From the look on Applejack’s face when he began scaling one of the apple trees to start picking, Archer concluded that he must have been doing something very, very wrong.
“I take it this isn’t how you pick apples down here.”
“Who’s picking apples? You’re climbin’ around like a dad-blamed chimpanzee.”
“Well, then,” he said, dismounting the tree, “How would you do it?”
“Watch n’ learn, monkeyboy.”
Archer backed out of the way as Applejack took a position in front of the tree, her rear half facing the trunk.. She made some minute adjustments to her stance and position, then reared back and mule-kicked the tree as hard as she could.
“What, so you knock the tree down and get apples that way? I’m sure I could teach you a few more efficient ways of-”
“Hush, you. Look.”
The still-upright tree began to quiver. A shockwave passed up the trunk and into the limbs and branches. Then, something quite mind-boggling happened. The apples began to rain from the tree canopy, evoking the bizarre image of a hailstorm. A delicious hailstorm, and quite aromatic to boot.
“That is... absolutely ridiculous.”
“Naw, it’s absolutely ‘applebucking.’ If you’re gonna work here, you need to learn the lingo.”
Archer looked at the tree, still upright despite Applejack's efforts. He looked at Applejack, smiling at the rather clever joke she'd just played on him and physics in general. Or perhaps physics was in on it, the clever blighter, and the natural unnaturalness that pervaded Fae Realms had conspired to reduce him to the gaping incomprehension he now found himself swamped in.
Or maybe he was just paranoid and physics was not a thinking entity which could choose to extend or rescind its laws when it was deemed amusing to do so.
Then again, there was the whole Pinkie Pie business. Where did physics factor into all that?
Archer, figuring there was nothing else for it, and deciding that physics really only mattered to him when he had an arrow in the air anyway, took a running start toward a tree he had selected at random. He intended to slam into it with both feet and perhaps learn the secrets of this mysterious “applebucking” technique.
Seconds later, he was on the ground with a sprained ankle. Physics, which apparently did have a sense of humour after all, rewarded him for his effort by dropping a single apple on his head, giving him spots in his vision to match the stars left over from his unceremonious flop onto the ground.
He was vaguely aware of Applejack laughing at him, but that didn’t really seem to matter much now.
“Applejack?”
“Heh... yeah, Archer?”
“Please tell me you have doctors here.”
“Aww, come off it. You'll live.”
It occurred to him that perhaps he had made a wrong decision somewhere in his life. Several, come to think of it.
***
Inkwell didn’t really expect there to be a hole in the floor of Sugarcube Corner. In retrospect, though, she wasn’t sure how there could not have been. It was just too obvious. Of course there had to be one inside to match the one on the roof. That only made sense, right?
She contemplated the sheer amount of sense it made from the bottom of said hole in the floor, which she had fallen through in a bout of unbridled ignorance and disregard for basic logic. I mean, really. A hole in the roof obviously equated to a hole in the floor, right? Right. Ha ha ha. And the existence of a hole implied there was someone who had to make that hole, that someone being, of course, Archer. He had to be down here.
Slowly, Inkwell pulled herself off the basement floor.
“Archer? Are you down here?”
The wall on the far side of the room echoed back “...‘down here?’”
“Yes!” she said, to the voice that was obviously Archer because no one else would be in the basement, and voices didn’t just spring out of thin air. “Sorry for dropping in. I needed to come check and see if Luna hadn’t turned you crazy. Because, you know, that's a thing she does, is turn people crazy.”
“...‘crazy.’”
“What!? I’ll have you know, you - you ruffian - I am the sane one in this relationship! You are the one who’s gone loony!”
“...‘gone loony!’”
“Oh, that is it! Come on out, beanstalk! I’m going to make you eat those words, and I am definitely not crazy!”
“...‘crazy!’”
Growling in frustration, Inkwell pressed into the abandoned depths of Pinkie’s laboratory. No confuddled echo was going to get the better of her. Not today. No sir, not -
She tripped on a fallen crowbar and emitted a sound not unlike a cow suffering indigestion.
