//------------------------------// // 6:26 PM - Dinner // Story: Before Closing // by Rambling Writer //------------------------------// I looked up from my aloeburger mid-bite. “Hey, doeff dif coun’ af a dae’?” I swallowed. “We’re talking, walking around a carnival, eating together… What do you think?” Aegis shrugged. “Don’t think so.” He took a small bite of salad. “You’re paying for you, I’m paying for me. Probably not.” The food court was busy, loud, and smelled like heaven. We’d gotten hungry and arrived just as the dinner rush was entering full swing, but the employees were working fast, so the lines weren’t too terribly awful. Against our better judgement, we’d gone to a fast-food stand. It was cheap, and it’d fill our stomachs for tonight, even if we felt terrible the next morning. It was kind of a hard sell, though; I could see delicious peach cobblers here, rich brown wheat there, and have you ever smelled a properly-made Neightalian bouquet? With the jasmines, the oleanders, the crocuses? I swear, if I could live off that smell, I would. But everyone else had the same thought, and the line was already real long by the time we arrived. And, well, it’s expensive. Aloeburgers and quickie salads, on the other hoof, aren’t. I took another bite. “Uffer cupples do da’.” I swallowed. “You know, going Dutch. From the Neightherlands.” “Do they do it this early, though?” asked Aegis. “I mean, at this stage, we’re still just acquaintances eating together. Maybe friends. But not much more than that. First date, guy pays for the whole thing, right? ‘Cause it’s romantic. But you’re just doing you, I’m just doing me. We’re not even splitting the bill and doing each other.” I choked on a bit of lettuce. “You did not just say that.” Aegis seemed to be having a bad time of that tonight. Realization hit him and he laughed. “So, no, of course it’s not a date! We’re not doing each other. Ergo, no date.” At least he could laugh at himself when he messed up. I probably couldn’t do that, at least not when I said something like that. As for dates, he had a point. It did vary, of course, but tradition generally dictated guy pays for girl (when it was guy and girl as opposed to two guys or two girls). No, probably not a date. Slurps started emanating from his cup, and Aegis pushed his chair away as he stood up. “Gonna go get some more root beer. Want anything? Water? Soda?” “Water’s fine.” “Aight. Back in a sec.” And he was off towards the soda fountain. As he was away, I kept chewing at my burger and occasionally taking slurps of melting ice from my cup. Today was turning out better than I thought it would. Aegis was surprisingly personable. Maybe not suave, but I didn’t want suave, and I hadn’t been expecting it. Not from his first stutters. Besides, I was a bit paranoid that suave guys were playing me somehow. But Aegis just felt too genuine for that. Too real. He laughed at his mistakes, made dumb jokes, sometimes said the wrong things at the wrong times… He wasn’t trying to wear a mask to please me, I didn’t think. He was just being himself. It was a shame he had to leave in a few hours. Aegis was back, levitating his drinks in front of him. “Alright, random fact time,” he said as he slid my water towards me. “We still don’t know that much about each other. So why don’t we tell each other something interesting about ourselves? Something that probably won’t come up in normal conversation.” “What if we don’t have anything interesting?” I just wanted to see what he’d say to that; I already had something lined up. He lightly jabbed his fork in my direction. “That, my friend, is impossible. Everypony’s got something interesting about them, even if they don’t think it’s interesting. I once knew some girl who didn’t think she was all that interesting… and then I learned she was making a whole new language for some stories she was writing.” My jaw dropped. “She didn’t think conlanging was interesting?” “Nope.” “Oh, come on, that’s…” I shook my head. “She must’ve been pulling your leg or something. I mean, how can making a whole new language not be interesting? Whether or not it’s a good language is beside the point, that’s… That’s a lot of effort. You’ve gotta make all the grammar, the nouns, the verbs, the…” My voice trailed off as I tried to remember more of my Equestrian lessons, but no more names came up. “…the stuff.” Aegis nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I said. Labor of love, you know? But she just thought anyone could do that if they wanted.” “I suppose I could do that. Right after I go to the Badlands and beat up every single changeling.” “But right before you teach yaks ballet, amIright?” “Heh. Yeah.” Aegis stabbed a cheese cube in his salad with his