At Your Service

by Deyeaz

IX - It's Bigger on the Inside

Listen up, kiddies. Since some of you might have been left out of the loop, I had edited the last chapter so that the fight between Midnight and the goon wasn’t AS overpowered and one-sided. Even though it’s magic, Midnight STILL has to get his ass handed to him every now and again.

Also, my friend who usually reads over my work asked me if Vinyl was actually fat. I told him no, and he told me to point her figure out on this chart. I personally think of Vinyl as having a cello-shaped body in this one, so for anyone who is bumbling around with that little enigma, problem solved. :)

IX - It’s Bigger on the Inside

'My house?’

Midnight’s thoughts erred those words again, brain not willing to connect the dots. Normally, they would just mean a simple visit, dedicated to one friend who deserved it. But to him, it spelled a rather imminent doom.

Not only had the idea of them dining at their house been an absolute surprise to him, but he’d be unable to explain to both Vinyl and Octavia that he had a pet monkey, capable of running amok at this very moment. “W-W-Wait, are you sure that’s a good idea?” Midnight asked Octavia, hoping that it may have been a slip of the tongue.

“Have I ever not been sure?” she asked rhetorically, appearing rather cross with the stallion in the harness. “Just… go,” she sighed, riding crop held tightly in her hands. Midnight shivered at the black “beauty” she clenched within her ash-grey fist.

“S-sure,” he said, cracking under the presence of the crop as he adjusted his harness and pulled the harness, the pain in his muzzle making it partially challenging for him to concentrate on the road. Because of this throbbing annoyance, the walk to Canterlot Castle felt rather long as well, a fifteen minute time lapse shrouded under the obnoxious disguise of a forty-minute moment.

Only when they did reach the castle’s front entrance did Midnight breathe easy: safe would he be in the confines of his tower. Although, given the extra “baggage” he brought with him, he was slowly growing more ambiguous of said safety. Octavia would act rather harsh in more ways than one, commanding him and ordering him around even in his own abode. Vinyl would no doubt make herself a little too much at home, perhaps accidentally knocking something over. Or disturbing Jericho during his incredulously long sleep. Or even getting on his computer and finding his cache of… well, highly risqué images, saved in the dark confines of his hard drive.

Envisioning this terrifying possibility, he could only hope for the best as he pulled up the cart by his home.

“Whoooaaa!” exclaimed Vinyl, eyes wider than dustbin lids and brighter than movie-studio floodlights as they wandered up the monolithic length of the hundred meter-tall ivory minaret Midnight called home. “This is where you live?! It’s massive!”

“Yes,” Midnight answered, unbuckling the saddle and tossing it off, letting it flop and clatter noisily on the lush green grass beneath his hooves. The guards that patrolled the castle perimeters at this radiant hour couldn’t help but risk glances at the three ponies on the royal property.

They couldn’t help but think: Octavia Philharmonica and Vinyl Scratch, were walking side by side with Midnight Oil, the scrawny, unusually tall Sarosian shut-in with thick-rimmed glasses, nerdy obsessions, and disgust with equinity? Preposterous! Science has clearly gone too far this time! Surely, there was an explanation! Maybe they know next to nothing about each other? Perhaps he was just showing them to the Princesses… Yes! That could be it!

But alas, no such thing came to be as the trio talked with each other—like they were equals. Like they were friends. Octavia was less inclined to communicate with the Sarosian stallion, yet Vinyl was unequivocally gung-ho as she spoke with Midnight in earnest. They were even walking into Midnight’s astronomy tower, where he would bar himself from the rest of Canterlot’s established and sophisticated—if not snobby—society.

“Can we see the inside?” Vinyl inquired, fixated on the white stone obelisk in her path.

“Eh… uh…” Midnight hesitated, not willing to answer right away. After all, Jericho was by himself for the better part of an hour: he could’ve broken something, thus bringing about embarrassment for his first impression on the two mares who more or less kept him on a relatively short leash. But, that was just a possibility, not a definite. “Eh, sure….”

“Awesome!” squealed the techno-junkie, her royal blue and cyan hair bobbing as she ran to the entrance of the castle, hoping to get there as soon as possible.

