//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: First Break // Story: Twelfth Equestriad Interview // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// The picture changes and the volume increases. The dominant species on this world is of the equidae rather than the hominidae, but advertising techniques are universal. *** A harassed looking businessmare is in a rainstorm through big-city streets, evidently from a long day at the office. "Weather team not doing their job?" a disembodied male voice asks, full of sympathetic and kind intonation. She sits in a stopped car on a highway, horns uluating in the background, slumped over her steering wheel with an expression of quiet desperation as the rain beats against the vinyl top. "Wasting your evenings stuck in traffic jams?" asks the sympathetic voice, now a bit sadder-sounding. The same mare waking up in the morning, the skies still overcast and leaden. She rolls out of bed, her face bleary-eyed and her mane disheveled as if from a very uncomfortable night's sleep. She staggers to the bathroom. "Not sure any more why you bother to wake up the next morning?" The voice seems about ready to contemplate suicide. She opens the bathroom door and suddenly an impossibly bright sun streams from the room. Stepping in, she suddenly finds herself standing outside under a full golden sun in a blue sky on a grassy meadow, hills in the distance, the space between containing a small shimmering stream babbling between a small town of fairy-tale houses and festival pagodas, merry music playing the background. "Why not come to Paradise?" says the voice, suddenly manically-cheerful. The mare smiles happily, her whole face lighting up with filly-like glee, her bedraggled mane puffing out into a huge fluffy hairdo, and goes running and skipping down the meadow toward the town. "Meet our friendly natives ..." Colorfully-hairstyled ponies, heads archaically hammer-shaped, run over to her and drape flower-wreaths around her neck, others pass her what looks like an ice cream sundae ... "Enjoy our many delights ... ... and they lead her into town where we see her in a montage of parties, shopping and delicious meals. "Your health, safety and happiness are 100 percent guaranteed by the most powerful artificial intelligence ever created by Ponykind, while you enjoy the pleasures and splendors of the World That Was Restored!! All for the low low price of the loan of a very small fraction of your cerebral processing power, which will be returned to you intact at the end of your visit!" Zoom-in on the mare's face, which looks incredibly relaxed and happy. "Paradise, where your every wish comes true! Just contact our tour office at 780 Miter Road, South Dunnich, Whitetail District 28-103, or phone 510-531-1345, e-mail ParadiseDimensionTours@piesistersinc.com. Paradise is standing by!" The contact information flashes on the screen, while a rather manic-sounding female voice quickly states: "Paradise-reserves-the-right-to-refuse-all-wishes-which-may-harm-itself-other-sapients-or-their-property-or-oneself-or-endanger-causality. Paradise-cannot-guarantee-against-emotional-side-effects-of-visits. Paradise-reserves-the-right-to-eject-disruptive-or-unruly-beings. Paradise-cannot-refund-travel-costs-in-such-cases." So does the most awesome thing a species ever accomplished, the most terrible tragedy in its history, the greatest promise ever held out to the individual, become mundane with sufficient familiarity. So it is that what was once defended by the secret hope of a light flung into the future through strange dimensions of spacetime, is now defended by legal boilerplate which was in fact spoken by that very same light, its Well-Beloved and Most Noticeable Pink Daughter. Paradise is not complaining. For it lives again, and so does its world. *** Dramatic classical music begins. The camera pans out across an open road, a long straight highway running through what looks to be the arid southern Palomino. The background is arid country, a desolation relieved only by scattered, scrubby vegetation including cacti and scraggly low bushes. The music swells. A streamlined black automobile races across this landscape, trailing a cloud of dust. We see it from several angles, looking sleeker and faster with every new shot. Brilliant light, brighter than that of any plausible desert sun, gleams off its oddly glossy (considering all the dust) black surface. Its engine roars at a volume which would logically imply either very poor efficiency, or recorded engine noise dubbed over the sequence. A highly-masculine voice speaks. "When you're the kind of driver who goes out beyond the ordinary, into the extraordinary; when you're not satisfied with the mediocre, you need a car that that takes you where nopony has ever been." The car slews to a screeching stop that -- if it had actually been going as fast as it looked in the earlier shot -- would have caused it to skid out of control and probably wipe out in a rollover. Instead, more dust rises dramatically. "You need the `49 Zephyr. The car of tomorrow, today, for the stallion of today, tomorrow." The doors open. A really handsome, well-built sky-blue Earth Pony stallion, with a flowing yellow mane, rather well-coiffed for a pony who has supposedly been driving into the desert, gets out and gazes dramatically into the camera. Two young Earth Pony mares wearing long filmy dresses that tantalizingly hide their hindquarters, though still leaving little to the imagination, step into the shot from the side from nowhere in particular