A letter home by NachoTheBrony
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{CRASH!}
...
{CRASH!}
Aristotle Michaelis, age 61, had been violently woken up by the first horrid crashing sound.
By the second sound, he entered his disappeared son’s bedroom and saw it with a new well and skylight.
Looking down, he was in time to see the kitchen’s floor give way and {CRASH!} send whatever-it-was to the basement. And, sticking out of the cloud of dust, he saw something like a leather-bound tome on a silver tray.
Down in the kitchen, he picked it up and opened it.
The very first page was a dedication from his long-lost son:
Dear Mom and Dad:
I know I must have disappeared from Earth some nine years ago. Probably some more, but nobody here really knows.
‘Thirteen years, seven months and three days, not that I’m counting’, thought the old man.
Anyway.
I was abducted, like in ‘flying saucer flies off with me’. Weird, isn’t it? Well, some equinoid aliens then rescued me, but with no way to ask my abductors where they had picked me from, the government gave me citizenship and welcomed me among them.
I have been preparing this scrapbook since, a month ago, a friend told me that he may have found where I came from.
I’m sorry, folks, but I’m not coming back: that day when I was abducted I lost a life, and the ponies have let me make myself a new life among them. I am a part of the community. I have friends. I have three beautiful, smart and fun wives. I have a dear stepson and, through genetic engineering, now I also have a beautiful baby daughter with one of them. Your granddaughter’s name is Lauren Hope, and she’s five months old now. I want to be as awesome a parent as you always were for me, so I can’t leave her behind. Thing is, she isn’t human, her three moms aren’t human, and I will not leave them for anything.
Besides, what would be my opportunities upon returning? Here I am a physical therapist, and well paid enough that it took me a year to pay off a little house. Back on Earth, I would be a thirty-something guy with a diploma from a non-existent college and three wives who aren’t even human.
And I can’t ask you to come with me: my other siblings are still on Earth, and I don’t want their Mom and Dad to just banish on them. Please have Mnemosyne, Erebus and Damocles known that their big brother is well and says hi.
Well, images speak better than words. Enjoy the scrapbook, and all the little notes we wrote in it. My friend says he can help us send one every year.
Cheers.
PD: My friend brought back a bunch of newspapers, showing that the Earth is in a bad recession at the moment. I’m sending you a couple months of my savings, changed into gold coins. Pass them to my siblings if they need them more. And don’t sweat on it: not only is gold cheap around here, but all the girls are well paid enough that we won’t feel the difference.
PPD: My friend says he also wants to send a souvenir. He’s as crazy as he’s rich, so I hope he doesn’t send anything too over the top.
Thus, Aristotle began leafing through the scrapbook.
Eventually, Hope returned from her bridge club night. He silently guided her to the kitchen and sat her down with him.
They learned about their daughters in law:
Twilight, a graduate student working on psychokinesis research (which apparently was a very serious science over there).
Rainbow, an acrobatic flier and the regional coordinator for weather manipulation.
Lyra, a constable, an Army reservist and a grandmaster in a martial art reliant on psychokinesis.
Their new daughters showed them around their home, around their town, and around their capital.
Their son showed them his hang-around spots and the spa where he worked.
They dedicated a chapter to showing them Hope Faust, their fifth granddaughter.
And they showed them a million photos of their son wrestling with Rainbow, reading with Twilight, meditating with Lyra, playing with his baby and his stepson Spike (a drake!), cooking, tossing out a burnt cake, visiting places, doing home maintenance, spending time with friends, having picnics on the park, stargazing…
The sun was well up before they closed the book. They then went to bed and had the best sleep they had had in more than a decade:
Their oldest wasn’t only alive,
Belerophon was happy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Epilogue:
Later that day, they went down to the basement to pick up the gold and assess the damage.
The gold was easy enough to locate: a red velvet sack, so heavy that Aristotle could barely carry it. A week later, it proved to be worth well over eight million dollars, and happily liquidated their remaining three children mortgages.
The other thing was the “souvenir”: A life-sized, exquisitely detailed metal sculpture of Star Trek’s Q, wearing a Polynesian skirt and a coconut brassiere, standing on a roast pig on a giant platter, drinking deeply from a pineapple cocktail while his other hand held a tray up high (the tray that still protruded from their kitchen floor). Neither parent needed an art degree to know that the sculpture was hideous, and would not sell even for free.
At first they tried to ignore it, which was easy: once removing the rubble from beneath it, the tray was two inches below floor level and the entire well could be repaired. Once in the basement, it was easy to forget. In fact, it took them almost three months before Damocles came visiting, noticed the cratered concrete under the sculpture and suggested having the metal analyzed.
Aristotle almost had a heart attack when the results came: the 2.5-ton monstrosity was made of the purest platinum known to mankind.
So, in essence, Discord sent a self-portrait. He might be reformed, but he's still egotistical.
Hey... Being Chaotic Good doesn't mean you stop being insane....
First thought at word "scrap book":
UGH emo family crap ahead...
Ending thoughts:
Damn. Just damn good. Damn.
Nacho, you are a gentleman and a scholar.
