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// 8: Food for Thought 
// Story: An Equestrian Princess in New York 
// by Tallinu 
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	8: Food for Thought

As we neared our destination, I took a few minutes to describe some of the sandwich choices I remembered, so we wouldn’t have to talk too much about them once we arrived. Repeating everything someone said to her in the same language they said it in would come across very strange. I’d have to try to use the telepathy feature to pass on anything she actually needed to answer, and then hope she could make do with pointing, nodding, shaking her head, or brief replies which I could translate without too much suspicion.
The shop wasn’t very busy when we arrived, for which I was grateful. The difficulties I’d foreseen with ordering were handled with relative ease. I made sure ‘Ishanna’ didn’t accidentally pick any meat products, and she ended up with a large sub sandwich with all the vegetables they had, plus several kinds of cheese, mustard, and mayonnaise. I had a smaller ham and turkey sandwich, much less stuffed compared to her sub, and some vegetable beef soup. I hoped her sub wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to eat. That thing was practically bursting. At least I’d gotten them to cut it into three sections instead of two.
We’d picked a table in the furthest corner, and Twilight had made herself comfortable on the bench against the wall, opposite my chair. I had just taken my first bite, and now she was distracted from unwrapping her sub, looking at the layers of my sandwich.
“That… is meat?”
She seemed curious, perhaps confused. I looked at it, blinked, and nodded as I chewed. Ham and turkey, from pigs and a kind of bird…
“I can hardly tell it apart from the cheese.”
I swallowed and grinned. “Well, it’s cooked, and probably processed a bit first… What did you expect? A hunk of flesh so rare it bleeds?”
Twilight winced and made a face, one which I mirrored almost immediately. “Ugh. No, but…”
“Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“It’s fine.”
“I really should learn to think before I speak.”
She gave me a wry smile in response, and carefully scooped up a section of her sandwich, which required a few tries until it wasn’t threatening to spill its contents everywhere. I watched carefully, wondering how her illusion would handle eating. As far as I could tell, she was exactly what she appeared, even as she bit into the sub, chewed, and swallowed, then did it all again.
What? Am I doing something wrong? Twilight was looking back at me, having paused in the middle of taking her third bite to send that silent query.
“Sorry! Didn’t mean to stare.” I blushed and continued without speaking, busying myself with my own food. I was trying to figure out how your illusion handles eating and things like that. Where differences between your body and the image would be an issue, like eating.
She chuckled and resumed doing so. Well, a glamour is a very specialized kind of illusion. It’s designed to handle all sorts of problems like that. For instance, do you see me leaning my head forward as I take a bite?
I almost nodded, and then realized that might look strange if anyone was watching. What could I be responding to? She hadn’t spoken aloud, after all. Yeah, is that important?
I’m not actually doing as much of that as it looks like. It helps to make the illusion line up with my real teeth. The glamour is designed to adapt the image to points of contact between myself and other objects as they approach. There’s a bit of prioritization involved, and it has limits, but it should be able to handle most situations.
I had thought it was impressive before, but this was something else entirely. Sounds even more complex than I thought.
A glamour really has to be, she responded, if you want it to hold up under any real scrutiny. The pigeons were child’s play in comparison.
As I ate, I thought about Twilight’s surprise at the appearance of the meat in my sandwich. Then I had a disturbing thought. In the show, one of your friends can talk to animals… like they actually understand her.
“Fluttershy?” She grinned and nodded. I tried to catch what the name actually sounded like, but I hadn’t been concentrating on that and missed it. “She has a real way with them, but it’s not like they’re actually smart. They’re just animals, nothing like the various sapient species.”
My look of relief was probably enough to clue her in all by itself, even if her own intellect hadn’t easily made the association with the previous topic, and her eyes widened. “Oh. Wow, I see what you mean. If every predator’s meal was like a tiny little murder, that would be pretty disturbing…” Twilight shuddered. “Especially since griffins and dragons are mainly predators, even if they can eat other things. Griffins are fond of fruit as well, and their fancier cuisine often includes dairy, some kinds of pasta, legumes, and mushrooms. And dragons eat plenty of gems for the concentrated magic and minerals, as well as being technically omnivores like us. Except most of them tend to swing to the other side of that continuum, like I said.”
“Interesting. So Spike can really get by on your diet?”
“Well, if he didn’t mind lots of eggs he theoretically could, as long as he had enough gems to make up the lower energy content. But he hunts sometimes, especially when Gilda stops by…”
“Gilda? Dash’s griffin friend?” Twilight nodded in reply. “You say she’s a regular visitor? She only showed up in one episode, where they had a fight because she was being a jerk.”
“Well, she can be a bit abrasive at times. What was the episode about?”
“Her first visit, probably? Pinkie’s welcome party?”
She gasped. “Oh my gosh, I had almost forgotten about all that! Yeah, I remember it. So Rainbow Dash is trying to make up for lost time with her old friend, right? And she set up all kinds of pranks, planning to have a good laugh with her, but somehow Gilda ends up getting caught by a bunch of them. She thinks they were all Pinkie’s fault, like the whole party was just a set-up to make fun of her.”
“It didn’t help that the town never got all that many griffins, so a lot of people were wary of her, and she didn’t get along very well with some of our other friends either. She tolerates Fluttershy, mostly since Dash is so protective of her, and she can’t stand Rarity. But she gets along alright with Applejack, since they’re all pretty competitive, and she makes an effort for Pinkie now that they’ve worked out their differences…”
Twilight shrugged and continued. “Anyway, she had a big fit, Dash told her off and defended us, and Gilda flew off in a huff… But Pinkie told Dash to go after her. I swear, that woman would try to make her worst enemy happy!”
