I WAS LUCKY enough not to be scheduled on the following Thursday, so I left plenty early for Turtlewood Coffee and had good luck with the bus and train. I showed up around eleven, leaving plenty of time before I could expect Peach, and later Meg, to arrive. Just as well. I ordered an herbal tea to calm my nerves and settled in with my laptop.
First I went to the news sites. Then my e-mail. Then, with excitement brewing, I went to PeachOnEarth.com and found a new entry, compete with pictures of three women I’d never seen before. Well, I told myself, this should be interesting.
[Posted: 7/5/18 by Peach]
Let’s talk about princesses.
This is Crown Princess Masako, from Japan, which is a small but important island country off the coast of the biggest continent on Earth. She’s married to the son of the emperor. He had to ask her to marry him three times before she said yes, because she wanted to be a diplomat instead of a princess. After they did get married, she had trouble having a child. She even had a miscarriage. They gave her treatments, they gave her drugs, everything her nation had to offer. Eventually she had a healthy daughter. But Japan doesn’t want another princess. They want a prince. Because only a male child can be heir to the throne, and Masako never had a son. They say she was so distraught about it that she isolated herself and maybe even had a nervous breakdown. She hardly ever comes out in public anymore. Once she wanted to be a diplomat, connecting people and lands, and now she just hides herself away.
This is Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden. She had an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa earlier in her life (think the opposite of Pinkie Pie) and had to hide it for a long time in case the public found out. She didn’t get to go to the school she wanted to because of it—she had to go study in a whole different continent. She also has trouble recognizing people’s faces, even people she knows well. As far as I can tell, she’s the only female heir apparent to a country on the entire Earth. There are other female heirs to countries, but they could all get knocked down in line if their parents had a son. Sweden is one of the few Terran monarchies that doesn’t give first dibs to boys over girls. And they only stopped doing that less than forty years ago.
This is Princess Kalina of Bulgaria. She seems like a cool lady. She speaks six languages and doesn’t eat meat, like most humans do. You know how there’s a legend about Celestia shaving herself bald a few hundred years ago? Humans mainly only have hair on their heads (and don’t call them manes!), but Kalina shaved hers off once because she lost a bet. Another time she colored her hair bright orange, which is just on the edge of normal human hair colors. So that’s cool, right? But both those times, reporters and gossip-mongers gave her a hard time about it. It’s like she didn’t do anything else for them to have a scandal about, so they had a hair scandal. In fact, out of the dozens of human princesses, I haven’t found a single one that hasn’t had some sort of scandal or other. And frankly, a lot of them seem pretty unfair.
What’s my point? It’s that humans don’t hold their princesses in high esteem. They pretend to, but when it comes down to it, they don’t really. They hold them to high standards, which is not in any way the same thing.
But it makes sense when you realize that princesses aren’t nearly as important over here as they are back in Equestria. First off, ‘Queen’ is the title for a regnant female monarch here, not ‘Princess’. Second, it’s men who’ve historically held the power, not women. But those are really just curiosities. The more important difference is that most of Earth’s countries have shifted from absolute rule to something more democratic—rule by the people. Earth used to have over a hundred monarchies. Now it’s down to something like thirty. And in most of those, the monarch doesn’t have the real power anymore—the country just keeps them around for tradition, or for kicks and giggles. They do things like make speeches, visit other countries, wave to crowds and cut ribbons at ceremonies. Earth treats its princesses more like pets than like people to be reckoned with.
And make no mistake, they’re proud of that. This country I’m in, America, was kind of the first big one to switch over to rule by the people. And just last night, they celebrated it big time. They have a company called Macy’s here that does parades and fireworks, and I’ll tell you, their fireworks are just as impressive as ours… until you remember that they do them entirely without magic, and then they’re far more impressive. And human crowds, in my opinion, are more exciting than pony crowds are. That may not be entirely a plus—I’m just saying.
I wonder if humans think we’re old-fashioned or throwbacks because we have princesses who actually do things. It seems the consensus of Earth is that princesses are pretty much obsolete. What do you think? Tell me in the comments.
Poem of the Day: Princessness
'Princess’ means principal, first among females, prime among people and wellspring of power.
Firstness is bestness, for first choice is best choice. Why not take the sweet choice instead of the sour?
Or is it not bestness? Is firstness just roughness? A first draft is weaker than all that come later.
Is ‘first among females’ a thing to be envied? Or is it a template for something much greater?
Firstness is worstness when change means improvement.
Does change mean improvement? Or is it just movement?
235 COMMENTS
That… was a lot of comments.