“Vinyl, stop!” Octavia hollered to her, the white unicorn slowing her speed down before returning to them.

“What?” She said rather grumpily, bothered by Octavia’s reticence to allow Vinyl inside.

“Are you honestly contemplating on climbing all those flights of stairs to be graced with such an impoverished grotto like his?” the cellist argued, practically firing a dart tipped with toxic irritation directly into Midnight’s neck.

“Hmm… good point…” Vinyl concluded, unknowingly irking Midnight slightly further. “Yo, do you know how to get us up there?”

Midnight nodded, albeit with a bit of irritation at their bluntness. “Okay. Grab on,” he said, offering his arm to the two. Vinyl took it right away, waiting for something interesting to happen. However, Octavia was not at all inclined to commit to what she deemed was a rather bad idea. “Come on. You know you don’t want to walk up those steps by yourself, no?” coaxed Midnight with a glowing horn and a free second arm, Octavia’s jaw clenching slightly at his second to last two words. Prospects of what Midnight and Vinyl could be doing in their lonesome in the former’s house sent her almost reeling in disgusted horror, maybe of those aforementioned prospects being… well… explicit, unmentionable things that should only happen behind locked doors.

Even sophisticated cellists such as Octavia had perverse thoughts flit through their heads from time to time.

“Fine!” She cracked, grasping Midnight’s other arm with the hand free of their bag of steamy doughnuts. “But only to make sure the two of you don’t get any weird ideas!”

“Weird i…” Midnight stopped mid-sentence, both his face and Vinyl’s bombarded with a ferocious blush as they smelled what Octavia was stepping in. Making eye contact with Vinyl made their blushes even more intense. Shaking his head to clear it of any… er, raunchy thoughts, Midnight’s horn flared brighter before the three of them dematerialized on the spot, landing at the top of the stairs inside the tower, underneath the ceiling double-doors that would lead to Midnight’s house.

Midnight quickly peered inside, analyzing it to see if it was fit for visitors to enter. There were a few granola bar wrappers and a squeezed juice box that sprinkled the floor, but that was it. Midnight quickly levitated them and chucked them in the wastebasket that sat adjacent the television, no doubt planning on having words with Jericho afterwards about keeping the place clean. “Come in, you two,” he called from above.

Vinyl and Octavia entered the abode, the former more eager than the latter to intrude. Both were dumbstruck by the size, however: it was grand, much larger and wider than one would have presumed it to be on the outside. It was a little smaller than a common room, but it was spacious and sprinkled with Midnight’s furniture.

“Whoaaaa!” ooh’d and ahh’d Vinyl, mesmerized by the physical impossibility of Midnight’s home. “How does that even work?”

“Er… Space-distortion spell; makes it bigger on the inside,” confessed Midnight. “I was young when I got this place, so I couldn’t do it by myself. Princess Celestia was kind enough to do it for me when I asked her for a less cramped room, though.”

“How young were you?” pressed Vinyl.

“Seventeen or eighteen. After I graduated high school. Finally coaxed my parents into letting me out and have a feel for the outside world,” answered Midnight.

“Well, I must say, not bad,” murmured Octavia. “But I’m not impressed at aaaaAAAAAH, what is that?!” she wailed as she pointed at the furniture. Or, to be precise, what was on the furniture.

A brown two-foot-tall monkey sat on the white half-circle couch, legs crossed, sipping on a juice box as it watched a documentary on penguins, a small oval sapphire planted on the chimp’s forehead. He looked content and entranced as he watched the flightless monochromatic birds go about their lives, with the Hoofrican narrator go into detail about their routine. He turned to face the trio and smiled as he saw Midnight, his brown eyes lighting up.

“What is that grotesque little hairball!?” exclaimed Octavia again. The monkey, who was waving at the trio who had entered the room, gave the grey mare the middle finger, a blank look on his face as he did so. “Did he just–?!”