fork. “Anyway, back to interesting facts. You want to go first or me?” He popped the cheese into his mouth. “I’ll go.” I leaned over the table towards him, my head propped up on my front hooves. “My family’s lived here since Equestria was founded. We were some of the first earth ponies to leave the old lands and settle down in the new ones.” Aegis’s only reaction was to blink. It was the kind of shocked blink you do when you can’t really do anything else. “Wow,” he said quietly. “That’s… pretty cool, actually. Your family must be really dug in.” “You kidding me? If you want to get technical, we still have a manor,” I said, grinning. This was always something I’d liked about home. “We use the surrounding lands to grow our crops. Some ponies may say they have ancestral homes, but my family’s got one that’s stretched back for over a thousand years. If there’s any out there that’s older, I haven’t heard of it.” “Been updated a lot?” “Actually, no,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s pretty solidly built, and it’s held up real well. There’s been some modernization — plumbing, for starters — but not that much. Those houses were built to last.” I was kind of surprised at how interested Aegis was in this. Most ponies, I tell them that, and they’re like, “You live in an old house. Interesting.” and immediately change the subject because that last word was a lie. Aegis seemed to actually get the ties I had with the place. I’d have to ask him if he had something like that. In between chewing on one of the last croutons, Aegis asked, “So who inherits it, when the previous generation bites it? Firstborn?” “Yeah. Regardless of gender. And if they don’t want it, it goes to the next one. I’ve got an older brother, but he’s moving to Vanhoover, so I’ll be taking over.” Crunch. “Lucky.” “Yep. Oh, and depending on who you believe, my family’s been here since before Equestria was founded. Like, my grandpa, he says we were smart enough to book it out of the old lands when the windigos showed up. Me, I’m a bit skeptical. It’s nice to think that my ancestors were that smart, but it seems a bit too nice.” I shoveled the last of my burger into my mouth. “Ogay. Yoah tuhn.” “I’m technically nobility.” That was a surprise. I struggled to swallow my burger. I’d never really met any nobles before. I’d talked with a few, sure, they often bought some of our food, but I’d never met them. From my experience, it was split roughly ten percent between nice guys and gals, ten percent between entitled anuses, and eighty percent disinterested customers who happened to be nobles. And if Aegis was technically nobility, what was he doing at a carnival like this? He spoke again before I could swallow. “But that’s only if you want to get really technical,” he said. “Like, de jure technical. De facto, I’m just a stallion with a slightly interesting family tree, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.” I finally managed to get my burger down. “How does that work out? An ancestor get cut out of the will over something?” Aegis grinned. “Bingo. It was my great-great-…” He frowned and paused. He tapped his hoof against the table a few times, his lips moving soundlessly. “…-great-grandmother, I think. She wanted to ma-” I held up a hoof to stop him. “Wait, wait, lemme guess. Wanted to marry a commoner, family got all grouchy, she wouldn’t bend, they kicked her out, she got married, star-crossed lovers lived happily ever after.” It sounded cliche, but cliches were cliches for a reason, after all. “In one!” he said, smacking the tabletop with a hoof. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. See, Great-Granny first met Great-Grandpa around the time her father was dying. Her family found out and threatened to have excised from the will. She relented until her dad had finally died. She promptly sold all the stuff she’d inherited, including the land, and took off with Great-Grandpa before anypony else knew what was going on. The family pretty much ignored her from then on out, and she ignored them.” He grinned. “But for some reason, they never actually formally stripped her of her title. It’s like they just figured, why bother? She never went back to them, and never used that title again, but she technically still had it. And titles in nobility are inherited, so…” “So all her descendants also kept her title,” I finished. “Huh.” It felt a little shaky to me, but there was no denying that it was a fun little anecdote. “Don’t think it’d hold up in court, though,” Aegis added, “and I don’t put any stock in it, myself. It’s just something interesting about my family.” That might explain his interest in my family home, actually. Nobles prided themselves on their family lines, so