--yes.” The word tasted dusty, unfamiliar on his tongue. He gave his sister a look. “Playin’ dirty, though.” She grasped his hoof and shaked heartily.
“It’s playin’ clever. I thought there, takin’ away all your words wouldn’t actually be half so hard for you as taking away just two little ones. The ones you use most of all. Gotta admit, that’s clever whatever way you look at it.”
“Ee...yalp!” he managed to yelp, fighting off the encroaching word.
“I got this in the bag.” Big Mac shot her a defiant look.
“Noo...you don’t!,” he managed to drawl, his jaw struggling avoid the familiar. He breathed as if he’d just managed a long jump record. A bead of sweat had already formed on his brow, and they hadn’t even finished breakfast yet.
Applejack helped herself to a bowl of the sugar laden cereal that Apple Bloom favoured. She didn’t normally go in for it, but watching Big Mac struggle with the challenge was putting her into a playful, boisterous mood.
“Tell you what,” she said around a crunching mouthful. “I’ll do your chores for today, starting right here and now, win or lose. A consolation prize, you know?” The orange mare rolled her eyes. “Aaaand it’ll get you out and about, with that many more chances to slip up. Trees ain’t the best conversationalists. ‘Ceptin’ Bloomberg.”
“I ain’t lost yet,” her big brother growled around a piece of toast that bled slow dribbles of jam. Applejack’s hooves thumped the table.
“That’s the spirit! Now get on out there and give it your best.”
After a moment of laughing, she called him back.
“You could finish breakfast first you know.”
“Ee..Er, right.”
“Would you bring Apple Bloom and her friends some breakfast of their own?”
Big Macintosh merely nodded.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders had been camping out in their treehouse. This was nothing unusual, nor was there anything unusual about them, the house, or the tree in which it rested.
The smouldering crater a stone’s throw away was new though.
It had started innocently enough, with a simple observation. Such had been this: Old things tend to be under new things, because it was a lot easier to throw something on top of what was already there than it was to push it under.
Then, like one collective entity wielding three filly bodies, they had looked to the soil. The Apple family had a lot of it. They got vegetables and corn and a zillion types of apple out of it, and that was just from the stuff up top.
The more they thought about it, the more the ideas wound up to speed. Gems came from the ground. In their minds, this was always in the form of large chests meticulously buried at the end of a treasure map. The fillies didn’t even about how such a thing could possibly get deep underground. If they had at all, they’d have come up with a vague impression that such chests just sort of appeared.
And there were excavations and buried old cities and stuff, wasn’t there? And ancient cities were always cooler than modern ones, they had tombs and temples and all sorts of amazing things.
They certainly had never seen that kind of thing in Canterlot. They’d never heard of Daring Doo and the Kinda Old but not Really Ancient Stuff - or - Daring Doo and the kind of thing that Granny would have lying around in a dresser or something and call a memento from ‘in the good old days.’
For a start, they’d need a big book to fit those kinds of titles, and who’d want to read it anyway? It’d be almost as long and pointless as one of Granny Smith’s stories. At the edge of the crater Apple Bloom raised a hoof of objection.
“Hey, my Granny tells great stories.”
“They take three hours!” Scootaloo said.
“She knows how to pace ‘em.”
“She does kinda forget what she started with,” Sweetie Belle cautiously said, but Apple Bloom was having none of it.
“So? Why’d you want a story to end up where it started anyway? Seems silly to me.”
Scootaloo groaned. “We’re getting off topic here anyway. What are we going to do about this?” She made a sweeping gesture of the catastrophe before them, which considering the depth and breadth of it, took a lot of sweeping. Some of the rock had pooled at the bottom and was making soft plink noises as it cooled into interesting shapes and colours. Sweetie Belle wondered if it counted as art.
The unicorn turned suddenly on Scootaloo, rocks forgotten. “I told you we should have stuck to the shovels.”
“We weren’t going anywhere.”
“We were too! We were going down.” It was true, they’d managed a fine pit in the dirt, one that had necessitated a little rope ladder for the fillies to shuttle up and down on. They hoped nopony would miss it, or failing that, wouldn’t know it was them that had it last.