Some of them were complimenting her on the poem. Some were complaining about her cherry-picking only negative things out of the princesses’ lives, when there was so much positive that could have been said. Most were honestly trying to answer the question of whether or not princesses were obsolete, and those were the most interesting. A whole debate with arguments and sub-arguments had developed, and while it didn’t reach any conclusions, one thing was very clear—Peach’s blog had really taken off.
I was proud, and I was scared, and I was happy for her. Why was I scared? I don’t think I could have said, exactly, except that I’d learned that big things can bring trouble.
Ponies were starting to trickle in for the lunchtime meet-up. Some went around the corner to where the couches were, but a couple ordered something and sat down at a table where I could see them. And again, I remembered that ponies have a scent. It was like the place was waking up. I felt happier without trying.
Still just eleven thirty. I bought a croissant and picked up a newspaper. I’d already seen most of the news I cared about online, but a column caught my eye. It mentioned the last episode of Life in Equestria that I’d watched together with Peach. “Earth and Equestria: Joining Together, or Breaking Apart?” read the headline. I started reading near the beginning.
“…possibility is reminiscent of the expansion fever that overtook America in the 1860’s and 70’s, resulting in an overhunting of bison so massive that the formerly dominant grassland species was driven to the brink of extinction. When new frontiers open up, the potential for opportunity is often so great that social and environmental dangers are altogether overshadowed and overlooked in the rush to capitalize.
“Thus far, Equestrian authorities have been more mindful of such concerns than our own have been, restricting access to Fimland to only essential visitors and restricting imports likewise. All parties, however, have been responsibly cautious with regard to obvious dangers such as disease, terrorism, and magical contamination. This speaks well of our ability to learn from the tragedies of history.
“However, very little has been said of another possible tragedy: the loss of the metaphysical fabric that links our worlds together. The very fact that the nature of this connection is hard to measure and hard to fathom makes it all the more vulnerable. Yet we must take measures to understand it, lest we wake up one day to find that, like the bison of the Great Plains, it has vanished practically overnight.
“The primary connection, as everyone knows, was the Canadian-American television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, itself a continuation of a previously dormant franchise. Presently, if new episodes of that show were to be made, they would not reflect Equestrian reality; experiments with writer Cindy Morrow have apparently confirmed this. But innumerable connections between our world and theirs continue to be apparent. Their history is replete with incidents that resemble softer, cleaned-up versions of events in our own. Their dominant language is practically identical to English, widely considered the most dominant language on Earth, and yet the etymology of their words is almost completely different. The fact that their language has arrived by an entirely different history of lexical and phonetic changes to be almost exactly the same as ours is an astronomically unlikely and even beautiful coincidence—except that, of course, it is no coincidence that the magical events surrounding their Tragedy of the God-Tremor opened a portal to our world and not some theoretical other. That particular connection was opened because of the similarities between our worlds. But if such coincidences were to continue, we could not ascribe them to this same cause. Four hundred years ago, English and Equestrian were significantly different from one another, and it seems logical to assume they will be different two hundred years hence. Now that we are aware of each others’ cultures, there is no longer room for coincidence to operate.
“Yet new coincidences do continue to crop up, proving that some kind of metaphysical connection remains between our worlds. We were not simply plucked from a multiverse of worlds that Celestia’s portal might have chosen as the one that happened to be the most similar at that moment; rather, some kind of link is in operation that binds us even now. The latest piece of evidence for this fact was on display this week in the most recent episode of Life in Equestria with Twilight Sparkle, an Equestrian program broadcast over most of the major Earth networks. The show’s title character conceived of a protocol for establishing the personhood of candidate animals, which she named the Turning Test. Twilight Sparkle, despite being a highly educated individual, was apparently not familiar with the Turing Test, a protocol proposed in 1950 by the British mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist Alan Turing for establishing the ability of artificial intelligences to mimic the behavior of thinking beings, if not actually to think themselves. If she were, chances are she would have chosen a less similar-sounding name for her own invention.
“Bearing this in mind, consider how many other coincidental puns or other similarities to our own works Princess Twilight Sparkle might conceive of were she not so well read! Now consider the relationship between the two worlds on a broader scale and we arrive at the following thesis: The more we know of each other’s cultures—and in particular, the more Equestrians know of ours—the fewer coincidences of this nature will crop up. Any Terran term that acquires household usage in Equestria will not see a syntactically similar term coined for some similar Equestrian concept. Our inventions may spread to Equestria through cultural osmosis; our sports may be played there, our holidays may be observed; but any that become known will not be echoed through parallel development there just as so many have been in the past. Equestrian ‘echoing’ of Terran culture seems to be the primary material of the fabric that joins us, yet this echoing has been happening less and less the more they know about us. No phenomenon like this ‘echo’ has ever been observed before, short of (arguably) some properties of quantum entanglement, and yet no one seems to inclined to consider its preservation.
