//------------------------------// // Chapter 3: Sanitization // Story: The Pony Who Lived Upstairs // by Ringcaat //------------------------------// IT WAS FRIDAY morning, and I had a seven hour shift ahead at the garden center. The newsstand near the rail depot rarely caught my attention, but today it did. I scanned the magazines with a curious eye—an outsider’s eye, now that I had a friend who was very much an outsider—but with a certain odd satisfaction I settled for a simple newspaper. I got my news from apps and web articles, but it felt nice to hold a newspaper in my hands for a change. It crossed my mind to wonder whether unicorns get the same pleasure from hefting something weighty and solid with their magic. From there I started wondering what pleasures I might be missing. At four o’clock, with work behind me, I took the bus home, fixed myself a sandwich, and showered. I’d already showered that morning, which seemed a little silly, but today felt special. Today, I felt like an information provider. I headed for the stairwell, planning to head up to 412, but I broke out in a huge unexpected smile instead when I heard clip clop clip on the stairs below and I realized I’d caught her on her way home. Then came the dull creak of the second floor door opening. “Hey, pony!” said a man's too-loud voice. It wasn’t a greeting so much as a challenge, or a look-at-me call. “Hey,” said Peach's voice. I heard her hoofsteps pass the landing below. “You back from your big job? Earn some good cash today, pony?” I couldn’t imagine what he's implying, but I instantly hated the man. Not knowing what I would do, I started down the stairs. “What do you think?” asked Peach Spark. As she came into view, I saw that her mane was frazzled and she had a halo of magic rising from her horn. The man laughed. He had a big chest and a ring of stubble just under his chin. “I think you earn your keep pretty good.” Just walk past him, I wanted to say. He's not gonna chase you. But my friend paused on the steps and eyed the man. “Why don't you just be frank? What do you want from me?” Just like a pony, I thought. And it did shut him up for a moment. “I just want to be friends, pony!” he eventually declared, like it was the funniest thing in the world and he had an audience. He glanced up at me and raised an eyebrow. Peach noticed me too. “Pepper,” she breathed. “Hi.” “Hi,” I said. “I was just heading up to your place. Gonna see if you were in.” My words weren't meant for the big man, of course, but he did a double take. “You... were headed up to her place?” Scathing mock-concern. Peach’s attention switched quickly from me to the troublemaker. “You want to be my friend?” she asked him in the tone of an ultimatum. “Then you can come up too.” I blinked. Was I going to have to throw a punch in the stairwell? Was the super going to hear about this? The man glanced up the stairs and back to Peach. “You want me... to come up to your place?” His hand was at his own chest, his mocking tone the same. “You said you want to be my friend,” repeated Peach, and I could hear the nastiness she was holding in. “If that's true, you can come up and join us.” The man laughed in disbelief crossed with triumph. He glanced to the side like there was a buddy there to back him up, but there wasn’t. “You got me wrong, pony. I don't want to go up to your place.” Peach kept speaking evenly, if impatiently. “And yet, that's what it's going to take. If you want to be my friend.” His laughing got more disgusted, more embarrassed. Finally, he snorted in exasperation and uttered, very quietly as if in disbelief—“You're a slut!” That’s when I moved down the stairs. But Peach said “Right, then,” in a quiet voice and started up at the same time. We almost collided. She nodded me upward, so I took a last look at the bewildered man, turned around, and rose. Peach followed. The man watched us go but didn't say anything more. We let the fourth floor door latch behind us before speaking. “That guy's a fucking bully,” I said. “No kidding,” said Peach. “I'm sorry you had to put up with that! You know, you could've just walked by him. You didn't need to engage.” “Engage?” She looked back at me as we walked. “You mean, talk to him?” “Yeah, he clearly wasn't up to any good.” She chewed her bottom lip. I wondered if it was a habit of hers. “I know.” “So why'd you talk to him?” I pressed. “I'm here to learn, remember? And besides, he said he wanted to be friends.” Unbelievable. “Peach, he was making fun of you! He didn't mean it.” “I know.” “So?” “I had to give him the benefit of the doubt, didn't I? Or I'd be as bad as he was?” She turned around again, giving me a chance to tell her she was wrong. I couldn’t. “You're the friendship expert,” I admitted. It seemed to vindicate her. “Thank you!” Moments later she added: “Being Equestrian's gotta be good for something.” We went into her apartment. I plopped my copy of the Star-Ledger down on her counter. I'd meant to present it to her as a special gift—oh, well. Her ears twitched. “Is that a newspaper?” “Yeah.” “Is it for me?” “Yeah. I figured you might want to check out the news. I mean, I know you don't have internet...” Her legs were around my shoulders before I knew it. I started to breathe faster. “Thank you,” she told me. Before I could hug back, she’d released me, but still—I’d been hugged by a pony! “You really needed some kind of boost, huh?” I asked. “Anything,” she confirmed, heading to the fridge. “Have a hard day?” She bustled around in there, emerging with a deli