Humans in Equestria

by Dyon

The Fools Leading the Bored

Tick, tock. Tick tock. I swear to Celestia and any other holy beings that might grant me a small reprieve from this maddening noise, that if someone didn’t turn that damn clock off in the next two minutes I was going to lose it. The classroom at Ponyville elementary was vacant, save the three of us that were serving out our mandatory detention and Cheerilee who was reading a paper or grading something. She might even be doing a crossword puzzle for all I knew, and with the top of her desk being more than a foot higher than mine there wasn’t really a way for me to know. Twenty minutes, I had been sitting in this hell for the better part of an hour and I just had another twenty minutes to go.

I looked over to Snips and Snails who were whispering to each other at the far corner of the room. It didn’t seem like Cheerilee heard them or much cared that they were breaking the whole no talking rule, they were probably veterans of the whole afterschool detention thing so maybe there were a few perks that came along with that. The two colts were completely wrapped up in whatever their conversation, and completely ignored the worksheets we had been given by the teacher. Not that these little worksheets were anything to keep even their attention, two pieces of paper with addition problems on one side and subtraction ones on the other. I had tried, oh how I had tried, to go as slow as I possibly could, but still with going back and erasing answers just so that I could work on my “calligraphy” the math problems only cost me fifteen minutes.

So now the papers were not only filled with answers, and a few examples of geometric proofs as well as some calculus level 2 integrals; hopefully Cheerilee would get the hint and stop giving me simple math problems, but I wasn’t holding my breath. I sighed and looked back to the analog clock once again ticking away on the wall, a whole minute had passed since my last glance so maybe there was some kind of hope that I wouldn’t be in here forever. Not that I was in an exceptional hurry to get back to the estate after what happened yesterday.

I had expected some kind of outburst, perhaps Steel would throw a fit about me ditching him, but much against my expectations he seemed to have had the time of his life when I finally got back to the farm. Apparently hanging out with the CMC had been a freaking dream come true for him, so that whole plan to mess with him had completely backfired. In fact, I think that he even left with Applebloom after class got out today so that he could go hang out with the trio again today, which for some reason kind of pissed me off though I couldn’t exactly figure out why that was.

Diamond hadn’t been much of a fan of Steel’s new club either. Breakfast this morning had been a childish tirade about how weird and freaky the three blankflanks were, and how if he kept hanging out with them he would never be popular. Not that he, or even I for that matter, cared in the least about being popular in a school of less than forty students. While only mildly annoying as that had been, when she finally turned her attention to me and started calling me out for having detention today I had completely lost all sympathy for the filly. Well that may have not been completely true, but I still felt a flare of anger spark up whenever I thought about that smug little pink face of hers.

I groaned and dropped my head onto my desk with an audible thunk. Cheerilee looked up from whatever she was doing for a moment to see that no one was actually hurt, before returning to her own business. I chanced another look at the clock, and swore I saw the second hand not actually move for a little bit before it began ticking ever so slowly in its stupid little circle once more. I was so bored just sitting there that reading the book Twilight had given to me actually seemed like it might be a good idea.

I had started to try and decipher the tome last night, and after an entire hour of reading and rereading the first two pages I gave up. I’m not exactly sure why I had decided to start with that book, but it had turned out to be a terrible idea. It was like opening a college psychology book, that already assumed you read the previous three. So there I was all night trying to piece together what a Ghedrine was with context clues that I also couldn’t figure out. I really needed to go back to the library and grab some beginner level books on this whole magic thing if I was ever going to have a chance to break down the one I already had.

“Psst.” I heard someone say from behind me. Knowing that it could only possibly come from one of the two ponies behind me I chose to ignore it for now and continue staring blankly ahead.

“Psssst.” Came the noise again, and this time my ear swiveled around towards the sound subconsciously. That was kind of annoying since it was a dead giveaway that I had in fact heard them, but still I tried to ignore it the best I could.

“Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst.” Came the bid to get my attention again and this time I couldn’t really ignore it.

“What!” I whisper yelled back at the two of them.

“No talking,” Cheerilee reminded the three of us without even looking up from her desk.

We all sat there in silence for a few moments, the only sound in the room emanating from the incessant clock. It wasn’t even for half a second that I had my head turned back towards the front of the room before I heard another “Psst.”

I turned just in time to catch sight of Snips uncupping his hooves from his mouth and taking a wary glance at the teacher who this time didn’t seem to hear him. “What,” I whispered, this time also looking to see if Cheerilee was going to say anything about it. She seemed a little to focused on her paperwork to hear me that time so I guessed that this volume was fine.

“You’re the new colt at school right?” Snips asked.

“Yeah. So what?” I replied.
“Well like, we heard that you joined up with the Cutie Mark Crusaders? Are you on their team, because that is kinda weird,” Snips went on to say.

“Um...no. That was my brother. I kind of have a cutie mark so I can’t join their club now can I?” When I said it I had expected the two to maybe get a little angry with my dickish ways but instead they actually looked at each other and whispered amongst themselves for a moment before turning back to me.

