VI - “When A Mommy And Daddy Sarosian Love Each Other Very Much...”
Midnight awaited the two mares adjacent him: had he not been tethered to a discomforting collar that could possibly be loaded with fleas from the previous mutt it belonged to, he would have waited by the door for them: the farther, the better, he would tell himself. Sadly, ‘twas not the case in this situation as he itched at his throat underneath the wrought steel of his confining accessory.
Octavia tugged the collar’s leash, dragging Midnight along until they reached the mall’s entrance. “You, stay put,” she commanded.
“Er, why?” Midnight questioned, not understanding what she was getting at at first.
“Ugh...” groaned the cellist, before firing a sneer his way. “No dogs allowed inside, of course.”
“First of all, I am not a dog: I was just goose-stepped by you into wearing a collar like a dog. Secondly, do any of you even have your wallets or purses?” Octavia and Vinyl’s trains of thought derailed from their tracks and crashed and burned aggressively; there were no survivors.
“Well, uh, hehe...” chuckled Vinyl, scratching the back of her head in embarrassment. “No. Neither did Tavi.” Octavia launched a look that screamed “Traitor!” directly Vinyl’s way, the unicorn recipient shrugged and confessed, “What? It’s true!”
“If you’re so smug about it, did you bring yours?” Octavia challenged Midnight. Smirking like a cheeky git, the Sarosian’s hand delved into his back pocket before pulling out a big black wallet from its depths. The wallet, fat with funds, was adorned with golden frames on the corners, and branded with an icon of some sort: a scroll with a complex arcane pentacle scrawled on its surface, with a quill of great grandiose resting in a stout inkpot next to it.
“Well, duh. I’m paying for you all.” With haste, Octavia plucked Midnight’s wallet from his unsuspecting hands. “Oi!”
“How much money do you have?” she inquired. She felt the wallet jump out of her hands and land back in Midnight’s, his horn’s aura vanishing as Octavia scowled at him. “You little-!”
“Hey, how about I count my funds,” he deadpanned. ‘Nosy shrew....’ he thought grumpily to himself as his fingers pulled out a large stack of purple five hundred-Bit notes, golden hundred-Bit notes, silver fifty-Bit notes, and red twenty-Bit notes from his wallet. Vinyl’s and Octavia’s eyes swelled up to the size of dustbin lids, pupils contracted into naught but minuscule dots. Midnight quickly shifted through his notes, counting each bill and totaling it all up in his head. “About... ten thousand Bits,” he finally answered, “with loads more in my account.”
“H-h-how much more?” Vinyl stammered, swept off her hooves by the sheer amount of cold hard cash the scribe was toting.
Midnight smirked. The girls were baffled by the immense profit he holds in just one hand. They’d be absolutely blown away by more than just that. “If I remember correctly... about, what, two hundred thousand in my account?” Vinyl’s jaw dropped almost comically as her posture went slack, arms hanging limply by her side. Octavia, unlike her friend, had a brow tweaked upward in disbelief, arms crossed upon her ample chest. “What? What’s wrong?” Midnight asked, disturbed a wee bit by their bizarre fusion of expressions.
“Whoa.... tha... that’s a lot,” Vinyl admitted.
Midnight’s cheekiness deflated as he forced himself to confess, “Yeah, but I can’t spend it.”
“What?!” Vinyl was flabbergasted as to why such a bountiful fortune was just left to gather dust. “Why?! You have loads of moolah just waiting to be spent, man! You gotta make it rain!”
”It’s either my savings, or it’s the money I’m wiring to my family over in Jalalaback!”
“Oh..."
“Come off it, Vinyl!” Octavia interjected, not buying it at all. “Obviously, he’s lying through his jagged teeth! It’s what Tartarus spawn like him do!”
“Jagged?” Midnight was offended by that bit, self-consciously licking the outside of his sharp pearly whites. “I take damn good care of my teeth, thank you very much.”
“I dunno, Tavi...” Vinyl said.
“What utter garbage...” scoffed Octavia. “I honestly suspect those notes are all forged.”