“It may seem perverse to suggest stifling the flow of information to Equestria. It is natural for friendly cultures to share information about themselves, as doing so typically costs nothing and gains much. Yet it is surely worth considering the possibility that in this one, singular case, such an ethic should be examined, just in case the hidden cost turns out be much greater and more tragic than anyone can currently imagine.”
The sound of hooves on tile jerked my attention from the paper up to the pony standing before me.
“Hi, Sparky,” I said.
“Hello, Pepper,” said Peach.
I folded the newspaper, almost ashamed of the column I’d been reading and not wanting Peach to see it. “I read your blog earlier,” I told her.
“What did you think?”
“It was definitely something to think about. But I’m surprised you only mentioned the fireworks at the end. I’d been expecting you to write a whole entry on your night out.” I’d known Kellydell and Seaswell had invited Peach out to the Macy’s fireworks extravaganza, and I’d been looking forward to her reaction.
“I still might. We did have a great time.”
“So, why princesses, then?”
Peach winked. “I had my reasons. Laying the groundwork. Setting the scene. How about you? Did you do anything fun for Independence Night?”
Peach had a way with words that made her irresistibly cute. Yet, in the shadow of the column, I wondered how much of that cuteness would be lost, the more fluent with American culture and language she became.
“We don’t call it Independence Night,” I told her. “It’s Independence Day, or just the fourth of July. As it happens, my friend Barrett had a barbecue. I went over and had a great time, hung out with with some people I hadn’t seen in a long time, met a few new ones. It was just what I needed to get out of the slump I was in.”
A big grin spread over Peach’s face, all the way to her perked ears. “Well, thank the stars for holidays!”
“Yeah, I guess so!’
“Weird how sometimes people need a calendar to tell them to do what’s good for them anyway.”
“Is it like that on the other side?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely. We Equestrians love our holidays. I think my favorite is Hearth’s Warming. Come to think of it, that’s kind of our own birth of the country day. Except it’s not about independence. At all. Really, it’s kind of the opposite.”
“Dependence Day,” I suggested.
“Yeah Dependence Day. Funny how that works. Your holiday about the birth of your country is about being free and making your own way, and ours is about coming together in the cold and realizing we all depend on each other to survive.”
I took that in. “Really, Hearth’s Warming corresponds to Christmas, though.”
“Oh yeah! Now I remember.”
I considered dissecting the meaning of Christmas, but decided we weren’t ready to have a conversation about religion yet. “So, you never really said why you blogged about princesses. What were you laying the groundwork for?”
Peach sat down, which meant putting both her seat and front hooves on the seat of the chair, and smiled mischievously. “Okay, guessing time. Kellydell gave me something last night when we went out for fireworks. What. Do you think. It was?”
I was at a loss, though Peach’s excitement was contagious. “Um… more clothes?”
“No, silly! She wouldn’t do that unless we went shopping together. That’s half the fun!”
“Well then…” I hemmed.
“I’ll give you a hint. It’s made of paper.”
“…An origami crane? No, wait. The title to something? Peach, did she give you a car?!”
She stared at me before bursting out laughing. “No! A car would be worth thousands of dollars! This was only worth hundreds of dollars.”
“Wow, really?”
Her expression went smug. “Now that I’ve got your expectations all puffed up, I’ll tell you. She got me a VIP ticket plus guest to see Princess Cadance’s address at Radio City!”
I suddenly had a weird mixed feeling in my stomach, but it was mostly good. “Wow! That’s wonderful, Sparky.”
“It is! I’ve never even seen a princess before in real life. And now maybe I’ll be able to meet one!”
“Kellydell must really like you.”
“She says I’m adorable.”
“Well, I can’t say she’s wrong. A VIP ticket?”
“She told the ticket office I was one of the most prominent pony bloggers on Earth. Which I guess is true! There isn’t a whole lot of competition, but this last week I got links from PonyPony and The Canterlot Portal, and my view count skyrocketed. I’m getting like four thousand visits a day!”
“Wow, Peach! That’s impressive. I wonder if it’ll last.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been posting on other pony blogs and forums, especially the ones about ponies here on Earth. And I’m gonna make sure to keep putting up content. I took today off work, so I’m planning to write a few more posts and some poems later today.”
My weird feeling was getting tinglier. “I’m really proud of you, Peach.”
“It might not last. I realize that. But I owe you a lot for your help.”