pasta salad and a jar of artichoke hearts held in her blue glow. “You could say that.” She plopped the jar on the counter and dropped some hearts directly into the salad, then levitated a fork from a drawer and went to sit on a cushion beside her little table. “Really, it wasn't that hard. Just thankless.” “Your coworkers don't appreciate you?” A bowl rose up before me, inviting me to take it. I smiled at Peach and took the bowl—it's strange being handed something by a unicorn. “I think they appreciate me. Like you appreciate a wire cutter or a can opener.” “That doesn't sound so good.” “It's not.” She patted a cushion beside her. I went and sat beside her, and she used her mind to spoon some of her salad into my bowl. I grinned without knowing why, except that it felt intimate. “Thanks,” I said. “They just appreciate you like you were a tool?” “That's kind of what I am to them. The chief engineer gives me schematics and I follow them. Sometimes he wants variations and I implement them. I'm basically a tool, just making tiny canals of copper flow here instead of there.” “But you understand the schematics. I mean, that takes skill.” “A little. It's not as if I make my own suggestions. The fact that I'm a person, that I can talk, isn't really relevant to what I do most of the time. I mean, they make small talk with me, but it's got nothing to do with what I'm there for.” “Sorry to hear it,” I said, my mouth full of cranberries, celery and fusilli. “I wish it weren't like that, but a lot of people's jobs treat them like tools.” She munched her food. “Maybe so, but how many of them are surrounded by the thinkers?” I’d been thinking of assembly lines more than anything. “I guess that's pretty uncommon.” “I feel like an expensive toy,” she muttered. “‘What if we have Peach do this? Well, what if we have her do this?' I just stand there, or sit, and wait for someone else to make the plan.” She looked sharply at me. “Have you got any of the toys? The plastic ponies with the hair?” I didn't know what answer she was hoping for. “No, I never saw any point in it.” “We'll need to get some,” she decided, glowering. And she returned to her salad. “What for?” “I want to know what it's like.” She looked back. “Playing with them. I want to see if I feel the same way my bosses feel when they use me to solve their problems.” I couldn't hide my grin completely behind my fork. “Somehow I doubt you will.” “I'm not so sure,” she replied. We ate for a while. She hovered the newspaper over and I helped her make sense of the stories. Eventually I let her read on her own for a while, while I took a look at the electrical equipment on her shelves, wondering where she’d gotten it all. When I came back, she was poring through the weather report on the back of the local section. I smiled. “Just so you know... those are sometimes wrong.” After a moment she looked up. “Huh?” “The weather forecasts. They're not always right.” She wrinkled her brow. “They're not always right?” “No, they can be pretty far off sometimes.” “Why... why would they even print them if they're not true?” I restrained my smile from getting too big. “They're just guesses! We don't control the weather here. We just guess what it's going to be.” She looked at me like I was crazy, and I couldn’t stop myself from snickering. “I heard about that, I guess,” she admitted. “Still. Why even bother printing guesses?” I shrugged. “Better than nothing.” She stared at the page for a while, then turned, frowning, to the crossword puzzle. If I’d been any good at crosswords, I would have offered to do the puzzle with her. Since I wasn’t, I just sat down and made conversation. “Did you get newspapers in Witherton?” “We had a small one,” she answered. “My family got the Equestria Daily instead.” “Did it cost more?” “Yeah, somewhat. Teleported in each morning, so.” I tried to wrap my head around the concept of teleportation costs. “So how different is it?” She frowned, thinking about it. “You've got more detail. Your stories are longer.” She levitated the paper and riffled its pages briefly, though she lacked the precision of Twilight Sparkle. “It's more pages, too. Your paper just has more in it.” “Huh. Well, we are in the biggest metro area in the country.” “Yeah. But even so.” She returned to reading. “Even so?” I pressed. “It's not just that you've got more people. It's not just that more happens here.” She ran a hoof along the length of a column, a story about a debate over where to build a mosque. “There's actually more detail. I'm starting to see that everywhere.” This was a little chilling. “More detail?” “All the procedural stuff at work. The meetings, the manuals. Best practices. All the laws! Is it true your lawbooks are, like, reams thick?” She raised a forehoof above the floor to demonstrate. “I think they don't usually compile them into one book,” I answered. “Exactly. And no one knows what's in them. I've been looking everywhere, Pepper. Your architecture. Your cities, like the layout. I'm starting to think it's even the way people behave, the social codes or whatever. And now the newspapers.” She shut the paper up with a magical clap. “Everything is more complicated here.” I wanted to give her a hug, but she didn't look receptive. “I guess it feels that way getting used to a new place...” She shook her head. “I've been here almost two weeks. I'm pretty sure it's not just that.” She looked me in the eye accusingly. “You wrote us simple. Didn't you.” The chill I'd been feeling washed over me. “Um... I guess? I