//------------------------------//
// Thinking 
// Story: Breakfast with Rose 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

Breakfast with Rose
Chapter 4: Thinking
Admiral Biscuit

To say I had mixed emotions would be an understatement. 

I was sitting on a bench in the park, mentally kicking myself for inadvertently volunteering to give a presentation at the school sometime in the not-so-distant future. It was a sign that they were beginning to accept me, which was good. Unfortunately, I didn't know what to speak about.

I could try to impress them with human technology—that was kind of a no-brainer. It would have been easier if I’d had any human technology to show them, but I imagined that fillies and colts were just as impressionable as elementary school boys and girls. As an adult, practically anything I told them might be believed. Cheerilee, I was confident, wouldn't contradict me. Not during the presentation, at least; perhaps afterwards she'd remind them that my stories might be made-up.

Wasn't that something that the early explorers had found? I thought I remembered that from school—they'd sent letters home about the wonders they'd discovered in exotic lands, and people at home had gotten a good laugh. Of course, some of the things they'd reported on had been true, like the platypus.

Besides, I wasn't sure what good it would do. I doubted that the majority of the schoolchildren had the sophistication to appreciate what I told them life on Earth was like. The complexity of the cell phone network would be utterly lost on them; they might find it interesting that I could hold a small device in my hand which would let me communicate with people at a distance, but for all I knew there was a simple unicorn spell that could do the same. Maybe some towns had an entire unicorn-powered telephone network.

Likewise, other parts of human technology might not impress them all that much. Cars—I’d seen a few spell-powered machines, including a wagon which had followed Twilight Sparkle to the library. Our trains were bigger, but in principle not too different than theirs, and the wonders of aviation might be lost on all the fliers in the class. Everything which I could explain reasonably well wasn’t that much different in concept than what they already had. The only difference was that human technology wasn’t spell-powered.

If Apple Flora was an indicator of what fillies were curious about, they'd want to know about me, and they'd want to know in more of a biological sense than a day-in-the-life-of sense. Cheerilee's class presentation with the drawing had no doubt raised all sorts of questions, and it was a fair bet that a lot of them went unanswered as far as the students were concerned.

The ponies might not see any problems with it, but I wasn’t going to become a living biology lesson. That was fine for a fern or some zoo animal, but there was no way I was willing to face down a bunch of bright-eyed foals with questions I wasn't comfortable answering. Even if they kept the questions benign, I probably wouldn't be able to answer half of them to their satisfaction. Since that was out, I was back to technology.

I realized that I was just thinking myself in circles, and I wasn't going to be able to come up with an answer. As often as not, I thought of the ponies like humans. Little furry quadrupedal humans. But they weren't; they were their own society who played by their own rules.

That's why my sessions with Tenderheart were so valuable. I could just blather on for an hour about whatever came to mind. She didn't usually answer any of my questions these days, but it felt like she sort of set me on the right path to find the answers on my own. As simple as it sounded, that's all that psychotherapy was sometimes, an ear you paid to listen and not judge.

That got me to wondering about medical confidentiality. Back in the old days, doctors and nurses gossiped as much as any old lady, happy to reveal your problems to anyone who'd listen. At some point, a wall had gone up, and they weren't supposed to do that any more. Even medical literature had names redacted, replaced with initials or the always-useful John Doe. Did the ponies feel that need for privacy, or didn't they? Did Tenderheart gossip about me to her drinking buddies?

How had Cheerilee come up with a drawing of me? Even as sketchy as it was, I hadn't exactly been running around town naked—well, besides last night—so had she gotten those details from talking to the nurses? Or Rarity? No, I'd kept my underwear on when Rarity measured me.

That had been a weird experience. I'd never been measured for clothes before, just bought off-the-rack stuff and tried it on in the dressing room. In retrospect, it was obvious that she would have to take measurements, but I hadn't been ready for it when her tape measure came floating over to me.

I let out a dramatic sigh and stretched out on the bench. There wasn't any reason to be getting all worked up about it. When I got up the courage, I was going to go into town naked anyway: that was apparently what it would take to help me fit in. So what did it matter where the drawing had come from? One of these days, there wasn't going to be anybody in town who didn't know. 