“I think we should celebrate. How about a slice of cheesecake?”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Meg to show up?”
Somehow I wasn’t really nervous about Meg anymore. “We’ll wait to get lunch. But since we’re here now, we can have dessert first.”
Peach put a hoof to mouth to cover her smile. “Let’s do it.”
So we each got cheesecake. We sat at tables near the wall, watching the occasional customer wander in or order something at the counter. I could tell Peach wanted to go introduce herself to the ponies who passed by, but she held off. Because she was with me. I felt touched.
“So do you want to go?” she asked.
“Go already? But what about Meg?
“No! I mean, go to Radio City with me! I have a guest ticket!”
My eyes widened. “Go to Radio City? You’re inviting me to see Princess Cadance with you?”
“Of course!”
I hesitated a moment before asking, “You’re sure you don’t want to go with George?”
It was her turn to hesitate. “He’s going to be working at the Metropolitan that day.”
“So you asked him first.”
“I didn’t want to say so. Yes, I asked him first. But that’s only ‘cause Cadance really is, you know, his princess.”
“He’s not a crystal pony.”
“You know what I mean. I just thought he’d appreciate it more than you would.”
I felt a little emotional dagger at that, but I decided not to make a thing out of it. “You’re probably right. He’s been working on that exhibit on love through the ages, and he likes meeting famous people. But you know what? I’ll appreciate it too. I will go.”
“Great!” She set one hind hoof on the tabletop and hugged me over our cheesecakes.
“So where is Radio City?” Peach asked once we were seated again. “Is it a suburb of New York?”
“Uh, no, it’s part of Rockefeller Center. Here in Manhattan.”
“Oh! Then it should be easy to—” She leaned suddenly to one side and peered past me. “Second Sight!”
I turned around. There was a dusky yellow pony walking by, a unicorn mare with a brown vest and… goggles. No, just really big glasses. Or were they goggles? Her cutie mark was an eye with arrows heading out left and right from it, and her mane and tail were bright purple.
“Peach Spark.” The dusky yellow mare adjusted her path toward us without missing a step. “And Ronald Pfeffer. A pleasure to meet you at last.”
“Um.” I held out my hand, and she plopped her hoof in it and shook it. “Did you know I was going to be here?”
“On some level.” Her face formed a tiny, eerie smile. “But I didn’t realize it until I saw you.”
“Pepper, this is Second Sight,” said Peach. “If you’re wondering how she knew your name, it’s magic.”
“It was more logical inference than magic,” said Second Sight. “You haven’t mentioned any other human friends.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“You’re not actually,” said Second Sight, “but I ascribe that to initial confusion. It happens a lot.”
“Um…”
“It’s all right, Pepper. She’s just like this.”
I took a deep breath. “Well, then. I… remember the note you helped write for me. And the drawing! It was really something. Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome! I enjoy collaborative art. It’s full of rare surprises.”
“We do should something else like that,” suggested Peach.
“Peach tells me that you enjoyed playing with my magnetics kit,” Second Sight said with a hint of extra meaning. “I can see she wasn’t mistaken.”
I swallowed. “Are you reading my mind?”
“No. I’m just looking at it.”
“Wow. That’s… totally not creepy.”
Second Sight inclined her head to Peach. “Sarcasm,” she murmured.
“Yeah I know,” said Peach. “You know, telling people what they’re feeling isn’t really polite, Sighty. You can freak them out that way.”
“True. I once tried restraining myself from making any observation informed by my magical powers. I lasted four days before I decided the strain on my faculties was too great. It isn’t always easy for me to differentiate what I know because of my special talent from what I know from mere observation and cogitation.”
I gave Peach an urgent look as if to ask whether there was any way out of this conversation.
“Well, maybe you could just try cutting down on the really blatant stuff,” Peach suggested. “Don’t make a rule out of it, just a guideline.”
“I know that you prefer guidelines to rules,” said Second Sight. “I personally find them more cumbersome. But in any case, we’re making Mr. Pfeffer uncomfortable. I’ll retire to the nook and you can join me later if you desire.”
“Right, sure,” said Peach.
“Uh, see you later,” I managed. Second Sight nodded as she walked away.
“You get used to her,” Peach told me once she was out of earshot.
“That was so strange. Is her power to know what everyone around her is feeling?”
“Yeah, basically. If you think about something really hard, she can tell. She also knows where living things are.”
“So she can track people?”
“I think she could track one person in an empty building, but not through a crowd. But she’s always working on strengthening her own powers.”
“So that she can get even more creepy?”