Midnight snickered tauntingly into his hands, his amusement from Octavia’s stubborn persistence overcoming his annoyance of her accusations. “You honestly have no clue. But whatever. Shall we proceed?”
“Fine...” Octavia huffed, as she and Vinyl entered first, leaving Midnight last to traipse through the glass double doors.
Canterlot Mall was, without a doubt, one of Equestria’s largest malls. Ten stories high, with each floor designated with a certain genre, such as music, furniture, food, clothes, and even a floor designated for sports and construction. Each floor was also about the size of a hoofball field, the escalators and elevators being an absolute must due to the vast walking distance one must take to get from one end to the other.
But, what drew many ponies into its grandeur insides was not just the merchandise it distributed, but the guise the very exterior of the mall took as well. The mall’s structure twisted and warped in a clockwise fashion, giving it a double helix appearance as its titanium and thick glass shell gleamed radiantly in the rays of the afternoon sun.
While others saw it as a magnificent place for shopping, passing time with friends, and other such camaraderie, Midnight and Vinyl—unbeknownst to the both of them—saw it as a perfect stronghold during a zombie apocalypse: fortified on the outside, and well-stocked on the inside.
But that is not important right now.
Midnight was silent as the trio traipsed about the store. The eyes of the mall-goers wandered onto him, not due to his appearance, but by the collar he had been forced to wear. Discomfort and its corrosive venom seeped into the Sarosian’s bloodstream as he adjusted his shirt collar nervously, words of vilification transmitting between those with the gall to voice their thoughts.
“So, where would you like to go first, you two?” Midnight inquired, dying to get out of the shoppers’ lines of sight. “Clothes stores? Food court? Music shops?”
Vinyl and Octavia shared a long look at one another before they smiled in synchronized, congruent joy. “To the music store, awaaaay!” Vinyl cheered as she plucked the leash’s handle from Octavia’s grasp and flicked it like the reigns on a sleigh-pulling reindeer. Midnight twisted his head to lock eyes on Vinyl, an expression of disapproval plastered to his face as he erred an offensive “ahem”.
“Ahehe...” giggled a slightly mortified Vinyl. “Sorry.”
“Whatever,” Midnight responded hastily, barely stanching his anxiety. “Come along, then, you two.”
The escalator rides up were spent in silence as they rode up to the sixth floor towards the music department. Only on their third escalator up was the impregnable tension cut to pieces by Vinyl saying, “Hey, Midnight?”
“Yes...” Midnight hesitated: should he call Vinyl “Master” as well? Or should he just drop the mannerisms and refer to her by her name?
Alas, he did not have to ponder on the solutions of that mystery for long, as Vinyl had proceeded to say, “How are Sarosians born?”
Midnight turned to face Vinyl, this time with a sympathetic smile on his lips. He knew that the notorious DJ would have to ask that question sooner or later, due to the little seed of doubt that Octavia had planted in her mind earlier. “You see, when a mommy and daddy Sarosian love each other very much–“
“No, you worthless twit,” Octavia berated as Midnight snickered away stupidly, “she means to ask how you wretched blackguards were spawned in the first place!”
“I knew that,” Midnight admitted, “I was just having a little fun with her, is all. Sorry, Vinyl.”
“It’s alright,” Vinyl said, dismissing the issue with a casual hand wave. “But yeah, what Tavi said. How were Sarosians first made?”
As they reached the peak of the third floor escalator and progressed to their fourth, Midnight began to weave a wonderful web of worthy words. “A lot of rumors and stories formulated from certain types of ponies–” he leered at Octavia as he said this, but only got a shrug and an aura of not giving a damn from the grey mare, “–but this lot of rumors and stories were proved to be erroneous due to extensive and strenuous analysis and reference.”
“...Huh?” Vinyl was lost in Midnight’s tsunami of advanced vocabulary.
“...The gossip was bullshit because I check my facts, I know my shit, and I don’t pull random words directly out of my ass,” Midnight simplified. Vinyl giggled, embarrassed by her initial reaction and entertained by his blunt, albeit funny, response. “Anywho, here’s how I figured out how Sarosians came to be.