Okay, so maybe an echo was going to get the best of her. But certainly not again. Fool me once, and all that.
With a grunt, she hauled herself upright and continued walking, farther into the depths of the complex than any other pony had dared to tread.
A pointless accomplishment, as she soon enough proved to the satisfaction of herself and anyone else watching that she was absolutely and totally alone in Sugarcube Corner’s basement. Imagine her surprise, then, when Mr. Cake came down and accused her of creating the hole she fell down.
He backed off in a very panicked manner when she pointed out that no one in the store had seen her descend the stairs, and swiftly counter-accused him of insinuating she was fat enough to cause the hole in the first place, taking a page out of Rarity's book and turning on the crocodile tears. Not that she needed any extra incentive to burst into frustrated hysterics.
The lesson being, girls, that if you want someone to leave you alone, play the weight card. It works every time.
You know what? Let’s go back to Archer. That sounds nice.
***
THUNK
“Aagghhh-oww.”
“Look, Archer, maybe you’re not cut out for this.”
Archer made an incoherent series of gargling noises, attempting to convey to his skeptical would-be employer that yes, he was. He then tried to rugby-tackle an apple tree, causing it to drop two very overripe apples and negating his argument completely.
Applejack began trying to pry him away from the tree, with which he was currently trapped in a bear hug.
“Look, it’s almost time for lunch. Why don’tcha head on up to the house and we’ll work it out later, alright?”
“Grrraaagh,” he said, unable to vocalize anything more than pure frustration at this point.
“Glad ta hear it. Now git. Ah got an orchard to clear.”
As he stumbled away, he heard the telltale THUNK and ensuing appley cascade of a professional applebuck.
He made a truly heroic attempt not to let it, or the subsequent chuckle from Applejack, annoy him too much. He failed.
***
“I’m just saying-” THUNK “-it’s not really fair to expect-” THUNK “-someone with legs like mine to even-” THUNK “...phew, hang on for a minute.”
Archer put down the axe. After a few minutes of not trying to stomp the snot out of trees, he had found a task he was actually capable of doing: splitting logs. Not exactly the most dignified of jobs, but it sure beat what passed for actual work around here.
“So,” he said, wiping at his forehead but only managing to smear the grime that had built up there. “This is usually your job, am I right?”
“Eyup,” was the reply from Big Mac, ever-laconic and monitoring Archer from a safe distance away on the nearby wood shed’s stoop.
“How do you use this thing without hands?”
“With my mouth, o’course.”
This gave Archer a momentary pause mid-swing, which he shrugged off, chalking it up to just more Fae weirdness. Honestly, he could fill a book with the things in this place that made no sense. Or even the things that just made less sense than they should. There were far too many of those.
“So-” THUNK “-what do you really do-” THUNK “-besides sit there and say-” THUNNGNG- “Ow. Besides sit there and say ‘Yup’ all the time?”
“Well, fer starters, I actually split the logs when I hit ‘em.”
Archer shot a glare over his shoulder at him. “That was uncalled for.”
“Not my fault you got such scrawny lil’ arms.”
“I’m not trained for this, alright? If I could-” THUNK “-could shoot these things in half, I would.”
“Ah’d like to see that.”
“Yeah, well-” THUNK “-actually, now that I think about it-” THUNK “-If I had access to enough materials, which I do-” THUNK “-and if I had, say, a couple hundred, uh, ‘bits’ for a grant, which I don’t-” THUNK “-I could probably build you something that can split wood about ten times faster.”
“Faster’n what? You? Heck, Ah figure Granny can split logs faster’n you can. Plus, we ain’t got two hundred bits to just throw away.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can-”
“Especially not on somethin’ as frilly as an automatic wood chopper. Ah can take care o’ the logs just fine.”
