//------------------------------// // Jus' Hitchin a Ride // Story: The Salmon of Harmony // by Hopkinz //------------------------------// Chapter 3 On the side of a wagon road out on the outskirts of Ponyville, Bonbon stood awkwardly while Lyra, her longtime friend, fiddled with some things in her toolbox. Every now and then, a cry of ‘Oh come on!’ would leave the minty unicorn’s lips, and she would stand up, kick her toolbox, and crouch down and fiddle with it once more. It was sunny, which was perfectly fine weather for adventuring, supposed Bonbon. The clouds had been cleared the day prior, which was convenient because the pegasus ponies of Ponyville would be too busy to clear the sky, as they were trying to decipher the first page of their tax logs, which usually consisted of ‘Dear Mr/Ms (Insert name here), today is Tax Reform Day and, as you may very well know, it is the day you must read through every page of this hefty tax log and approve it. It has come to our attention that your back taxes log interest rate of growth years has reached unsustainably important unaddressable units...’ The ponies of the ERS would be having a fit of laughter over this, were it not for the fact that the majority of them were busily immersed in approving tax logs of their own. Lyra stood up on her hind legs, styrofoam thumb fastened onto her right hoof. ‘Now, Bonbon,’ she said, ‘allow me to demonstrate to you the art of hitchhikery!’ ‘Hitchhikery?’ ‘Just go with the flow.’ And with that, Lyra stood on the side of the road, stuck her thumb out, and waited. And waited. After about five minutes, Bonbon grew so tired of standing awkwardly and waiting that she felt the only feasible alternative was to proclaim her tiredness of the awkward standing and waiting that she was currently feeling. She did just that. ‘That’s the art of Hitchhikery? There’s no way that that’s ever going to wor- An R.V. chose that moment to pull to a stop right in front of them, leaving Lyra with a smug expression on her face, and Bonbon with a stunned, surprise expression on her face. There was just no way that this was possible, but it had just happened, which made it perfectly possible, which it shouldn’t have been, which meant that there were a million and one things in the universe that she didn’t understand, which meant- It was then that Bonbon decided that thinking was overrated, and that she’d have been much, much happier if she could have gone through today without thinking. By extension, she thought some more, it would be very, very nice if she could just stop thinking for each and every Sunday out there. And, just to make everything even more surreal, Princess Luna, of all ponies, poked her head out at the pair and boomed, ‘WHERE TO, FAIR TRAVELERS?’ Bonbon immediately fell to her knees and bowed awkwardly in front of her princess. Lyra, on the other hoof, who was well-versed in the art of hitchhikery, decided that responding to her question was probably a better idea. ‘Well, I do have a nice summer cottage in It’s Beyond,’ said Lyra, ‘I suppose we could head there.’ ‘THEN WELCOME ABOARD!’ Bonbon and Lyra stepped aboard, and the first thing they noticed was that the room they entered was bigger than it had seemed on the outside, which would’ve sent the former into a helplessly spluttery state of mind, had it not been for the pints and pints of alcohol she’d consumed prior. Lyra, on the other hoof, stared around her in wonder. It’d been so long since she’d seen technology like this. ‘No way in hell...’ breathed Lyra, golden eyes wide with the familiarity of it all, ‘one of those fancy dimension-space porter thingies. They have these everywhere in It’s Beyond, you know.’ ‘WE KNOW. WE HAST READ THINE BOOK, ADVENTURER!’ boomed Luna. Nopony had the guts to tell her to use her indoor voice, save for Marvin, who had no guts at all and was too busy writing glum poetry to show off how glum he was to want to speak up in the first place. Luna was at the driver’s seat, sipping on a martini, because martinis were classy and princesses were supposed to be classy. An open copy of the Prodigal Explorer’s Map hovered beside her, purple in her horn’s telekinetic glow. If Lyra had any tact at all- which she hadn’t- she would have said something tactful, as everypony is supposed to do when talking to their princesses. However, as she had no tact, she didn’t say something like, ‘Well thanks for reading my book, I appreciate it and did you know it’s not actually mine and you’re totally best pony’. She’d read the article on tact before, as it had been written by her friend Blue Hoops, but she’d decided that there was no point in having tact and had berated her friend for writing such useless articles. And, as she’d had no tact, she said, ‘Hoopy.’ There were no repercussions to this, as this was not one of those situations that called for the usage of tact. The R.V. continued along its course. Lyra took a seat on a pristine couch, and a Bonbon, whose inebriated mind was now keeping her from doing anything but breathe, not splutter, and follow the green unicorn pony, followed her and fell asleep. The seats were soft and cushiony, slightly less so than a cloud, which would have passed through the both of them, and slightly more so than an ordinary couch. Just right, in fact. ‘Cloud-o-graphic holo couches. Hoopier,’ remarked Lyra. As an afterthought, she thought to ask Luna where she got her copy of the Map. She did so. ‘Hey, Princess, where’d you get your copy of the Map? Harry the Bear told me that no copies of it had been published outside of Equestria.’ ‘OUR SISTER GAVE IT TO US WHEN SHE SENT US ON OUR JOURNEY. SHE FOUND IT IN SUGARCUBE CORNER.’ ‘Hoopy.’ Lyra thought about how she’d found her satchel in Sugarcube Corner, and dismissed it as an improbable coincidence which, after the day she’d been having, it probably was. *** The Prodigal Explorer’s Map defines Sugarcube Corner as a brothel in which Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple breasted prostitute living on the street Erotica 9 works. It also has a bar and a casino. The Prodigal Explorer’s Map wasn’t very accurate, you see. *** Bonbon woke up with a pounding headache. It was a terrible headache, more terrible than My Little Bromo fanfiction, more head splitting than Talking Tom’s signature head splitter, and it made her feel about as bad as she felt whenever she woke up on a Sunday. She wasn’t terribly used to headaches, nor was she terribly used to hangovers, so she spent the better part of five minutes cringing and holding her head in pain. Some part of her subconscious wondered if she’d known that her day would turn out like this, and another part responded with ‘Well it’s Sunday, you dolt. Of course you knew,’ which was perfectly true. When her cringing and holding session had ended, Princess Luna was standing over her, concern in her eyes. ‘ART THOU ALRIGHT?’ asked Luna, which sent great crashing tsunamis of pain into the squidgy purple matter that formed her brain. ‘I’m fine, princess,’ said Bonbon, who had tact, and was quite fond of using it, especially when she was talking to princesses. Had she no tact, she would have said something like, ‘Oh for Your sake could you speak louder I think some parts of my eardrums are still intact and oh You do you not know how to use your You-damned indoor voice I mean the last thing that a pony with a hangover needs is for another pony- a princess, for Your sake!- to shatter their eardrums! LIKE SCREW YOU YOU PORMWRANGLER!!!!!!!!’ But she had tact, you see, and didn’t say that. Still, she cringed and gritted her teeth and held her head and imagined vivid images of her using her princess’ entrails as cupcake ingredients, all the while justifying it with ‘It’s just the hangover talking, it’s just the hangover talking,’ which it was, though the images still did a fairly good job of disturbing her. ‘Wouldst thou like for us to use our indoor voice?’ asked Luna, quieter this time. Bonbon nodded gratefully, though the act of simply hearing turned her brain into mush, swirled it around in a particle blender, and then toasted it in one of Twilight Sparkle’s toasters. ‘Dost there be anything we can do to aid thee in thy sufferings?’ Luna’s soft, kind voice grated on the inside of her skull like an extra gratey cheese grater on a brick. ‘Coffee,’ the cream colored pony whispered whilst wincing, ‘coffee would be really nice right now.’ ‘We...’ said Luna uncomfortably, ‘we know not of this coffee that you speaketh of.’ Bonbon felt her headache get worse, and decided that tact be screwed, she needed her coffee. ‘BUT IT’S COFFEE! It’s- it’s- At this point, she succumbed to the pain of her pounding headache and fainted back onto the couch. *** Shortly after Bonbon had fallen asleep for the first time, Lyra had taken two bath towels out of the bathroom, and distributed them all around. Princess Luna already had one hanging around her neck, so she only got towels for Marvin and Bonbon. Marvin was about as grateful for the towel as any sentient equine born with a natural hatred of all things lifey could be, and Bonbon was too asleep to notice. *** The Prodigal Explorer’s Map states that if you want to survive in It’s Beyond, you’d best know where your towel is. This is true. *** Eventually, Princess Luna got around to driving again, and Marvin took out a piece of paper and wrote depressing poems on it. Lyra went to the bedroom, overthrew the communist mice currently occupying the bed she wanted, and began plotting points on a map. Not THE Map, just a perfectly ordinary map hanging off the wall. Ponyville, she decided, could be Point A, marked with a nice little thumbtack. Since the wall was magnetic, she took a magnet from her toolbox that vaguely resembled an R.V. and stuck it on a road leading out from Ponyville, which was Point B. Point C was Lyra’s summer cottage, where her parents lived and where, if her luck held out, she’d be in a few days. Luck, if you will, never held out for Lyra. More on that later. She also thought to mark out Point E with a little piece of paper saying, ‘BEWARE OF BEAR!’. Point E was on the sparkling shores of Mareida, just off the coast of the great Mareific Ocean, in which the Editing and Printing Department of Useless, Overpriced Maps was, and where, by extension, Harry the Bear would be. She wasn’t overly fond of seeing Harry the Bear again, as the unicorn mare had run up quite a substantial tab over her sojourn in Equestria, and hadn’t written any substantial entries for the guide, either. She wasn’t sure if the Department was still in Mareida, of course, because she hadn’t been there in just over ten years. Point D was off vacationing with IPv5, and they were both taking turns drinking beer and telling each other sob stories about how no one ever uses them. *** When Bonbon woke up for the second time, she was immediately gratified to find that much of her headache had gone, and that there was a steaming mug of what appeared to be coffee on the circular white table next to her. It smelled like coffee. It looked like coffee. ‘If it had a voice,’ she thought, ‘it would probably say something like ‘I’m a cup of coffee,’’ which was a fairly odd thought to have. According to the Duck Rule, which was one of the most important rules ever created, it was probably coffee. She took a sip, swallowed it, and reasoned that whoever had invented the Duck Rule was most likely one of the biggest idiots in all of Equestria and It’s Beyond. The drink she had just sipped was actually quite a bit like a drink that was almost entirely unlike coffee. Which meant to say that she hadn’t actually taken a sip of coffee, but a drink that was so absolutely not coffee that the only pony who could have done this to her must have been the lovechild of Nightmare Moon and Discord. Princess Luna turned Auto-Drive on and trotted over to Bonbon, as the princess had just noticed her awakening. ‘Your friend Lyra hath told me that this... ‘coffee’ that thou request is simply a cup of boiled bean stew,’ began Luna. The alicorn levitated a now-empty can of Lima Beans. ‘So we made this for thou. We trust that it is to thine liking?’ Bonbon, the ever-so tactful, who didn’t like the drink at all, said, ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, your majesty.’ Princess Luna smiled and returned to her driving. Marvin, who was seated on the couch next to her, spoke up. ‘I’m just about finished with my poem about the pointlessness of life. I suppose you would all like to hear it?’ Bonbon shook her head. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re right. Nopony likes me. Why should I even bother with life?’ he groaned and hobbled off to the bedchambers, where he’d kill some communist mice, sit down and make grousy comments at Lyra, who was trying to sleep. ‘Sometimes we question our wisdom in taking him with us,’ said Princess Luna. ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll make himself useful eventually,’ replied Bonbon. ‘Perhaps. Wouldst thou like to go and make thineself useful by telling everypony to prepare for hyperdrive?’ ‘Hyperdrive? What’s that?’ ‘’Tis like a- knowest what? Ask thine friend. She knows more about this than we do.’ ‘Well alright then.’ *** There are few things more useful in this world than towels and hyperdrive. We’ll get to the towel part later. Hyperdrive is, in layman’s terms, a state in which the vehicle that one is driving goes really, really fast. Fast enough, in fact, to cross all of Equestria and It’s Beyond 100 times in one second. It was surprising, then, that with technology like the hyperdrive, that the scientists in It’s Beyond had yet to figure out space travel. Shortly after going through hyperdrive, one generally tends to feel woozy and have an intense pain in their muscles, along with a deficiency in their body’s natural protein. There are many things one can do to avoid/treat these symptoms. Wrapping a towel around your fetlocks, surprisingly does wonders for the wooziness. The intense pain is prevented by preemptive alcohol. Lots and lots of preemptive alcohol. The protein deficiency is solved by eating airline peanuts. *** ‘And that’s how hyperdrive works,’ finished Lyra. She’d foregone sleeping, as she had recently been overcome with crushing depressions from simply being near Marvin. ‘I didn’t understand half of that,’ said Bonbon. ‘None at all?’ ‘None at all.’ ‘Think of it as... Luna’s R.V. moving really, really fast.’ ‘Well, that makes sense. Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’ ‘I did, didn’t I?’ ‘Oh, that’s right. You did.’ ‘Anyways,’ continued Lyra, ‘you’re going to want to do a couple of things before entering hyperdrive.’ She took a bath towel out of her satchel, and wrapped it around her fetlocks. ‘First, do this.’ ‘Well why should I?’ asked Bonbon. This was all seeming ridiculous and pointless to her. ‘It’ll help with the wooziness.’ ‘Alright then.’ ‘Now, you’re supposed to drink a lot of alcohol beforehand, but I’m pretty sure that we’ve got that one covered. It’s muscle relaxant, you see.’ Bonbon nodded, even though she didn’t see at all. ‘And after this, we’re supposed to eat a pack of airplane peanuts, because of its unique physical properties.’ ‘And what are they supposed to be?’ asked Bonbon. ‘Packing peanuts’ Lyra replied.. ‘No, not that. The unique physical properties of an airline peanut. What are they supposed to be?’ Bonbon pressed on. ‘Oh. No idea.’ ‘Well then why’d you bring it up?’ asked Bonbon, who was getting somewhat frustrated by the whole exchange. ‘I thought it was you who brought it up.’ replied Lyra. ‘Well no. It was you.’ ‘Oh right, it was.’ Lyra passed Bonbon a packet of packing peanuts and went off to go drink the Princess of the Night under the table. *** ‘N-n-now w-w-w-we g-g-g-g-gooo and activa-activate th-the haaaaiipaaar d-d-d-d-d-drive!’ stuttered an incredibly drunk princess. ‘Uh, princess, shouldn’t you avoid drinking and driving? I’m pretty sure that that’s not a good idea.’ said a really concerned Bonbon. ‘S-s-s-s-sil-sil-silence! W-w-w-w-we are p- p- p- perfectly able bodied and mindied- thingy!’ Bonbon hurriedly trotted to the driver’s seat and gently nudged her princess off of it, and plopped herself down. She wasn’t the best driver in Equestria, but she was only five hours drunk, which was much, much more preferable to an experienced driver who was five minutes drunk. ‘Alright!’ she announced nervously to the motley crew behind her. Lyra hurriedly wrapped Luna’s fetlocks with a towel, and tucked a package of airline peanuts under her wing. ‘Are we ready?’ ‘Ready!’ said Lyra. The realization that she was only mere seconds, rather than days, away from her summer cottage with her parents excited her to no end. Marvin was bored. ‘Ready, I suppose. Are you sure you don’t want to hear my poetry?’ ‘Still no,’ replied Bonbon. ‘Same,’ concurred Lyra. ‘Alright then, let’s go!’ Bonbon pressed down on the large red button marked, ‘Hyperdrive: Do not press!’ and the R.V. rumbled and shook and did all sorts of R.V. things as the engine broke down and ceased entirely to function at all.