None of this mental rambling was helping me figure out what kind of presentation I ought to give. I wasn’t any closer to a decision, although I could console myself with the thought that I’d at least narrowed the choices somewhat.

I could list off all the Prime Ministers. I'd had to memorize them for history class, and like a lot of useless trivia I'd learned in school, it had stuck with me. Multiplying fractions had not. I knew that you were supposed to cross the top and bottom numbers to solve something, but I couldn't remember what it was. Probably x.

Or I could cover kings and queens. They had mayors and such who were elected, so the concept of lower-level government jobs being temporary wouldn't be all that fascinating. But they had a top pony—Celestia—who had been in charge forever, as far as they were concerned. The ponies were aware that there had been a time before her; apparently, it was mentioned in a play that they put on every winter. Oddly, though, nobody in town seemed to know who was in charge before she was.

I got the impression that it was a historical cut-off point. She'd been the one who’d unified modern-day Equestria, and before her there had just been separate tribes. Presumably there were historians who did know, but it clearly wasn't taught in school like the fact that Sir Charles Tupper had had the shortest term as PM. I seemed to remember that there was an American president who'd had an even shorter presidency, but I couldn't remember who it was. Garfield, maybe. He was easy to remember, since there was a cartoon cat named after him and a Johnny Cash song about him.

I tried to dredge up more useful stuff I'd learned in school which might appeal to ponies. Cheerilee hadn't really given me any guidance, which was both a blessing and a curse. Rose liked reading Daring Do, and obviously enough other ponies did that the library couldn't keep them on the shelves—so what about re-telling some human story? Even a summary . . . I could go with a traditional myth, a religious story suitably toned-down, or even something from popular culture. What would they make of Indiana Jones? He was kind of like Daring Do. Or if I wanted to go with a female character, to be more in-line with their gender defaults, Lara Croft.

I could probably skip over her huge boobs. They wouldn't understand the appeal.

Of course, that idea relied on me recounting enough facts from Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider to actually tell a decent story, and I wasn't sure I could manage to do that. Perhaps I could just make some stuff up to fill in the blanks; they wouldn’t know the difference. If Cheerilee didn’t think that was educational enough, then maybe we could discuss the differences between them and Daring Do.

Or I could go with books instead; I'd worn out a few Tamora Pierce novels. I could remember enough of Protector of the Small to give a good presentation, and they might like the idea of knights. Or else they'd be confused and offended by the idea of people riding horses. Maybe not, though—the horses of our world would be mythical giants to them, and anyway, Peachblossom had been a character in his own right. I pondered the idea of maybe enlarging his role just a bit, and dialing back Kel's.

I could try a practice run with Rose. If there was anything which needed more explanation, she’d tell me. Plus, she was probably curious too: we hadn’t really had that many conversations about what it meant to be a human or what it meant to be a pony.

The park was a good place to go and ponder—with my eyes closed, it was almost like being back on Earth. The birds and insects sounded the same to my ears, and quiet conversations in the distance could have been conversations back at home, so long as I didn't focus too hard. The ponies mostly complained and gossiped about the same things kinds of things as on Earth, the gleeful shouting of kids playing kickball or tag was occasionally followed by a kid crying and being comforted by her mother . . . best of all, their social rules kept them from bothering me when I was keeping to myself on the bench.

But then I'd open my eyes, and it would sink in. By now, I'd mostly gotten used to it, but sometimes it took me by surprise: everything seemed superficially identical at a distant glance, but the closer I looked, the odder it was. From the insects to the trees, nothing was the same. I understood why tourists liked to visit chain restaurants: you could go to a McDonald's anywhere with confidence that there’d be a Big Mac on the menu.

There certainly weren’t any McDonald’s in Ponyville, or any other chain stores for that matter. I wasn’t sure that there was much in the way of standardized anything . . . all the businesses in town were quite literally cottage industries, and all the farms were family-owned.

That led to another idea: I could tell them about modern agriculture. They'd be horrified to know that most of it was done by machine. One thing about living in a farming town was that I'd learned more about crops than any lesson in school had ever taught me, and I’d gotten the impression both from overhearing farmers and talking to the merchants at the market—who, often as not, were the same pony—that they felt it was the personal touch which made their fruits and vegetables and grains worth eating. As a buyer, you knew where it had come from, and you could be confident that the entire life of the crop had been overseen by the very same mare who was trying to interest you in her tomatoes.