“That’s Jericho, my pet and friend. Be nice,” warned Midnight, cutting across Octavia’s rage, while the monkey nodded in the background. Midnight saw what Jericho was so fascinated by on the television, and he groaned: he recognized the narrator’s sweet, deep, chocolaty voice from anywhere. “Are you seriously watching that Morgan Freemane documentary about the penguins again?”

“Eep eek ooh ah ah ah!” replied Jericho in defensive anger over his favorite program.

“Yes, I know this is one of your more favorable shows, but honestly, this is just borderline obsession!” argued Midnight as he kicked off his horseshoes. “They’re just penguins, after all.”

“You can talk to him and understand him?” asked Vinyl, a mix of both amazement and confusion.

“Well, sorta.” Midnight placed his horseshoes on the square area of hardwood around the door, which Vinyl was kind enough to close. “I can tell what he’s trying to tell me by his tone, his attitude, and his hand motions. He can understand me in that sense as well, since I have loads of books laying around in my room.”

“So he can understand you because of all the books he’s read?”

“You can say that.”

“Eeh ooh ah eeh ooh…” Jericho grumbled, crossing his arms and glancing away from Midnight as the two ladies followed his example and placed the removed hoofwear on the hardwood before setting hoof on the carpet.

“Uh, no, you watched this documentary five times in the past two days. It’s like you can memorize it by heart if I told you too.” The Sarosian levitated a few pillows from off the couch and placed them on the ground around the coffee table. “I take it you ate breakfast, Jericho?” At the little chimp’s nod, he then pushed, “You think you can make room for seconds?” He pointed a finger at the bag of doughnuts in Octavia’s grasp.

"Ooh! Ah ah ah!" Jericho pointed in worry at Midnight's muzzle, napkins stoppering the blood that threatened to trickled clandestinely from his nostrils.

"What? Oh, this is nothing to worry about," said Midnight, attempting to dismiss the matter with a wave of his hand. "I just ran headlong into a wall to impress these two," he fibbed.

"But that's not what--"

"Of course it is!" Midnight knew he was screwing himself over little by little when he cut across Vinyl's retort. "Just go with it, he whispered to the two of them.

“Ohh, eeh ooh ooh ah ooh ah…” chirped Jericho, waggling his eyebrows mischievously as he pointed at the three ponies in the room. The stallion was the only one who blushed, as the two mares were left clueless by the monkey’s gibberish.

((No!)) Midnight said defensively in Ponsi. ((That’s not at all what’s going on! Get your head out of the gutter!)) Jericho waved a hand to dismiss the situation as a joke, tittering and chuckling in his other hand at Midnight’s flustered response. The mares behind Midnight only tilted their heads in bewilderment. “Honestly….” he groaned in Equuish.

“What is it?” Vinyl asked.

“N-n-nothing important!” stammered Midnight. “Just… eat your doughnuts, kids.”

“But we’re adults…” said the two females in stern unison.

“Just shut up and eat your damn food.” Midnight skulked off upstairs, his clothes still stained with his own blood. "I'm gonna go change...."

~End of Chapter IX~

Author's Note:

Golly gee whiz, this is so fucking late.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Sorry if this chapter is garbage. Been trying to juggle my AP classes with TF2, art, Anime Club, etc. Try to enjoy, please. :3

Comments

[kamachakta]

“Are you seriously () that Morgan Freemane documentary about the penguins again?”

Perhaps you should explain what he's doing with the Morgan Freemane documentary?

Also, despite the wait, this chapter has been thoroughly enjoyed.

[Mr101]

This is really, really good. I want even more of it, like, right now.

[Deyeaz]

3343433
Thank you for catching that, just fixed that now.

3343602
Glad you're wanting more, man!

[Mr101]

3343627
My only nitpick is that it kinda needs a dark tag, for all the racism in it and such.

[Undead_Non-Brony]

Hey, i'm in AP too! Math and Biology. I hate both of the teachers.

[Deyeaz]

3343686
Hmmm... good idea, mate.

3344693
AP Lang, AP Physics, and AP US History for me. They're fun, but they're balls-off-the-walls hard

[Cleetusthetarantula]

WHY HAS IT BEEN SUCH A LONG TIME?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? WHYYYYY!!! (IK the reasons were already given in the authors notes.)