“It was about the day I had gotten the position of scribe, back about nine years ago.”
“Wait, how old are you?” Vinyl quickly interjected as they reached the fifth floor and progressed to to the sixth, their destination.
“Twenty-seven," Midnight answered. “Anyways. When I gotten into town, I had overheard two elderly mares gossiping about me under their breath while I was in line at the supermarket. They were telling the exact same story you told Vinyl, Oct– er, Master." Octavia blinked, crossing her arms once again.
“When I returned to the castle, I went to Princess Luna and asked her if this rumor was true—if Sarosians truly were monsters that Nightmare Moon had created. She reassured my doubts by debunking that story with her recollection of how we were made.
“According to her, as well as Celestia, who had stumbled into the room at the time to get away from bothersome merchants who could only ramble on and on about their damn hats, Sarosians weren’t created by Nightmare Moon’s fury. Instead, they said that we are descended from dragons.”
The word “dragons” made both Vinyl and Octavia recede slightly, taken aback by this sudden discovery. ‘Dragons? Really?!’ the two thought simultaneously. 'Fire-breathing, pony-eating, village-plundering dragons?!' The duo's minds were racing a mile a minute to formulate a proper response to information of that caliber.
“Liar,” the both said in unison.
“Tch,” clicked Midnight. “Who would you rather believe? Two immortal princesses who are living out all eternity overseeing Equestria’s rise? Or two daft dead invalids with brains drier than the Sahayra Desert?” The gross silence from both mares signaled Midnight’s little victory. “Exactly.”
“But, how does that even work!?” Vinyl asked with a passionate shock as they had ascended to the sixth floor, the music department. “I mean, what do they do!?”
Midnight cleared his throat again. “Allow me to clarify. Dragons are capable of magic. There hasn’t been a lot of records about dragons due to how exceedingly dangerous it is to get near one, but a lucky few, particularly Starswirl the Bearded, have been able to uncover that, yes, dragons can do magic, just like unicorns and alicorns can. What these dragons can do that almost no unicorn can do is shapeshift.”
“Shapeshift?” Octavia erred, mildly intrigued about the topic they had stumbled into. The trio browsed the sixth floor for a bench to sit at, and after finding a good spot in the center, they promptly took their seats; while Vinyl and Octavia sat in the bench, the latter had forced Midnight to stand.
“Correct. Dragons who are sent into exile or presumed dead in the events of a raid gone wrong tend to go into hiding. Whether they’re desperate to escape being the runt of a litter or they grow curious of the lives ponies tend to lead, I have no idea. They utilize their magic and shapeshift into ponies, thus trying to adapt to life in equine society and blend in with our encompassment.
“Some are called out and deemed suspicious by the ponyfolk, thus forcing them to go into hiding again and try life in another town. Most usually manage to actually fit in with the ponyfolk. Eventually, they've even reached the stage where they fall in love with ponies and, uh... copulate.”
"Copulate?" Vinyl repeated, the word lost to her.
"They get freaky-deaky, alright?"
"You could have just said that. And plus, why not show us some more proof?" Vinyl was slightly skeptical as well, daring Midnight to cough up his answer.
"I've got the eyes of a dragon–" Midnight blinked the objects in question "–my ears look like their facial fins, Pegasi Sarosians have wings like dragons, we have their sharp teeth, and even their tongue."
"Their... tongue?" erred the cellist with distaste. Upon her reiteration, Midnight jutted out his tongue at her, to which she recoiled in disgust. Rather than a tongue that ended in one flat, rounded end, Midnight's ended in two, pointed prongs, much like a reptile's.
"Whoa!" Vinyl squealed as she suddenly grabbed his tongue, the pink muscle extended like a roll of measuring tape, ending at a staggering ten feet. Ignoring his slurred "ow!"s of agony, Vinyl let go of his tongue, and it retracted back into Midnight's mouth faster than a speeding bullet, making him yelp in anguish as it plopped unceremoniously back into his maw.