Peach grimaced. “Well, you can’t blame someone for trying to improve themselves.”
I went back to my cheesecake. “Assuming that seeing better into other people’s heads is an improvement.”
Peach joined me and took a bite. “When I first met her, she saw that I was confused about what I was doing here. We went for a long walk and she helped me sort things out. That was what led to me thinking of starting a blog in the first place.”
Huh! Well, that’s nice.”
“Yeah, she’s a kind person, even if she comes off like a freak. She’s trying to talk me into quitting my job and coming to work at her lab.”
“Is it actually her lab? As in, she owns it?”
“Oh, no, it’s human-run. But she loves her work and thinks they’d hire me if I applied.”
“Are you tempted?”
“A little! But I feel like I should at least stick with ThuneTec until I’ve got my money in order. I like Second Sight, but I’m not ready to trust her with that big a decision. You know what I mean?”
I did. We talked for a while about trust, and about how to decide when it’s time for a new job, and about our respective financial situations. We’d just finished off the last of the cheesecake when…
The clearing of a delicate throat, in a tone that was more like a word than a bodily function.
I looked over and there she was. In a dress. Who wears a dress to a coffeeshop? Standing nervously, but not hanging back. Wispy long brown hair with waves there, and there. A pair of bags in one hand. Why did she need two bags? I still liked the way her neckline looked, and that hollow spot in her throat.
“Hi, Meg,” I said.
“It’s good to see you two again,” she said. She cleared her throat again, this time because she needed it.
“Likewise!” said Peach.
Meg glanced around the main room. “I see a couple of ponies are here. Will more show up later?”
“They’re gathered around the corner,” Peach explained. “We call it the nook. Want to go see, or talk a little first?”
“Will they accept me?”
“Who knows! I accept you.”
Meg held her bags in both hands in front of herself. “Do you?” she asked quietly.
“Sure! You rode me hard and now I’m tamed.”
“Is that what it takes?” I murmured across the table.
Meg blushed. “I don’t believe that for a moment. Is there anything I should know before I go and talk to them?” I was curious about that, too.
“Well,” said Peach, “just keep in mind that this is one of the only places we get to spend time with just other ponies. So if it seems like they want their privacy, you should probably respect it.”
Meg looked saddened by that, but nodded. “I’m ready.”
She didn’t seem interested in talking to me at all. I’d actually started to wonder if she was trying to court Peach, but now it looked like she was more interested in meeting other ponies. I exchanged a glance with Peach as we got up, but our glances weren’t the same. Mine was disappointed, but she was just puzzled.
I packed up my laptop and we strolled around the corner. The faint sweet scent got stronger. When we’d come to Turtlewood before, it had been at a random time, and we’d met just three other ponies. This, though, was the weekly meet-up. There was a babble of conversation as we rounded the corner into the nook, mixed with the sound of magic quietly shimmering as unicorns lifted glasses and napkins. The two faux-leather sofas were full of ponies. I counted nine, and everyone was there. George was the first to notice me—he looked startled in my direction for a moment, then gave a cordial nod. Second Sight didn’t look over. Kellydell was in the middle of saying something to a hefty beige mare when Seaswell stroked her back with his wing and gestured toward us.
“Hi everyone!” greeted Peach.
We were caught in a mess of hellos and introductions. Meg stood well back, clutching her bags and waiting to be addressed.
“Did you come with Peach?” asked Kellydell eventually.
“Yes. I’m Meg Dougherty.” She shook Kellydell’s hoof, and a few more hooves, before explaining why she was there. “I’ve always been a fan of ponies,” she told everyone nervously. “From before, I mean.”
“From before we were real?” joshed the big beige earth mare whose cutie mark was a trio of orange leaves.
Meg shook her head tightly. “From before everyone liked them.”
I could tell the group was confused. I was confused. But Meg proceeded to pull open the larger of her two bags and dump the contents on the table.
It was a mass of pastel plastic. Pony figurines. And accessories.
Generation one.
The ponies hushed up for just a second, then erupted in three or four babbled conversations among themselves. They crowded forward to take a look.
“This is Love Petal,” said Meg, setting upright a white figure with pink hair and pale pink patterns covering her body. “She was the first pony I got, and she’s always been my favorite. She tends to be the heroine of my stories.”
“Is she covered in tattoos?” someone asked.
“That’s just the way she is. She’s one of the Flower Fantasy Ponies. They were all like that. They were still making them when I was little, but then they stopped for a while, so I treasured the ones I had.”
The figure lifted off the table in a swirl of someone’s white magic, but Meg took it back and set out another one, light green with a pink mane and purple tail. “This is Seabreeze. She means a lot to me because I got her through mail order. I had to save up Horseshoe Points and keep all my mother’s receipts until I had enough. And then she came.”