Something about that thought struck me as incredibly funny. “Could Pinkie even have enemies?”
The disguised princess giggled and shrugged. “Well, technically. But they’d have to be pretty determined to stay that way! Fortunately, she wasn’t.”
This was one divergence from the show that I was pleased to hear about. “You think she knew they could work things out?”
“Or hoped. We could all tell Dash wasn’t happy that Gilda took off, but I think Pinkie knew it was more than that. I’m not sure Gilda would’ve come back on her own. She’s got a lot of pride and it was badly bruised by that rejection. Dash was afraid to go at first, she didn’t want us to think her defense of us was anything less than a hundred percent. But Pinkie was pretty insistent. ‘She’s your friend, and she needs you a lot more than we do right now,’ I think is what she said. At any rate, Dash just smiled and took off like a rocket.”
Twilight paused to take a bite, and I was in the middle of chewing one myself. But I already had a decent idea of how things turned out, from the things Twilight had already said, and I grinned. It sounded like Pinkie had managed to make even the grumpy griffin smile in the end.
“I don’t know the details of what happened next. I didn’t see them for the rest of the day, but Pinkie spotted them landing at Rainbow’s house that evening. The next morning they were practically inseparable, and Gilda awkwardly apologized the next time she met each of us. Since then she’s been a regular visitor. She usually flies out two or three weekends a month to hang out, and for special occasions too.”
“That’s good to hear, I know I’m not the only one who was a little disappointed with that episode. I’m surprised how well that one matches up with what you just told me, though.”
“Really?” Twilight gave me a bemused look. “It still feels weird that you people know so much about our lives, and have made up such fanciful stories about us. Oh, don’t look like that, I know it’s not your fault.”
I nodded and let that subject drop again. “You were saying something about her and Spike?”
“That’s right! She ended up giving him hunting lessons, because he wasn’t doing that well at it when he started trying on his own. His appetite was getting harder to cope with as he grew, especially once his wings got big enough to fly, and none of us were qualified to give him hunting lessons. Not even Rainbow, as much as she thought otherwise to begin with!”
I chuckled about that. “So no butcher’s shop or the like in Ponyville, huh?”
“No, like I said, we don’t get a lot of meat-eaters there. Canterlot is different, as are a lot of the big cities. And areas along the borders with the griffin territories are different too.”
She looked at my half-devoured sandwich with an odd expression. “So despite what I said earlier, I’ve never actually had any before.”
“Oh. Erm… Are you asking for a taste?”
“No, I just… Well… Maybe?” She didn’t seem very certain, either, not like she was trying to hide eagerness behind something else. Interest, sure, but it was very mixed.
“Well, if you decide you do…” I tore a small strip of each kind of meat off the untouched side of my sandwich and set them aside. “Don’t ruin your dinner, though.”
“Right. I am quite hungry, and this sandwich is delicious!”
Twilight was making quick work of her meal, and licked some wayward mustard from her fingers once the first portion of the sandwich had vanished. I noticed her eyeing the strips of meat I’d set aside. I didn’t say anything, but she must have seen me looking and blushed.
“Well, it’s not like it’ll do me any harm… And I am curious… Purely in a scientific sense, of course… And it’s not like I have some noble image to live up to that would be ruined forever if I was seen doing something so ‘abnormal’ for a pony as snacking on cooked animal flesh…!”
“Ishanna.” I was afraid Twilight was getting a little worked up, and if it got much worse she might attract attention. Even if nobody could understand her, that wouldn’t do our cover any good at all. And, of course, I didn’t like to see her stressing out the way she seemed to be. Fortunately, she paused in her anxious rambling.
“If you want to try it, then try it. Nobody’s judging you here, least of all me.” I smiled and pushed the napkin I’d set them on toward her. “Just relax, okay?”
She blushed more, but took a deep breath and gave me a chagrined smile. “I guess I was being a little silly, wasn’t I? Thanks.”
I chuckled. “No problem.”
Twilight picked up the strip of ham, sniffed at it (there was that leaning forward effect she’d mentioned), and gave it a tentative lick. She nibbled on one end of it, and finally the whole piece went in her mouth. “It’s very salty…”
“That’s typical of ham. Try the turkey.”
She repeated the same series of steps, most likely so she could compare her observations, though she was far less hesitant about it the second time around. “Interesting texture. Somewhat fibrous, but not nearly as stringy as some plants, and easy to chew. The taste, though… It’s not unpleasant, but it’s certainly unlike anything I’ve tried before.”
“Yeah. When it’s cooked properly, meat can be very tender and flavorful.”
She picked up the middle portion of her sandwich and glanced thoughtfully at mine, then shrugged. “I suppose I’ll have plenty of time to experiment while I’m here. Wouldn’t want to upset my digestion with too much of an unfamiliar diet.”
“Wise of you. Even we can have that sort of trouble. Oh, and there are plenty of meat substitutes available, like veggie burgers… I tried one a few years back, it was different, but not bad.”
“Do you know if they have those here?”
“Probably not, this is more of a sandwich place. Something to keep in mind for later.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” she replied. Her eyes shimmered faintly and she spoke as if dictating. “Thirty-seven… Investigate meat-substitute options.”
I really should not have been surprised that Twilight Sparkle had a to-do-list spell.