“Yeah.” THUNK “You’re a brick outhouse on four legs.” THUNK “You’ve lived your entire life essentially being better than me at this sort of stuff.” THUNK
“Yeah. You know what, gimme the axe.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause we don’t got the whole day to split one log.”
Archer looked down at his handiwork. The single unfortunate log had suffered a multitude of ugly gashes and scars, looking more like an abstract art project than any sane, rational attempt at producing firewood. He chose to focus on the fact that he had, at some point, chopped more than halfway through to the bottom.
“Here,” Mac said, taking the axe handle with his teeth. “Gff g’t annufher lhhg.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Archer, assuming the obvious, left to get another log to be cut up and split. He pulled a good one (well, a log, he had no idea if it was good or not) our of the wood shed and hoisted it over his shoulder. It was quite heavy, he noticed. The end was rather hoof-shaped.
He stopped.
All he would need to do was saw off the excess length and.... why, yes, this could work.
CHOP
“Alright, Archer. Hand me another.” Nothing happened. “Archer?”
When Big Mac looked up, Archer was nowhere to be found.
“Humph. Figures.”
***
With a satisfying thud and another avalanche of falling fruit, Applejack proved for the fifty-ninth time that day her superiority in all things appley. A superiority which would be challenged, quite soon, by a particular human.
“Applejack?” asked the human in question. “I need your assessment on something.”
“Hmm?”
Applejack turned to find Archer staring contemplatively at a nearby tree.
“Say someone were to buck this tree. Where would they do it?”
She half-sighed, half chuckled to herself. He was tenacious, she had to give him that.
“Oh, I dunno,” she said as she trotted over, feigning severe disinterest. “I suppose, if’n I had to guess... there.” She struck the trunk at a spot Archer couldn’t even begin to distinguish from the rest. As if to punctuate just how freaking awesome she was at this sort of thing, a single apple fell from the branches for no reason and narrowly missed beaning Archer again.
He marked a small “X” on the spot with his knife, eliciting a pained wince from Applejack.
“Y’know, I coulda just-”
“Wait right there,” Archer said. “This’ll only take a second.”
Applejack stared blankly after him as he walked off. He bent over to pick up something rather heavy behind a tree a few dozen yards away. He turned to her.
“You’ll want to get out of the way!”
In one motion, he hoisted up something long and cylindrical and began running at the tree as fast as he could. Applejack leaped out of the way just in time for Archer to slam his newest toy into the tree’s trunk with a solid-sounding THUNK.
Applejack took a second to catch her breath before she began the anger in earnest.
“What in the hay are you tryin’ to-”
thump
Applejack looked up. An apple had fallen from the tree and landed in her hat. As she craned to get a better view of whatever had dropped the offending fruit into her headwear, another apple fell and clocked her in the snout. And then another came down on her. And another. And soon quite a few more starting pelting down all around for the sheer fun of it.
When Applejack dared to look back up, the tree’s branches were bare.
“You-”
“Eeeeeyup,” Archer drawled, doing his best Big Mac impression.
“You bucked it?”
“Sure did.”
“But how...?”
Archer held aloft a largish length of log, which had had ropes tied near the ends into rudimentary handles. It looked like a rather crude, rather tiny battering ram.
“You used that thing to buck this here tree?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, shoot!” she said, standing back up. “See, I wouldn’t even have thought of that. You’re more clever n’ I gave ya credit for.”
“Thanks,” he said, unsure of whether to feel complemented or slightly insulted.
“C’mon,” Applejack said, motioning to another section of orchard. “Let’s see if you can keep this job as easily as you got it.”
“So I’m hired?”
“You start now. Now let’s get a move on. I only got only a half hour ‘til my lunch break, which I sure as sugar ain’t gonna spend out here!”
***
“Dash!”
A few hundred feet above sea level, on a fluffy cumulus the size of a loveseat, a light blue pegasus stirred.
“Mff. Don’t wanna go to flight school, Ma, don’t make me-”
“DASH!”