“They mailed that to you?” asked a light blue earth mare whose cutie mark was a row of collapsing dominoes.
“She was the only one of the new ponies we could get, at first,” Meg explained. “They said she came from a faraway Spanish garden and loved to go walking on the beach.”
“What’s Spanish?” someone asked.
“That’s the place over the pond, where everybody wears boots,” explained George.
“Why are her mane and her tail different colors?” asked someone else.
“You earned her,” said Seaswell, unfurling his wings and stepping up. “Way to go!”
“There aren’t very many green ponies,” Meg explained, as the ponies started to handle the pony toys. “They said that green doesn’t sell.”
“Green doesn’t sell?” objected Kellydell incredulously. “What does that mean?”
Meg looked afraid. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, or anyone else who’s green. I just mean the people who made the toys decided that little girls didn’t want to buy the green ones. So they didn’t make very many, and that’s the other reason why Seabreeze is precious to me.”
Kellydell and Seaswell looked at each other for a long moment.
I couldn’t tell whether they were having an existential moment or sharing their disgust, but I wanted to laugh. Instead, I followed an impulse and started quietly singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Eventually, everyone was quietly listening to me sing, and I gathered my courage and powered through. On the line, “But green’s the color of spring,” I was delighted to hear Meg join in.
There was some polite clomping on the floor, but it was mixed with confusion. “But… you’re not green,” a little white unicorn stallion pointed out hesitantly, as if I really might be and he just didn’t see it.
“It’s a song Kermit the Frog sang,” I explained.
“A frog sang it, you say?” George seemed intrigued. “Blimey, but I’d like to see that.”
“Not a real frog,” Meg hastened to explain. “A puppet. A famous fake frog.”
A lavender pegasus mare stepped up and tapped the table. “Is that anything like all these fake ponies?”
Meg stood her pony figurines up, one by one. “Something like it. Most of these ponies don’t really have stories, but some do. She held up a gold earth pony with pink hair and flowers on her rump. “This is Posey. She was in My Little Pony 'n Friends. She was the gardener of Paradise Estate and caretaker to the foals.”
“She looks sort of like Fluttershy,” pointed out the lavender pegasus.
“She’s the precursor to Fluttershy,” said Second Sight, “but she wasn’t the same.”
“What does that mean, the precursor?” asked Kellydell.
“She came before her,” said Meg. “Lauren Faust based Fluttershy on her. But yes, Posey was her own pony. Fluttershy loves animals… and Posey loved flowers.” She peered lovingly at her toy. “And Posey was awkward… but not shy.”
Peach brushed her tail against my leg. “This is so weird,” she whispered to me.
“I wonder if I have a precursor,” wondered Seaswell.
“I don’t think anyone in this room had a precursor,” rejoined Kellydell, “because none of us were in the show! No one ever dreamed up our fictional counterparts.”
“I’m afraid I can’t speak to that,” said Meg. “But I just wanted to tell you about some of my favorites.” There was uncertain shuffling. “If anypony would like to know more, I’d be glad to share.”
The beige earth pony stepped up. “But why did you bring these here?”
“I thought… maybe some of you would like to play,” said Meg.
“Play? Play what?”
“Play ponies,” answered Second Sight.
“Play… ponies?” repeated Kellydell.
“I think she means play with the dolls,” said the little white unicorn, “and pretend to be whoever they are.”
There was an awkward silence. Meg started to gather up her toys stiffly back into her bag. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This was a foolish idea.”
“I’ll play,” said George Harrison.
Meg looked sharply at him. “You will?” Her voice was more doubtful than relieved.
“Why not?” He ambled up and looked over the figures. “Who’s this one, then?” he asked.
“That’s Gusty,” said Meg. “She knows how to call the wind.”
“Suits me,” said George.
“You can’t be Gusty!” objected the lavender unicorn. “She’s a girl!”
“They were all girls back then,” said Meg quietly. She paused. “But come to think of it, I think the same actress did the voice of Bart Simpson. And he was a boy. So I think you’re okay.”
This led to more questions, but the door was opened. Peach agreed to play, and so did I. Second Sight, in her usual weird way, said that she didn’t think she could safely play, but that she would watch. Eventually half the group was having a conversation on the sofas, led by Kellydell, and half of us were at the tables, playing ponies.
This had turned out to be a date after all. A play date.
“I call Princess Luna,” said the light blue earth mare with the domino cutie mark.