even if he didn’t think of himself as a noble, it might get him invested in his own line. Something like history or genealogy. So once he had that, he’d probably get attracted to places that had a long history. Like millennia-old ancestral homes. But that’d depend on him actually being interested in history in the first place. Just because you were a noble didn’t mean you were a historian; they might be invested in their family tree simply so they could wave it around and say, my tree’s bigger than your tree. I wondered how much he’d enjoy history if he’d never learned of his ancestry. I coughed. “So, um, if you don’t mind me asking, are there any famous nobles I’d know of that you’re related to through her?” He preened. “Well, I don’t mean to brag, but… Prince Blueblood.” Oh. Um. Yeah. Him. The lousiest, most self-centered noble of all. The one who made tabloid headlines every other day with his moronic antics and kept pushing for inane legislature that’d prop up the nobles even more, especially when they didn’t need it. The one everypony pointed to when asked to name nobles who could do with having their title stripped, if only temporarily. The one who was the most full of himself because of something he’d “earned” solely by happening to pop out of the right mare’s vagina. And Aegis was proud of being related to… that. Uh. Well. The words were out before I could stop them. “I am so sorry.” Aegis was drinking his root beer at the time. He clapped his hoof to his mouth and managed to avoid a spit take, but that just meant he snorted it all out his nose instead. And guess who was sitting right in the line of fire? Yeah. I probably deserved it, but ugh. I sat there for a moment, just staring him and blinking through the root beer dripping down my face, as Aegis shook his head and snorted out of his nostrils. He grabbed a napkin with his magic and blew his nose. “Sweet Luna, does that clear out your sinuses,” he muttered. “Wow.” Then he saw me and snickered. “Sorry, sorry,” he giggled as he wiped me down with a clean napkin. “But that timing was perfect.” I shook a few stray drops out my mane. “What?” “I don’t actually care about who I’m related to,” he said. He took a sip of root beer. “I really am distantly related to Blueblood — I think we’re like fourth cousins — but he’s, let’s not put too fine a term on it here, a jackass.” “Hey! Donkeys are perfectly nice people. Stop comparing them to him.” Aegis giggled. “He’s a moron, a jerk, an ignoramus, a git, a lout. Any one of those, take your pick. And he’s famous for it, as long as you’re not starstruck by his looks. So I can have some fun with ponies by telling them I’m related to him, acting like that means something good, and see how they react. It’s amazing how many ponies try to smile, say ‘that’s nice’, and promptly change the subject. So when you say that…” He giggled again. “It’s funny.” I cocked my head. “You really think so? It’s not that funny. Just something I made up on the spot.” “It is to me. Trust me, there’ve been so many ponies that try to avoid insulting me that when someone says something that I agree with, it’s hilarious.” Well, at least someone was happy. Me, I couldn’t see why. It wasn’t even something I made up, I don’t think. I’d always thought that sort of thing had been around for a while. But oh well. If it made him laugh, I could live with it. The last thing Aegis had said grabbed my attention. “You agree with that?” I asked. He shrugged. “Not completely, but close enough. Just because he’s distant family doesn’t mean I have to like him. It’s, why’d you want to be related to him?” “Connections, maybe? I don’t know what the noble courts are like.” “Maybe. But I don’t really care much for him. And my mom…” Aegis whistled. “Hoooooo boy. One day, it was just after I’d turned seventeen, she said she had some terrible secret that she needed to tell me. It was just that I was related to Blueblood, but the way she talked and built up to it, I honestly thought it was something like Dad had died. She had the sad face, the mournful voice, the downcast posture, everything.” Now it was my turn to giggle. “Wow. That’s pretty grave for something that small.” “And the best part? I don’t think she was joking at all. I think she was genuinely deeply ashamed of being related to him. I can understand where she was coming from, but come on.” “Parents, huh?” “Heh. Yeah. So, random segue,” Aegis said as he stuffed his trash into his cup, “but can you think of anything else you want to do here?” “Not games. I think I’m tired of games.” And I never really liked them anyway to begin with. Except for the rope ladder. Maybe. “Then how about some rides? There’re plenty of rides here.” “Sure,” I said. “That’ll be fun.”