“Well yeah, but that mixture did it a lot better, a lot faster."
Apple Bloom shoved the pegasus. “It did it too well! We were aiming down but it nearly blowed us up!” She calmed in an instant and turned to Sweetie Belle. “What went wrong?”
The white filly consulted The Book. The capitals were justified entirely. Again, Cutie Mark Crusader reasoning had run its course. More or less like this:
The Love Poison had been amazing. It was wrong to use, and they understood that now, because it tampered with ponies. But, they had reasoned, there must be other sorts of potions that could do equally amazing things This was a book of such mixtures, and provided they didn’t make the ones that affected ponies, where was the harm in it?
It was going plink at the bottom of the hole.
“Err...” she said, skimming over the all the unnecessary words. Ones like Does Not accept responsibility for any kind for mishandling or misappropriation.
Fusion infusion: a brew to be applied to small boulders and stubborn stumps with sufficient bang as to dislodge them.
As one filly, they looked to the smouldering hole. If their treehouse had been made into a pit-house, standing on its roof might just have allowed them to see the grass. If they really stretched their necks.
The ingredients were written in poetic form.
Take a dragon’s puff,
add a phoenix tuft,
Stir with a sunflower
for explosive power.
“Sweetie Belle, you said you’d get the dragon’s puff. How much did you get?”
The unicorn shied away. “Well...it didn’t say what kind of dragon, and the only one I know is Spike, but Rarity says that most are way, way bigger, as he’s only a baby. I might have put in more than one puff, seeing that he’s a baby and all.
Apple Bloom gave her a hard stare. “How much is more than one?”
Sweetie Belle stared upwards in concetration. “Erm... I didn’t count. I just got him to breathe into a paper bag. How many puffs does it take for Spike to get dizzy and fall over? That many.”
“Sweetie Belle!” Scootaloo shouted, but Apple Bloom cut across the pegasus filly.
“And you were supposed to get the tuft of phoenix!”
Scootaloo flickered her wings. “I totally did!” There’s that one at the library, you know? I got one feather, easy. Super easy. I got like a million of them!”
“A million.”
Scootaloo caught the icy glare from her friend. “You know what I mean,” she laughed nervously. “PeeWee was moulting, there was down everywhere. Twilight Sparkle even gave me a cookie for sweeping them up for her. I mean, he’s only a baby phoenix, so I thought a few extra would make it work properly.
“How many was a few extra?”
Scootaloo hesitated “All of them?”
Apple Bloom groaned aloud and fell back onto the grass.
“Well it still worked.”
“It worked too well! They’re gonna banish me to the moon! Except they we ain’t got magic so they’ll build a giant catapult and try to banish me to the moon but it’ll be too far and instead I’ll only be banished to the far side of the Everfree which isn’t the moon but it’s still pretty bad maybe worse 'cause I don’t think they have cockatrices and manticores on the moon!"
Each of her friends grabbed a flailing front leg. “Calm down and breathe.”
“Yeah, you need some air.”
“I’ll get plenty of air when I’m helplessly flying across the Everfree!”
Both fillies still standing shook her insistently, until Apple Bloom swatted them away and sighed.
“Still don’t know what we’re gonna do about this hole.”
Scootaloo nudged the earth pony to her hooves. “It’s not going anywhere. Let’s go in the treehouse and think.”
Nopony likes to think on an empty stomach, because what one invariably thinks of on an empty stomach is that they, in fact, have an empty stomach.
Cue Big Macintosh; entering stage whatever side of the treehouse that the hole wasn’t.
“Hey!” he called up amicably. It was strange, he had to wonder, how the place steadily improved the more the fillies made it their own. It looked very much a small, proper house. This was even stranger considering that anything and everything else the fillies took an interest in was in for a wild ride.
“Oh. Uh. Hey,” his sister called down to him. He carried a basket for them, wafting an essence of goodness that went beyond mere scent. “You brought us food?”
“EEes.”
“You feelin’ sick? Your face kinda went all scrunchy there...”
“NNo. Feelin fine.”
“Did it again!”