"What... the hay is wrong with you, girl?!" muffled Midnight through the hands that shielded and nursed his mouth. "Honestly, what possessed you to yank a stallion's tongue like that?"
"Hey, I got curious!" Vinyl responded defensively, cheeks reddening with mild heat.
"Curiosity has nothing to do with it!" he stated firmly, removing his hands and pointing an accusing finger at her.
“...So, what were you saying about Sarosians and dragons, bro?” Vinyl asked, more than destitute to avoid this topic for fear of greater mortification.
“Well, yes. But there’s more to it than that,” confessed Midnight. “Dragons and ponies have completely different chromosomes, the former’s being of a larger count and more magically enhanced than the latter’s, regardless of the dragon’s shapeshift. So, it’s relatively volatile for a dragon–pony offspring to be formed, due to the conflicting chromosome count and the magic properties of the dragon’s chromosomes. The chances of the offspring, or Sarosian in this case, being born is about twenty-five percent.”
“And... what about that other seventy-five percent?” inquired Vinyl, a smidgen of worry in her tone.
“...they die. Whether it be a stillborn—the most common one—or slaughtering due to the more unfriendly ponies being disturbed and filled with detest for this dragon–pony hybrid, they die.” Midnight looked positively grim, the way he said the vast majority of these hybrids dying bringing a sense of melancholy into him. Octavia looked forlorn, torn between her hatred for Sarosians and her standards on the euthanizing of innocent babies. Vinyl looked somewhat heartbroken as well, lip trembling at the thought of foals being executed just for being of a difference species.
“That’s... quite unfortunate,” Octavia finally piped up. “So how many of you lot are there to regular ponies?”
‘You lot? Really?’ Midnight thought as he sat on the floor with crossed hooves: his legs were tired from all that standing about. “I’ll be getting to that in a moment. We don’t have the insanely long life span of dragons, yet once a Sarosian is born, he or she has the exact same fecundity for foals as regular ponies, due to the Sarosian’s chromosomes being the same quantity as a pony’s. However, there’s a catch: the chromosomes, while still being of similar count, will still retain the dragon’s magical attributes, so there will always be a fifty-fifty chance of the offspring being a Sarosian or normal if he or she mates with an ordinary pony, depending on the dragon’s magical aspects transferring to the offspring to make a Sarosian or not, and the magical attributes will be passed down to the next generation.
“According to those statistics, there’s pretty much four Sarosians out of ten ponies total, with the overall population being 2.7 billion Sarosians to... hmm... about six billion, seven-hundred fifty million regular ponies in Equestria," Midnight completed.
“But that doesn’t explain why Sarosians prefer nighttime to daytime,” Vinyl asked.
“Hmm....” Midnight wracked his brains together to answer the mare's query. "I'd have to say that due to Nightmare Night overthrowing Celestia and briefly plunging the world into eternal night, Sarosians were just as affected as everypony else in the end. Unlike regular ponies, who relied on their food source being only organic fruits and veggies, Sarosians are omnivorous. We were more oriented on eating meat back in those days when we could get it. We adapted to the nighttime, our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and eventually we grew to see in the dark and could hunt at night. However, our prey was dying out as their organic food supply was dying due to lack of sunlight, so we were in the same situation as ponies only several days later.
“It also got much too cold for us to go outside, and with the ponyfolk being... er, unfriendly to us, we had to set up colonies in mountain caves or underground to keep warm, thus spawning the derogatory slurs ‘cavedweller’ and 'nightcrawler'. We were very grateful when Celestia came and banished Nightmare Moon to the moon with the Elements of Harmony. Both our produce and our prey became bountiful due to the sun growing crops for all to eat as the days and their warmth returned. Some of us did go out into the sunlight, but others had been so accustomed to the night and its darkness during Nightmare’s usurpation, that they hid from the sunlight and appeared only at night."
"Can Sarosians be all races? Like, unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth Ponies?"
"Yeah. Not only that, but there are different classifications for Sarosians.”