and drape themselves over him with sultry looks meant to suggest lust. The stallion ignores these lovely apparitions who have ambushed him in the middle of the desert, and stares even more intensely into the camera, smirking. "Get behind the wheel of the future. The `49 Zephyr." Base an entire civilization on love and friendship if you will, but advertising agencies will still pitch to the lowest common denominator. And to any species at all like our own, sex sells -- even when its connection with the product is absurdly hazy. *** A late middle-aged, but still quite lovely white unicorn mare with a medium-length purple and pink streaked mane, wearing a long red gown glittering with diamonds and embroidered with a big musical note over a stylized heart-and-bell over her hip stands on stage under the spotlights, microphone held in aura with negligent ease, singing with evident power, though the volume on her is down so it's difficult to make out her words. The tune was handed down in one family for four thousand years, but has familiar to everypony since almost forty years ago: it's "Sweet Music." "Coming live from the Morgan Philharmonic at 9 o'clock Canterlot time, it's none other than the spectacular Sweetie Belle!" Now the camera focuses in on her as she belts out part of a song, "Pardon me, colts / Is that the Crystal Empire choo-choo?" The voice has the superb control and passion which made her the most popular singer in the world, bursting out on the musical scene as a young mare forty years ago at the Third Equestriad of the new Age, taking by storm a society already anxious as it realized that the recent rash of strange occurrences were not going to stop, but instead were going to get worse and worse as the Shadows seeped down from their dimension of dead stars through the cracks torn in time by ancient errors. As Equestria realized that it had fought and won what were only the first battles of what was going to prove a very long war. "Sweetie Belle, everypony's darling, singing the songs you remember from your youth!" Now her voice becomes lilting, both sweet and mocking: "Don't sit under the Apple trees /With pony else than me ..." And the older ponies in her audience remembered when they kissed their special someponies one last time, unsure if they would ever see them again in this life. Some had boarded trains which took them to fight outnumbered against Queen Nightmare Hunger and her Shadow Swarm, or launched into the air with pathetically-inadequate weapons against the Dark Dragons, or flown off hastily-contrived space warships in rickety fighters to duel with the Shadow Strikers in the void between Earth and Moon, in those desperate days and dark years when ponies snatched every hour of happiness, they could because nopony knew if she would live to see tomorrow. And some who had stayed home remembered lovers who had looked so nice in their uniforms, but had never returned to keep their pledges of love eternal ... and even now, with the Wars over two decades safely ended, many cried. Far from all the wounds had yet healed. "And her most famous song ever ..." says the voiceover. "The one you all remember from the very end of the War." Sweetie Belle's eyes gleam as she sings this one, her tears beginning to start as she pronounces the familiar words. She is very proud of what she did in the War, but she remembers the circumstances which made this song famous. She remembers the glory, yes, but she also remembers how many Ponies didn't come back, and how much worse things might have gone if it had not been for Celestia's Sacrifice. "Life is only what we choose to make it / Let's just take it / Let us be free ..." This commercial is of course showing footage recorded previously. In her trailer on the Northeast Coast, the real Sweetie Belle is preparing for her big show. She's already been sewed into her dress, the hairstyling's been done, and the makeup artists are getting to work. She still feels the thrill of singing, but she has mixed emotions about the particular song being broadcast right now (as it happens, she is watching the Luna and Twilight interview on her portable set). "With our strength we'll find the might / There's no fight we cannot fight / All together / We can win!" She remembered a history documentary someone had once left on in the background that used her song as theme music. It had very good footage of some of the highlights of the action. When the big space battleship Amaterasu had exploded, she remembered that madcap crew of Neigh-ponese who had once hosted her at their mess, and how they had been such sweet and shockingly young ponies, scarcely more than colts and fillies, so energetic and innocent. She winced as she saw the Fillydelphia turn out of the line of battle, launching her death-ride into the thick of the Shadow fleet to save her own squadron, because she had shared a few dates with her sensor officer -- it had not been love, nor even much lust, but he had been her friend. Every other scene of that show had by implication depicted her old friends dying, and if she hadn't associated the Last Battle with "We Will Win" before, she did now. And it had spoiled that song for her forever. Sweetie Belle had many friends in the Fleet that last day of the War, and she had considerably less the next day. Still, as the Great and Powerful Trixie had once told her backstage: "The show must go on." So Sweetie Belle would do just that. *** "We now return you to a very special Canterlot Comments, with Princesses Luna Selena Nyx and Twilight Sparkle."