Rainbow Dash jerked her head off the cloudy pillow-substitute, suddenly returned to the land of the living. “Whuzzat, wahappen” she half-muttered, half-shouted, displaying her wonderful grasp of the Equestrian language. She leaned over the side of her improvised sleeping bag, trying to figure out who had so rudely awakened her.
Oh. It was Inkwell. What a surprise.
“Look, Inkie, if this is about the humidity again, I’m-”
“No, no, no, the humidity’s fine!”
“That’s a first,” the winged mare muttered under her breath.
“What!?”
“I said, uh, 'I feel worse!' Yeah, worse than when I went to sleep. I’m weird like that.”
“Just come down here!”
Groggily, Rainbow Dash flapped and performed the aerial equivalent to a drunk stumble to the ground, where she landed ungracefully and came eye-to-half-lidded-eye with a rather on-edge bookkeeper.
“Rainbow Dash-”
“Urgh.”
“-I need you you to think for a moment-”
“Urrrrrrgh.”
“-and tell me if you’ve seen Archer anywhere.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I’ve seen him.”
“WHERE.” Inkwell was now pressing her face uncomfortably close to Rainbow’s.
“Uhh, in midair.”
“What.”
“The middle of the air. That’s what ‘midair’ means.”
“What?”
“He was up in the sky. What else do you want me to say?”
“No, I mean... What was he doing up there?!”
“Flying, apparently.”
“HOW?”
“Some giant mass of metal I don’t want to think about right now.”
“What!?”
“You’re saying ‘what’ a lot.”
“What happened next?”
“He threw the Cutie Mark Crusaders at me and jumped on my back. Then the metal thing fell and exploded.”
“Wha-” Inkwell began, before being silenced.
“Say ‘what’ one more Celestia-forsaken time and I’m going back to sleep.”
“Alright, then. What’d he do next?”
“He flew me into the ground in front of Sugarcube Corner and started yelling. Then I flew off because I had a headache and then I fell asleep. And then you showed up and my day has coincidentally taken a sharp downward turn.”
“Alright...” Inkwell scratched at her chin for a moment. “Did you see where the metal thing landed?”
“Sweet Apple Acres.”
“Is Archer there?”
“Hay if I know.”
“Alright. Thanks. Bye!”
Inkwell promptly vanished in a cloud of dust. Rainbow snorted and fluttered back up to her cloud.
“Yeah, whatever.”
***
Inkwell, to her credit, nearly made it into Sweet Apple Acres before she ran over someone.
“P-Pinkie!?” she sputtered, pulling herself off of the pink pony.
“That’s me!” exclaimed said pony, bouncing up from the crash like she was made of rubber. “What’s eating you, Inkwell? You look kinda ragged.”
“Ohh, I’ve just spent my entire morning looking all over Ponyville for Archer, who I think Princess Luna may have driven insane! I'm fine! Absolutely peachy!” She gave a half-deranged laugh before looking Pinkie dead in the eyes. “You haven’t seen him, have you?”
“Oh, sure I have!” Pinkie picked up one of the metal bits she had spilled in the pony-to-pony collision. “He’s over in the orchards, hitting trees with giant logs.”
“That.... I... You... WHAT!?”
“Yeah, he just invented applebucking for humans! You should go see him, it’s pretty neat!”
With that, Pinkie bounced away, humming delightfully, salvage in tow. Inkwell stood motionless, mouth agape, for quite a while after.
Her morning was consistently filling up with more and more bullcrap. Bullcrap of a scale and magnitude that she had never had to deal with before. It had started, literally and figuratively, at midnight. First the Princess had knocked her unconscious. Then the weird dreams. Then the conflicting memories. Now that she was up and about, she was running herself ragged trying to make sure this human - who she didn’t even like that much anymore - was sane and alright. And now here was Pinkie walking along and telling her he was hitting trees with other trees, effectively confirming her worst fears.
Like I said, bullcrap of the highest order.
She fell face-forward into the ground, groaning.
“I give up.”