“No,” he managed to squawk, tendons and eyes bulging with the strain. The ‘ope’ fought savagely to get out.
“And again! What’s going on, Big Mac?”
He sighed. His whole family suffered from chronic honesty.
“I’m doin a bet.”
“What’s the bet?” Apple Bloom pressed the point like a sore tooth.
“Can’t say two words.”
The filly cocked her head to one side as she leaned out the window. “That it? What words?”
“Can’t say.”
“Oh. Right.” She thought for a moment. “Oh! I bet I know which ones, considering it’s you. ‘Eeyup’ and ‘Nope,’ right?"
“Ee...ya’ll just come down here and get this basket. Ain’t fair to try and mess me up like that.” The filly bounded down to the ground, followed quickly by the others.
“I wasn't trying to mess you up, honest! I wouldn’t even need to, them’s practically your answers to everything."
Big Mac managed to bite off the ‘n’ sound. “That ain’t true.”
“Is so!”
Arguing with the filly was a no win scenario, so he didn’t start. It had nothing to do with the fact that firm denial was trying to form his mouth to the sweet siren sounds of ‘Nope.’ Content, he passed her the basket and continued on his way.
“Come round the house sooner rather than later, and bring that back.”
“Big Mac, not that way!”
Not just Apple Bloom, but Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle as well tried to steer him away. It was an exercise in futility, and one that piqued his interest.
“There something this way you don’t want me seeing?” he grumbled.
“Nope! Nothing!” the filly insisted. Big Macintosh felt a moment’s terrible envy for her free vocabulary.
Those thoughts fell away into a chasm, one conveniently at his hooves in one of the unseeded, unplanted plots of ground.
Apple Bloom hung her head low. “I’ll go get my crash helmet.”
The red pony didn’t even try to figure out what that meant, not when he was still trying to gauge what he was actually seeing.
In the silence, cooling rock went plink, helpfully making it merely quiet.
“You all did this?” A chorus of sorrowful nods bobbed around him.
“And you’re all alright?” More nods.
“And you learned a lesson?" Again, the nods.
“Okay then.”
Apple Bloom fixed her brother with wide, teary eyes. “You’re not gonna build a catapult and fling me near as the moon as you’re able?”
Only the fact that he had to say ‘Uh’ before what came next spared him from failure. “Nnot at all. No.”
His first thoughts, after sighing his relief for a catastrophe avoided, was along the lines of ‘what to do with this hole?’ But he wasn’t working today, was he? It was a small shift, but the thought rewrote itself after a second’s consideration as ‘what can I do with this hole?’
A small yellow hoof prodded at Big Mac.
“You ain’t gonna tell sis, are ya?”
“Ee...course I’ll tell her. In a fair way though.” He sighed.
Scootaloo stifled a giggle. “That bet sure is giving you trouble!”
Sweetie Belle whispered in quick consultation with Apple Bloom, whom started again, more coyly.
“Say...it’d be awful nice of us if we didn’t get at ya and try to make you slip up on your bet. And it’d be awful nice if you kinda maybe in a way that wasn’t a lie at all didn’t tell Applejack about this ‘cause she ain’t half as cool a brother as you are and would surely take it the wrong way.”
Rather than speak, the big stallion raised one eyebrow.
Sweetie Belle furrowed hers. “Applejack is your sister though-”
“That wasn’t important,” the yellow filly said testily, pushing her friend away. Slowly, after some deliberation, Big Macintosh smiled.
“You know yourself it’s best to tell her upfront about this sort of thing, but alright.” Cheers were had. For Big Macintosh, they were a bit deafening.
The girls ran off, whooping for joy. He wandered the opposite direction, glad for a semblance of quiet. He loved his sister and her friends, he did, but there was only so much Cutie Mark Crusading a pony could be expected to cope with in a day. Those fillies needed something else to do sometimes, some way to have simple, non-destructive fun. Something to chill out with...
The idea that struck was of the simplicity that is nothing less than inspired. Holding it in his mind, Big Macintosh set off towards Ponyville. He had no particular haste, not with the whole day to enjoy yet. Provided he watched his tongue, he’d get three more out of it too.