Celestia Sleeps In: Analysis outtakes.
Self-Depreciating Parody Chapter
Admiral Biscuit
It was a dark and non-stormy night. In the Golden Oaks treebrary, Twilight and Luna happily bounced the idiot ball back and forth between themselves, while they made amusing misinterpretations of the materials Lyra had brought back from her first visit to earth.
Lyra, freshly bathed and groomed, walked back into the library, and they bounced the ball to her.
“Have you come to any conclusions?” she asked sarcastically.
“Yes,” Twilight offered. “I can tell that this book is a book for counting. I’ve also determined that the creature in the drawings is obviously a muppet—which is a cartoon character—even though I’ve never seen an actual human before, or a muppet. I am confused about base ten, though. Do you have a useful analogy?”
“It’s like different measuring systems,” Lyra offered, bouncing the ball off her head.
“You’re a musician, why don’t you make a reference to time signatures? And where did the ball go?”
“I tossed it to the author, who apparently forgot about time signatures until after he published—despite having piano lessons since he was big enough to reach the keys, and eleven years in band orchestra, bell choir, jazz band, and marching band. He’s having so much fun with the idiot ball, I don’t think we’re ever going to get it back.”
“Prithee, why doth it need a book for counting?” Luna interrupted.
“Obviously,” Twilight said in her best lecturer’s voice, “it’s a book meant for foals, to help them count.”
The other ponies nodded. This made a lot of sense.
“We hath arranged for other ponies to help thee understand the materials,” Luna said in Ye Olde English. “They will be surprisingly helpful, naming objects which we have never seen, while using the creature’s terms for them—even though we do not share a language. We hath chosen Rarity, for her fashion expertise, Bucky Fuller, who is the best pun the author could come up for an architect’s name that any reader would actually understand, Pinkie Pie to name kitchen implements as a slight bit of comic relief in an otherwise-serious discussion, and Octavia Van Clef as a shameless promotion of Private Gig (by Navy Pony), and because the author secretly has the hots for her.”
“I understand,” the unicorns said in unison.
Dale looked through the book she’d given him. It was titled Your Home in Equus, which he could suddenly read. Based on the static drawings on the page, it was obvious that the ponies had a princess who controlled the sun in their geocentric solar system and another who controlled the moon. He wondered how many other princesses they had.
They also used magic, which explained a lot. He’d been wrong, assuming that they had a spaceship; clearly they just had spells which allowed interplanetary travel. Thus, their level of technology was less than his own.
The next morning:
Luna tossed Twilight out of bed.
Then she returned to Canterlot.
Rarity looked over the drawings in puzzlement. “I can make nothing of these.”
“But you’re the best fashion designer in all of Equestria,” Twilight protested.
“I know. But I don’t know what these creatures look like.” She waved a marshmallow hoof at the book. “How am I to make any sense of these drawings?”
“Oh, that’s easily solved.” Twilight turned to the section on anatomy. “Here’s a drawing of him. The female counterpart is on the next page.”
Rarity pointed a hoof at a page on underwear. “I can clearly identify that this is a brassiere, even though the word for it is in a language I don’t know, and it restrains parts of the female anatomy which we don’t have. Later on, I’ll mistake one for a head covering—it makes sense; your ears can fit in these little cups. . . .” She continued explaining everything in the drawings, including proper names for every type of glove.
“Wow, Rarity, you’ve been really helpful! Thanks!”
“Think nothing of it darling.”
Lyra woke up and heard Bon Bon making breakfast downstairs. Are they secretly—or maybe overtly—lovers? Or are they just roommates? I’m not saying. Draw your own conclusions. But they sure are seen together in a lot of episodes. . . .
Another break with Dale, because the author couldn’t be bothered to come up with something more clever. (He’s apparently still looking for a spaceship, although it should be obvious to him by now that there isn’t one.) Dale took the weapons back to camp. He understood how they were made because he has a freaky knowledge of medieval weaponry, not because he’s a retired machinist with forty years of metalworking experience.
Twilight looked up from the calendar in shock, left eyelid twitching. “It drew in it? Who does that?”
“Books and clean white paper and offset printing and full-color photographs are commonplace in their world,” Lyra explained. “We value books, because we haven’t industrialized yet, but to them, a calendar is just something you buy for $3.99 at Wal-Mart.”
“Oh. Well, I’d hang it on the wall and look at it, if it were mine. Those are very artistic pictures of classic Chevrolet trucks.”
“That’s what the hole’s for.” Lyra unnecessarily explained the punchline of the joke.
“What about the confusing number of days, and divisions of the week?”
“Well, the number of days in the week go back to the Judeo-Christian Bible, which says that God created the heavens and earth in six days and on the seventh day He rested, and that was the first week. They’re named in his language from the German, which replaced the Latin planets with the Norse gods: Sun’s Day, Moon’s Day, Tiw’s Day, Odin’s Day, Thor’s Day—you get the idea. The months, on the other hoof, use the Roman names. It’s interesting to note that they stopped naming them after month six, calling them ‘seventh month,’ ‘eighth month’ and so on, but that doesn’t make sense any more because one of the Caesars shuffled things around so that the numbered months fall late—September is now the ninth month, October the tenth. . . . The number of days is odd, because their planet orbits its sun, not the other way around. To further confound things, it’s a leap year. Normally, there’s only 365 days.”
“Wow, that’s weird.” Twilight looked up at her. “I guess we’ve just skipped about a thousand words of discussion, haven’t we?”
“Pretty much. Let’s drink coffee until the morning train shows up.”
“Ok.”
