//------------------------------// // 23: Why Does it Have to be Snakes // Story: Prompt-A-Day Collection III: Prompt Warriors // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Why does it have to be snakes? Admiral Biscuit You awake, and you're surrounded by your deepest, most powerful phobia. Everypony has their own phobias. Some are illogical. Pegasi sometimes worry about losing their wings mid-flight. Unicorns fear the malfunction of their horns and resultant loss of magic. Earth ponies dread the thought of plants no longer bending to their will. Crystal Ponies fear the return of Sombra, even though they watched him die. Even Zebras are probably afraid of something. There are more logical fears, though. Granny Smith sometimes wakes up with a strange fluttering in her chest, and wonders if her poor old heart isn't about to give out. Sometimes it keeps her up all night. She's not afraid of death, but she doesn't want to leave her grandfoals behind. She worries about how they’ll get along without her. Rainbow Dash is plagued by a recurring nightmare that she failed to make the second sonic rainboom in time. She wakes up in a cold sweat every time she sees Rarity crater into the ground. She will never admit this to Rarity. After she got her award and met the Wonderbolts, it hit her like a ton of bricks, and she had the shakes for an hour, then cried herself to sleep that night. She won't admit that to anypony. Fluttershy is afraid of being alone, but too timid to admit it. Rarity fears something happening to Sweetie Belle on one of her many crusades. Pinkie Pie worries that she'll forget somepony's birthday, anniversary, or any one of a vast number of celebratory events which she tracks obsessively on a large calendar in her room. Applejack wants foals, but claims she hasn’t met the ‘right’ stallion yet. She’s really afraid something will go wrong, somehow—either during the act, or afterwards. Twilight Sparkle fears snakes. There is no reason why she should. She's faced down some of the nastiest monsters that Equestria has to offer, and she's always triumphed. She completed a spell even the great Starswirl the Bearded could not, and ascended to princesshood. She's even learned to manage her obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and was once seen crumpling up a schedule and tossing it in the wastebasket. True, she pulled it out five minutes later and smoothed it back out, but progress is progress, no matter how small. But snakes. No snake has ever harmed her. She's been stung by bees more times than she can count—well, not really; if you asked her, she could give an exact tally. She's been stoned by a cockatrice. She's faced dragons thrice, once alone. She's dealt with Discord, Nightmare Moon, Sombra, and Changelings. Yet none of them hold the primal fear that a simple tubular reptile can inspire. She'd mostly avoided them in Canterlot. A busy city was hardly a snake paradise, and while there might have been some there, she never saw them. Even Ponyville was largely snake-free, and she did quite well until Winter Wrap-Up. If she hadn't managed to work up a schedule to get the chores done on time, ponies would probably still be laughing at her overreaction to waking up a den of hibernating snakes. The problem had gotten slightly out-of-hoof during their brief adventure with . . . well, she still thought of her as Daring Do. Naturally, wherever the archaeologist went, snakes were there, too. Twilight could chuckle at their mention in a book—although she still glanced around the room to make certain none were present—but she couldn't deal with them in the wild. That set her apart from Rarity. While the fashionista hated getting her hooves dirty, and complained any time she thought she might get a little sweaty or chip her hooficure, if it needed to be done, Rarity just did it. Twilight had humiliated herself by freezing up and had to be carried past the threat by Applejack. At least that's what they told her afterwards; she'd been screaming loudly enough to have not noticed. Fortunately, Rarity had been quick with a silencing spell—the net result was that Twilight could still hear herself screaming, but nopony else could. The girls finally calmed her down by repeatedly dunking her in a spring-fed pond that was the closest thing Twilight had ever felt to absolute zero. Rainbow seemed to take perverse pride in the act. They'd all soberly agreed that something needed to be done, and Fluttershy had proposed a simple solution—acclimatization. Once she learned that snakes were harmless, she would no longer fear them. While the plan had a nice academic feel to it, Twilight was dubious about the actual execution, but so far it had gone off without a hitch. They'd started with books about snakes. As creepy as they were, snakes were fascinating creatures. From a distance. Pictures came next, and once she'd gotten over the reflex of incinerating the photographs on sight, that went pretty well, too. Rarity made her a stuffed snake plushie. She pretended it was a rope, and that wasn't so bad. Before too long, there was a snake in a cage on Fluttershy's table. Twilight made sure to seal the door with magic, just in case it tried to get out. Other than that, she did all right. Her teacup hardly wavered as she drank, watching it out of the corner of her eye. Just in case. All that led up to the present. She'd felt pretty good about the whole snake thing, in fact. The word no longer gave her a slight thrill of fear. What an odd thing to be thinking about, she thought, stretching. Her body felt kind of . . . funny, like she'd slept wrong. The cold table had a familiar feel. It was the worktable in the library basement. I must have fallen asleep while doing an experiment. She lit her horn. The walls of the basement were shifting, moving . . . slithering, almost. What in Tartarus? Twilight brightened the glow, revealing dozens of dozens of snakes crawling all over her basement, her lab tables . . . and up the stairs. That day, Twilight made an interesting discovery and a resolution. First, she discovered that she could teleport on the fly, from a sprawled position, while screaming at the top of her lungs. Secondly, she resolved that at the first opportunity, she was going to address Fluttershy's fear of flying in a very direct and personal manner. "Ah just don't see how this was supposed ta get us cutie-marks," Applebloom lamented. "Snakes need someplace warm and quiet to stay for the winter," Sweetie Belle said with some authority. "I read it in one of Twilight's books. And what's quieter and warmer than a library basement?" "Yeah," Scootaloo added, pouring another bucket of drowsy snakes through the basement window. "Besides, Twilight loves snakes; she's even got that snake stuffy your sister made for her."