Even a pony like the miller paid close attention to who she was getting her grain from, and watched over it every step of the way. The thought of it being dumped into a gigantic mill one railcar at a time would horrify her. In our modern society, the flour mills ground on relentlessly; hers shut down when the wind stopped blowing. The occasional shortage never seemed to bother the ponies, nor did the fluctuation in prices. They all considered that to be normal, and scoffed at the ponies who lived in cities and got their food via train.

Deep down, the idea of that disconnect from the local market seemed to bother them. The miller occasionally griped about her shipments to Canterlot, and how the ponies there wouldn't know who'd grown the grain or ground the flour which they were eating.

Had humans felt the same way as the cities grew and the farms grew increasingly distant? If the ponies were on the cusp of the same type of industrial revolution, they were going to be forced to watch everything that they were accustomed to shifting more and more rapidly. There had been a time, I was sure, when the shipments to Canterlot had gone one wagonload at a time, and maybe it had once had a market like Ponyville did, but when it got too big, the traditional methods had become too slow. Going forward, farms might consolidate, and the pony-drawn plows might be replaced by mechanical tractors. Would they embrace the new technology, or shun it?

Back on Earth, there were even large commercial flower-growing operations. I couldn’t imagine there being rose-harvesting combines, though. Rose's livelihood would probably be safe for her lifetime.

I probably could have sat on the bench forever, coming up with one question after another, but my thoughts were interrupted by a now-familiar filly.

“Hi, Sam! Me and Caramel Tooth were playing kickball with a couple of other fillies you probably don't know but then her mom came and she had to go home and do chores and then I saw you.”

I opened my eyes and looked into the eager face of Apple Flora. It was weird how things could come full-circle like that.

“Do you know how to multiply fractions?” I asked her. As greetings go, I could have done better.

She nodded. “We learned how in school. Miss Cheerilee is so smart—she knows all sorts of stuff.” She hopped up on the bench and stood on her hind legs. “Hey, I'm as tall as you when I stand like this.”

“Oh yeah?” I straightened my back, but her head was still slightly above mine. Still, I had an ace up my sleeve. I stood up.

“No fair.” She dropped back to her hooves and pouted.

“I could give you a piggy-back ride again,” I offered.

Her tail flicked and she dropped her head slightly. I suspected that if she'd been a pegasus she'd have been less worried about having all four of her hooves off the ground, but then, if she'd been a pegasus she could have won the 'who's tallest' competition easily.

I sat back down, and like that her mood changed. “You said that you were going to be with Rose all day, but now you're at the park.”

“I wasn't sure how long I'd be with her,” I said. “She had to go back home and work.”

“It's a lot of work to raise a crop,” Apple Flora told me. “That's why wildflowers are better, 'cause they don't need a pony's help to flourish.”

“What if it's a bad year and there aren't any?”

Her muzzle scrunched up. Clearly this hadn't occurred to her. One thing that was nice about modern civilization was that you weren't as dependent on the bounty of nature. “That couldn't happen,” she decided. “Somepony would fix it.”

I considered explaining the facts of life to her, but two things stopped me. First, for all I knew, that was actually true. If they had weather management, there was no reason why they couldn’t have their hooves on the rest of nature as well. Second, even if they didn't, there was no reason to burst her bubble, any more than I would have told a kid that neither Santa nor the Easter Bunny were real. “I guess so,” I said cautiously. “I hadn't thought of that.”

Her left ear turned off to the side suddenly, and a moment later, her head followed. I was a bit slower on the uptake; it wasn't until I'd heard a shouted greeting that it occurred to me to look towards the center of the park.

A group of fillies and colts had come in in a cluster. I recognized some of them: the pair I'd seen on my way to school were there, along with the two yellow fillies I’d seen wearing roller skates. The other four were complete strangers to me.

“Wanna play hide and seek?” the orange colt asked.

Apple Flora nodded, then turned to me. “Do you know how to play hide and seek?”

“Yeah.”

“Can Sam play too?” Not waiting for an answer, she hopped off the bench.

Her friends engaged in a hasty discussion, the end result of which was a narrow vote in my favor. I got up off the bench and walked over to them, fully anticipating losing badly.