Luna lay down in bed. She pulled out a loose feather, which is so stilted it’s obviously foreshadowing. Maybe even an example of Chekhov’s gun. She lamented the fact that ponies don’t know much about the night sky (it’s canon), and that everypony will have forgotten that in a few pages—or in this poorly written screed, by the next section break.
Twilight set down her coffee. “Why don’t we discuss the astronomy book?”
“Ok. He seemed to hold it in high regard, since he assumed that we knew all about the universe. He thought we had a spaceship.”
Twilight laughed. “Nope, we usually don’t have electricity in canon, and we certainly haven’t invented mass spectrometry yet, or radio telescopes. Nevertheless, I can say with confidence that these are pictures of the other planets in his solar system, and they all orbit the sun. It—the sun—is made out of plasma. I’m not sure what that is, or even what elements the sun’s made out of, since we as a society clearly don’t have the technology to find out, but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s hydrogen and helium undergoing a fusion reaction, at a temperature of millions of degrees.”
“That sounds like a song I heard from Pinkie once. How did it go? Ah, yes: ‘The sun is a mass—’ “
“No copyrighted song lyrics!” Twilight glared at Lyra.
“Well, I’m glad Luna’s going to clear this all up in the next chapter when I’m gone,” Lyra said, putting down her pen. “I’d have expected it here.”
“Everypony assumes I know everything and never make mistakes, unless they’re obviously significant to the plot of an episode,” Twilight lamented.
At the train station:
“I’m Bucky Fuller, the architect,” the pegasus said, extending a hoof.
“And I’m Octavia. My characterization is clearly modeled after a consort, or companion from the TV show Firefly—for no apparent reason. Also, I have a quasi-British accent, whatever that is.”
“You’re going to be surprisingly helpful,” Twilight said to Bucky.
“And we’re going to speak Dale’s words,” Lyra told Octavia. “It won’t be a challenge, even though the phonetic sound of the letters has nothing whatsoever to do with the names of the letters. I figured it all out by osmosis while I was sleeping.”
“Well, then, I am not quite sure what I shall do.” Octavia put on a cute little pout.
“In the next chapter, you’re to imply that Twilight got intimate with you,” Lyra explained. “But that’s for later.”
“Oh. Very good, then.”
Twilight opened the book. “Can you describe these buildings?”
“Why, certainly. That’s clearly an igloo, where the Eskimo ponies live. That’s a yurt, where Mongolian ponies live. Notice how I’m using their own words for the buildings, even though our language has no equivalent. The next page gets a little more complicated, since in canon all our structures are medieval-fantasy European in design. However, I can say that’s a vinyl-sided split level ranch house, with double-glazed windows and an attached garage. Here we have a Gothic cathedral, which is where the religious types worship their god. It’s a thing that ponies don’t do at all, but of course I understand it completely. The next page is clearly a hundred-story tall skyscraper, which they use for offices and apartments. Once again, our construction technology is centuries behind theirs—we even still use wooden cranes—but I have no problem staking my professional reputation on a wild guess.”
“Aren’t there skyscrapers in Manehattan?” Twilight asked. “I was just there with Rarity.”
“It’s not the author’s fault when they change what’s canon in a new episode,” Bucky reminded the unicorn. “That’s why he used an AU tag.”
“Wow, you’ve been surprisingly helpful.” Twilight looked down at the pages in awe. “Who would have thought you could figure all that out from drawings in a book that don’t even have a single item to indicate scale, except for the architectural details which are totally unlike our own?”
“I know, right? Ok, I’ve got to go. You’ll probably never meet me again, since I’m an undeveloped OC. Bye!” Bucky made his own way back to the train station.
“We’ve figured out his language,” Octavia announced. “It’s really simple. One day’s worth of observation, and we’ve got it all. Even the tenses just sort of came to us. Irregular verbs, too. Not to mention all the English words which are borrowed from different languages and have counterintuitive pronunciations. Why, whole poems have been written on the subject!” (it’s true; here’s a bunch)
“That was pretty fast.” Twilight finished another missive to the princess. “I’d hoped that section could go on a bit longer. Hopefully, the vet shows up soon.”
“I’m right here,” Dr. Goodall said. “I bet everyone was expecting Fluttershy.”
“No, we told them about you thirty pages ago.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “Well, I’m ready to lend my expertise. These are a bunch of animals. Since they’re mammals, and we’re mammals, I’ve got no problems describing their anatomy. Of course, I won’t be using the Latin names, since we don’t have that here. Oh, wait, I suddenly learned Latin. We’re good to go.
“Hmm,” she continued, correctly leaving an open quote in the preceding paragraph of dialogue—a punctuation convention apparently unknown to a certain EqD prereader. “This is a picture of a horse. Pretty much the same as the Saddle Arabian horses.”
“I wonder why Dale hasn’t brought a horse?”
“They don’t fit into canoes,” Twilight explained. “Plus, they’re not sapient on his world, so you wouldn’t be able to talk to it.”
“Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I’ll ask him tomorrow, anyway. It should be amusingly awkward for both of us.”
“I’m sure,” the vet said as she left.
Pinkie Pie bounced happily into the room. In no time at all, she identified all the knives—just the kind of knowledge a homicidal sociopathic (socioponic?) baker of cupcakes would have. She named off a bunch of other stuff, although she had trouble with the electrical appliances. Then she sang and danced a bit, and finally pronked out the door.
“Wow, that ended quickly,” Twilight said.
“I know. It’s easy to jump to conclusions when we have no knowledge whatsoever of what we’re talking about,” Lyra added. “I’m going to bed.”
“So am I,” Octavia said, winking seductively at Twilight. “Will you join me?”
“Not until Princess Luna arrives. She’s going to show us the night sky, if you know what I mean.”
FIN