mean, it is a kids' show.” There was sullen triumph on her face. “Exactly. We had to be simple enough for your kids to understand.” Then her confidence collapsed. “Oh, Celestia. Oh sweet heavens.” She folded up with her eyes closed and put her face in the paper. I sat down and put my arm around her. She twitched, but softened. “Maybe it has to be this way,” Peach muttered, her ears tilting back. “Maybe you can't create a new world without making it simpler than what you’ve got. Maybe it's just not possible to keep everything.” “Hold on,” I objected. “There's tons of stuff in your world that wasn't in the show. All the geography, the countries no one'd ever heard of. The history. All the nitty gritty stuff, the economics, the grown-up stuff. I mean, that exists! You have all that, right, even though it never got shown?” I'd seen lists, in fact, of countless details of Equestria’s world that were never even hinted at in canon. They’d been part of the great news onslaught that had accompanied first contact between our worlds. But the funny thing was, in all those debates and testimonials, I’d never once seen anyone make Peach's simple, devastating observation: You wrote us simple. Probably a lot of people on both sides had been thinking it, but were just afraid to say it out loud. “There's all that, sure,” said Peach, still huddled. “But that's breadth. Not depth.” I hugged her as well as I could from my position. “You seem deep to me.” Wow. I sounded corny even to myself. I couldn’t believe I was saying this to a girl. Slowly, she stood up and took a deep breath. She turned around, now standing on the paper, and it seemed like she was calming down. Then she raised her head and asked in a small but piercing voice: “What's a slut?” Oh, god. “You don't know that word?” “No. I don't know it. What did that man call me?” Please, someone else, answer this question for me. But no one else was there, of course, because I was her only friend. The girl with one friend needed it explained why she'd been called a slut. “It's... it means someone... a girl... who's easy. Who goes to bed with everyone.” “Goes to bed with... oh, seriously? So he was calling me loose under the covers?” I winced. “Yeah. You invited him up, I was going up with you, I guess he jumped to some conclusions.” She stared at me in horror. “Is that what people will think? If you're coming to see me, we must be involved?” I hung my head a little. “I don't know. Maybe. It's not like there are social standards for this.” “Because I'm a pony?” “...Yeah.” “So what if I weren't a pony? What if I were a woman? Would people assume it then?” “Um.” My experience was limited, but... “Probably, yeah.” She hid her face again. “Crepes,” she swore. “And we don't even have the language for it.” Then up came her stare. “You didn't just write us simple. You sanitized us!” It wasn't me, I mouthed, but I couldn't say it aloud. “Do you have other words we're not allowed to have? Secret words? Forbidden words?” I nodded humbly and name a few of them for her. “CREPES!!” She stood up tall and threw up her head, wincing, and it seemed like the exact wrong time to tell her 'crepes' wasn't a real swear. I glanced at the paper lying on the floor. The top story, which we’d covered earlier, was another scandal—the governor was once again being accused of retributive politics. Sure, we had nasty politics here on Earth. We even had brutal dictators. But at least we didn't have supervillains—not really. I was about to point that out, but then I realized that even supervillains were just sanitized evil. Sanitization doesn't mean getting rid of evil. It means making it comprehensible. “Peach.” She seemed about ready to cry. She didn't speak. I talked as gently as I could, almost apologetically. “You know, your world is what it is. Because of its history, because of its magic, its great leaders, its creatures...” She shut her eyes, all her legs stretched out fully. “If your world is so nice that it doesn't need words like 'slut'... that's because things have gone so well. One way or another, you've learned to live in harmony. It's not because we somehow made you this way. It's because... that's just how ponies are. You should be... you should be proud.” With a deep breath, the tension left her. “Even so,” she mumbled. “Even so. Even if it's historical chance that did it, not a writer's pen. We're simpletons. We're children, in grown-up bodies, leading grown-up lives.” “You are not children.” “We might as well be.” “Then what's so bad about that?” She shook her head. “You're what we wish we could be. What's so bad about that?” She walked away, back into her kitchenette. Away went the leftover pasta salad and the artichoke hearts, back into the fridge. Back came Peach to lie on her futon mattress. Her mane was a mess, and I felt bad for wanting to comb it. “It means we're less than you are, Pepper,” she finally said, looking at the floor. “A wish is only a part of a person.” “You're not any less than we are,” I countered. “You've got all this stuff we don't have. Magic. Weather control. Supervillains, and epic quests, and trees of harmony and empires rising after a thousand years. Wishes can be more, not less.” She looked at me with pity, as if I’d just said the corniest thing in the world. Cornier than 'You seem deep to me.' I looked back at her sadly because I’d meant it. “Well, either way, I'm just a wish,” she said, swishing her tail. “I don't know, Pepper. That's gonna take some getting used to.” I wished I could argue with that.