That's what I'd expect from Dicord, just drop a sculpture made of insanely pricey metal on a house because why not.
Poor Aristotle.
So, the price of platinum is around 46,600 US$ at the moment.
Per kilogram.
46,600 x 2500 = 116,500,000
Discord is still trying to cause chaos, this time of the economics variety
2642155
Choas is chaos... economic chaos doubly so.
Welp, that was different. Awesome, though.
t.qkme.me/3uhcom.jpg
Shouldn't it be "PS" and "PPS" ?
EDIT: I'm glad this was made, I always wanted to see something like this.
2642155
I'd peg that a little higher if that statue is indeed pure enough to require a lot more 9's after the decimal place. That is if they are even allowed to sell any of it before the government swoops in and seizes it in the interest of national and economic security. (Not to mention all the scientists making with the grabby hands for their experiments requiring purest platinum)
And then the tax man will find out about the big bag of bits and demand their share of the wealth too.
Yeah, the Real World(tm) is no fun.
(Equestria is sounding better all the time, despite the lack of internets, television, and really really tasty meat)
2642155
So now we have an inflation?
I love this! My first thought when I heard about the hole in the ceiling and floor was Derpy, which would open up a whole other can of worms.
I'm just amazed and delighted to see Discord in this!
Now I gotta know: what's the name of Lero's mom?
2651644
Offically we don't know yet but NachoTheBrony's gone with Hope. It's not what I'm using but I do like Aristole for Lero's dad.
Someone call the SCP Foundation!
2642155
Personally, I didn't write thinking that Discord is trying to sow economic chaos: he was just being a jerk, doing the equivalent of tying a hundred dollar bill to a brick and tossing it through a window: he gets his mischief done even as he pays the damage. And, as I said, he doesn't understand how crazily valuable platinum is.
2643415
That means Post Data.
2643833
I was thinking about labelling the platinum as being "nine-niner", but I didn't consider that going technical would be wise.
Other than that, I cut the story there not only because of word count, but also because of the million ways that the Michaelis family could go about getting their money's worth from the statue, and because them trying to sell it in one piece would likely pop the economic bubbles for platinum, gold and palladium.
2651698
Thanks.
And don't forget checking the meanings of his siblings' names: Lero got the best one of the bunch.
This is a cool story. I really love the idea of Lero getting some sort of word home.
2655220
Wow, you actually used Lauren Hope. Also a very entertaining chapter. I liked the name the siblings have.
A bit is only an eighth of a doubloon, though....
2746358
Huh?
...Christ, I just realized, that means he was in Arcadia, at the tender mercies of The Lady for somewhere between four to five years.
o.0 this kinda brought a tear to my eye :D its good to see leros parents after so very long even if its in a side story :) love the fathers name it very much suits him ^^
113 MILLION DOLLARS OF PLATUNUM!!
PLATUNUUM!!
2641746
That's what makes it all the more entertaining. For that matter, do we even know if John is John? Perhaps Q/Discord got a little bored and decided to pull the same trick Kevin Sorbo pulled...
Am I the only one who knows that large quantities of precious metals suddenly appearing in our world would be immediately looked into by every government and criminal organization on the planet?
You don't just work 9 to 5 for +30 years and suddenly go off and sell massive piles of gold and platinum.
Do that, and the government will be the first to ask where you got it, and after finding that you have no means of mining (hell, you don't even own mineral rights to anywhere but possibly the land on which your home sits) they start wondering how you managed to pull +120 million worth of gold and platinum out of thin air.
(Usually, when something like literal tones of valuable substances appear seemingly from nowhere, they assume you're illegally importing it. Which, technically, you are, as the US government didn't give permission for this stuff to be brought onto American soil. Traditionally, illegally transporting valuables in large sums like this is done because it's some criminal organization stealing gold from some precious metals company or exploiting slave labor to mine in a foreign country. If you're wondering how much trouble that would cause you, think illegally smuggling African blood diamonds into the U.S.)
The long and short of it is, they couldn't ever sell more than a small melted down coin's worth under the guise of panning (and then you'd have to find a place in which panning is legal. This means either finding a large mass of land with natural water and purchasing the mineral rights). If you use mining techniques on government owned land (AKA, any land that's not privately owned, which the gold would belong to whoever owned the mineral rights), then the government would seize the gold, as it's technically their property.
And then they'd send you off to jail for stealing 'government property' in the amount of whatever the gold was worth.
(And you better hope you didn't melt down $5,000 or more worth, or it becomes grand theft!)
I knew it! Wealthy and crazy, indeed
5066928 Ahh, but do you realize what asteroids are made of?
Yes, rock, dust, and ice. But also METAL. A single fair-sized asteroid may have more platinum group metal content than has been mined in all of human history.
And they fall from the sky.
This metal fell from the sky. They have the hole in their roof to prove it. Sure, the crater isn't big enough by a few dozen orders of magnitude, and the metal is oddly purified and formed, but any polygraph will show they're telling the truth! And Uncle Sam loooooves to swear by the power of the polygraph. They swing those things all over the place!