“Different classifications?” Octavia reiterated skeptically. “Define, mongrel.”
“Well, this doesn’t apply to all of us, but there are different categories of Sarosians. Think of it as...” Midnight scratched his chin, the cogs and gears of his brain whirled and churning to concoct the correct words. “...think of it like perks for specific ones. Upgrades, so to speak. Some of us are hyperobservant and have photographic memories. They can see and hear subliminal details way better than others, and they can remember every last thing about them; we call them ‘Recorders’. Some are able to pick up scents and smells much better than others and trace them back to their sources; they’re known as ‘Bloodhound’ Sarosian. Some, mostly unicorns like me, can actually get rare glimpses into the future every now and again; we call these types of Sarosians ‘Soothsayers’. Some are able to talk and make actual conversation to animals fluently, thus earning them the title ‘Encrypter’. Some can even mimic whatever anything somepony says or does precisely, acting it out to the T - even in the way it sounds. These Sarosians are known as 'Copycats'. See where I’m going with this?”
"And what stupid attribute, pray tell, are you born with?" Octavia demanded of Midnight.
"Easy: a Recorder. That's how my job of being a scribe isn't so hard for me." Midnight felt pride swelling up inside him at the mention of his ability. "I can rewrite everything that the Princesses say exactly, regardless of whether or not it was five seconds or even five hours ago. Anything that sticks out, yet no one else sees it, I can see it easily and remember it for a long time. Anything I read or watch is planted instantly into my brain."
“Wait, so can a Sarosian have more than one of these traits?” questioned Vinyl, more curiosity barreling through her at the force of a bullet train due to the phenomena that she was hearing.
“Well, yes. There are a few that are born with more than one of these traits. The only problem is that you can’t learn these abilities: they can only be passed down from generation to generation. Some other traits can pop up at completely random, totally rare times. The most abilities anypony’s ever had was the five I mentioned, and this was about 453 years ago, the Sarosian in question being a sage by the name of Star Lantern. So exalted was she for having all of these traits that she earned the name BexHadrim.” The confused looks of both Vinyl and Octavia made Midnight sigh and translate, “the Open Mind.”
“Okay, what language was that?” Vinyl wanted to know more, mind racing with thoughts and questions she wanted to ask Midnight.
“That was dragonspeak,” Midnight answered, happy to see Vinyl's interest in his species' ancestral roots.
“Like, Flyrim dragonspeak?! Fus ro dah and stuff like that?!” Vinyl’s eyes started widening, brightening like movie-studio floodlights. At Midnight's nod, Vinyl practically resonated a little *squee* as her mouth curled up into a huge smile. "Holy shit, that is so awesome!" the prestigious DJ squealed. Then, she suddenly grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him lightly, his glasses going somewhat askew. "Can you teach me?! Please! Pretty please!" Vinyl jutted her bottom lip out as she looked at Midnight with begging, helpless puppy-dog eyes.
"Er... I'll give it some thought, yeah." As she let go, Vinyl smiled so brightly that Midnight felt a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of joy, flood him like a town in a hurricane, the waters of euphoria washing and rinsing his soul in its untarnished and pristine rarity and beauty. Wow. This feels... pretty good. Is this what it feels like to help a friend?
Readjusting his glasses back onto his muzzle, Midnight quickly directed his attention to Octavia and said, "By the way, Nocturne isn’t some language Nightmare Moon just pulled out of her ass. It’s a name in dragonspeak that means ‘Night Wings’, due to a majority of Sarosians being pegasi.”
“Oh, shut it." Rather upset that she had been eavesdropped on by the collar-clad unicorn and that he had uprooted what knowledge she had of his worthless race, Octavia grumbled as she stood up from her seat on the bench, her rear sore from resting in one place too long. “Now, come along. You have things to buy for us,” she added loftily, a snarky grin stretched upon her lips as she yanked on the collar's leash.
Midnight groaned grumpily as he got to his hooves. “Oh... that’s right....”
~End of Chapter VI~