Meg shook her head sadly. “I don’t have one of her. I don’t have any toys of real ponies. It didn’t seem respectful.”
“Then I’ll take whoever their princess was.”
“They didn’t have any princesses. Not the ones in the shows, anyway.” She passed over a primrose figure with blue hair and an inset gem for a cutie mark. “Or rather, there was a castle full of princesses, but they lived apart from everyone else and didn’t seem to rule anyone.”
The blue mare didn’t seem pleased. “Then who was in charge?”
“No one was in charge,” said Meg softly. “Some were more like leaders than others, but they made decisions as a team.”
“That doesn’t sound very realistic.”
“More than you know,” said George. “That’s how they did it in the old country, where I’m from. Still do. Mind, there’s prefects, so they’re not utterly leaderless, but a prefect’s only got as much power as the respect she wields.”
“Are these ponies from the old country?” asked Peach, gesturing to the whole tableful.
“The old ones are, yes. I think so, anyway,” answered Meg.
“The older pony shows aren’t true accounts,” said George. “There never was a Gusty, or a Posey. But they’re not all that different from how things used to be. Ponies used to live without rulers. It was a different time. Enemies around every corner, and little bands struggling to make life livable.”
“And without human friends to help them out,” said Meg.
The beige mare laughed heartily. “Of course not! They threw that in from sheer ego. Can’t have a kids’ show without some kids in it, right?”
“They took them out,” said Meg. “For the other shows.”
“So I can’t play a princess?” asked the blue mare.
“You can if you really want to,” said Meg. “But don’t be surprised if the rest of us don’t do what you say.”
Peach picked up a figure. “Here’s another green one. Is her cutie mark really a bunch of milkshakes?”
“Yes, it is,” said Meg. “That’s Fizzy. She’s always talking, but she hardly knows up from down. She has magic over bubbles.”
Peach grinned a silly grin. “I’ll take her. Let’s do this thing. What’s our story?”
I looked around, wanting to help. I grabbed a plastic sandwich container without a sandwich in it and put it on the edge of the table, flapping its top half like a giant monster. “The Eaters have come,” I told everyone. “They’re done eating whatever was in the next valley, and now they’re hungry for more.”
“Perfect!” laughed Meg, giving me a little happy glance. She picked up a pink pegasus with multicolored hair. “I’m Whizzer. I’m the fastest flier around, and I’m the fastest talker, too! If anyone can fight the Eaters, it’s probably me!”
“Let’s not ignore the power of the wind,” said George, pushing his pony forward. “Seems to me those critters are flimsy and none too heavy. Couldn’t I just blow them away?”
“Maybe you can,” I said. “But they’ll just keep coming back!” I slowly advanced my plastic container and used it to devour one of the miscellaneous ponies lying on the table.
“Oh, no you don’t!” shouted the blue earth mare, wresting the devoured pony out and fighting back. “I won’t go lying down!”
And so we played. For a good hour. It was interesting to see Meg as the loquacious Whizzer. She didn’t talk any louder than normal, but she did talk a lot more. Peach got to let loose her scatterbrained side as Fizzy, then switched from sodas to ice cream when she took on Lickety-Split. I played the villains for a while, then picked a pony of my own as the story changed. Every so often, it occurred to me just how strange a situation I was in. Playing toy pastel ponies with the real things around me. A part of my mind asked whether this wasn’t pointless. Why play a childish game when I had a room full of genuine talking ponies around me? I could strike up a conversation and try to get to know them, the way I’d gotten to know Peach. It would be so much less silly.
But this felt right, somehow, and it was what we wanted to do—three earth ponies, a unicorn, a girl and me. Meanwhile, the rest chatted on the sofas and eventually left to go about their lives here on Earth.
“Tzzt! Buttons winks out and goes back to Paradise Estate,” said Meg.
“Wait, Buttons can wink out, too?!” protested the sky blue earth mare, now playing one of the villains.
“All the unicorns can wink in and out,” said Meg.
“Bullcakes!” said Peach. “Teleportation is advanced stuff! I think only one unicorn in eleven can do it.”
“They could do more, back in the old days,” said George, still playing Gusty. “Winking is easy—just turn your mind a certain way, and pammf!” He zipped his figure across the table.
“Are you lecturing me about magic?” Peach countered.
“I’m just telling. An earth pony like you, Lickety-Split, could never be capable of really understanding magic.”
Peach was discombobulated at first. Then, fired up, she leaned across the table. “Try me!”
“Well, I know taste is your favorite sense,” said George. “Magic is like a sixth sense. You feel it in your horn, but it’s all through your body as well. It’s like waking up on a summer morning and remembering you slept out of doors.”
“No it’s not!” laughed Peach.
George shrugged one shoulder. “Well, I wouldn’t expect an earth pony who spends her days making ice cream sundaes to understand.”
Peach picked up the pile of unused ponies with her magic and dropped them abruptly, scattering them. “How’s that for magic?”
The big beige mare laughed. “Are we playing, or are we squabbling?”
Meg smiled thinly. “I think maybe that’s enough,” she suggested. “We’ve had our fun, and it was a really good time. But it’s coming up on one, and I should be going.”
“Oh alicorns, I was due back at work twenty minutes ago,” said the beige mare. “Lunch break can only stretch so far. Nice to meet you, Meg… come again sometime, won’t you?”
Meg drew a quiet, swift breath. “I think I will.”
“We’re done?” asked the blue mare. “I didn’t get to tear Paradise Estate to the ground!”
“You can do that next time,” said Meg. “Thank you for playing.”
Second Sight spoke up for the first time since the game began. “Everyone had a good time, on balance. Thank you for bringing these toys, Meg. It was collaborative.”
Meg raised an eyebrow at her, but Second Sight just walked away.
I helped Meg put her toys away as the remaining ponies dispersed. “So.”
“So,” she said. “Thanks for introducing me, Ron.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to meet up somewhere else sometime?”
She paused and took a long, hard look at me, the only good look she’d ever given me. She let a breath in and out.
“I’m sorry, Ron,” she eventually said.
I nodded. “That’s fine,” I said, as if it really were. “I figured.”
We finished cleaning up. Meg said a few words to Peach in private on her way out.
George ambled up to me. “Shot you down, did she? I’m sorry, mate.”
I wasn’t as annoyed with him as I felt I ought to be. “It’s okay.’
“I figured she was just using you as an excuse to meet us. I’m used to it by now. Plenty of human folk just can’t get their minds around us. Most keep their distance and try to forget we exist, but a good few stumble over their own toes trying to say hello. I try to be kind to both sorts.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re not either kind, Sergeant. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Being nice to you’s easy.”
I looked George in the eyes. Soft brown eyes that sometimes seemed bright, sometimes dark. “I never know whether to take you seriously,” I told him.
“Serious or not, I usually mean what I say,” he replied.
Peach stepped up, interrupting. “Like when you told me I could never understand magic?”
“Well, in that case, I was just playing around, Spark. No hard feelings? It felt nice to have a horn on my head for once.”
Peach smiled slowly. “What you said about magic. You just made that up?”
George shrugged. “A colt’s got to have fantasies.”
“No hard feelings, then. I like the way you think. Even if I have trouble telling when to take you seriously, too.”
George sighed. “I’ll take it. May I buy you a cup of something to make it up, Miss Peaches?”
Peach looked embarrassedly at me. “Pepper’s right here. Doesn’t he get to buy me something?”
“Of course he does. Does that mean you’re once more amenable to being courted, Miss Peaches?”
Peach looked between the two of us. “We’re just friends,” she said decisively. “The three of us. No one is courting anyone. Because, George, if my family had heard you even joking about knowing more about magic than me.” She shook her head.
I actually felt sorry for George in that moment.
We got a round of coffees, everyone paying for themselves. George took his with honey. I took cream. Peach put cinnamon in hers.
While Peach was returning the mugs, George spoke softly to me. “So you’re going to see Princess Cadance with her?”
I nodded. “She told me she asked you first.”
“She did. I wish I could go.” He looked wistfully into the air. “But seeing as I can’t… good luck.”
“Good luck?”
He faced me. “That mare’s a prisoner to her conscience. I’d like to see her freed. If it can’t be me, it should be you. So. Good luck.” He raised his hoof for a shake, and I bumped it with my fist. He seemed satisfied with that.
Peach returned. “We’re still on for the Metropolitan next Wednesday, right?” she asked George.
“Right as rain. It’ll be good to show a lady where I’ve been spending my influence these past few weeks.”
“And the Saturday after that,” she went on, turning to me with excitement. “Radio City, here we come!”
I grinned, with a little effort. “Here we come. Thanks so much for inviting me.”
Peach stood on her hind legs and gave me a hug. We murmured our goodbyes and she left.
But George remained, sitting across from me and looking out the window. He was the last pony in Turtlewood and seemed in no hurry to leave.
I stood up to go. “See you around, George.”
He turned to me. “Oh, one last thing. Figured out yet what your cutie mark would be?”
I swallowed and shook my head.
“Pity. Well, there’s always tomorrow. Be seeing you.”
He looked out the window again, and I walked out with a lump in my throat.