“Yeah, that makes sense. So you aren’t in anypony’s club right now then?” Snips asked again, it seemed that he would be the main one carrying this conversation.

“No,” I affirmed. I thought a moment about how this felt remarkably similar to a conversation I had in high school, of course that one had ended with me feeling like a loser for not having any real extracurriculars while this one might end with me feeling the exact opposite.

“So he’s not in a club then,” Snips said to Snails.

“Nope,” Snails affirmed.

No, that feeling of being a complete loser seemed to creep up on me once again out of no where. “So what,” I said, childishly crossing my hooves as I did so.

“So like,” Snips spared another glance to Cheerilee, but with the way she still wasn’t bothering to look up I was just about convinced that she didn’t truly care if we talked. “Okay so like, you don’t even have a team you’re on?”

“Team?” I asked.

“He doesn’t even know about the teams,” Snips said to Snails. The lanky unicorn just nodded solemnly.

“Would you like to fill me in then?” I asked. For being the token idiots of the show these two were really good at making me feel like the fool.

“Yeah sure, when we get out of detention,” Snips said, nodding to the clock behind me. I turned and glanced back at it to see that there were only five minutes of detention left. If I had known talking would make the time fly by any faster I would have started off being more sociable.

I sat correctly in my chair and doodled a bit on the worksheets, very poorly drawing a super saiyan pony. I didn’t even fully have time to put enough detail into the hair, obviously the most important part, before I heard Cheerilee clear her throat to get our attention.

“Alright you three, you can go now. Make sure to leave your worksheets on my desk before you leave, and I do hope that you were able to finish filling them out.” She stood from her desk and walked to the door so that she could hold it open for us. I slipped out of my own desk, it was much too small in my opinion, and grabbed my backpack which I threw on my back, before picking up my worksheets in my mouth and bringing them over to the teacher’s desk. I thought that I was actually getting pretty good at the whole grabbing things with my mouth, it was actually easier than doing it as a human, which I had to admit I did every once in a while when I just had too many things to hold.

As I passed by I had to stand on my back hooves to reach up onto Cheerilee’s desk and place the worksheets there; as I did so I caught sight of the crossword she had in fact been working on, she even did it in pen, bold. I took a second to look it over since the other two delinquents were taking their sweet time getting all of their things together, they had stopped to fill in at least some of the answers on the worksheet while they slung their bags, using that cheating magic all the while to multi-task. Cheerilee had finished half of the crossword, and I did catch sight of a stack of graded papers next to it on the desk, so it was nice to know, or at least believe, that she had been just as bored as I had while sitting here. I looked back to the two fooling around in the back before shrugging and pushing away from the teacher’s desk, and heading over to the door.

“Have a nice day Ashen Stroke,” Cheerilee said to me as I began to pass the threshold of the classroom.

“You have a nice day too Miss Cheerilee. Oh, and nine down is dispense,” I replied, taking a look back as I did so. I thought my little comment might have earned me a bemused smirk but instead she frowned at me like I had just spoiled the ending of a movie. So, feeling like a dick, I turned and walked down the hall that lead out of the building and into the afternoon sun that was all too eager to greet me.

I stood in front of the schoolhouse for a minute with my eyes closed, just enjoying the warming sensation that my fur would get whenever I would first walk out into the sun. They weren’t that readily apparent at first, but little by little I seemed to be picking up the nice little things that this body had to offer over my other, though the whole being a child thing was still insanely bothersome. I couldn’t really see an actual benefit to it other than that I wouldn’t really have to work for who knew how long, but that was just a minor thing. We all knew it when we were younger but it still warrants saying, being a kid sucks.

“Oh, you’re still here,” I heard Snips say from behind me, prompting me to open my eyes and turn to look at him.

“Well,” I replied, “you did say that you were going to explain whatever it was that you were talking about inside.”

“Yeah sure,” he said, walking past me with Snails on his left. “But, you need to come to the clubhouse so that we can explain it right.”

I arched a brow before looking to Snails who just solemnly nodded back at me again. It seemed like a hassle, and there were probably better things that I could be doing at the moment, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, impossibly, this was important. “Alright,” I relented as I fell in line on Snip’s right, “but this better not be a waste of time.”

“Trust me,” he said, firing a smile my way as we turned onto the road into town, “this will be awesome.”

We took the road into the town of Ponyville like I had done on a few occasions already, and it wasn’t too long before we were walking the casually busy streets of the town. There didn’t seem to be too much of a bustle going on right now, and I tried to look out for any ponies that I might recognize as Snips and Snails led me through a couple of streets to their “clubhouse,” but Bon Bon was the only one I was able to pick out. Suddenly the idea of Lyra finding me hit for the first time, and I had to quickly shoot the part of my imagination that was already trying to create worst case scenarios for that outcome. I didn’t believe that the whole Lyra obsession with humans to be canon, but if it was I might have to raise her on the list of ponies that I need to do my best to avoid, not that I was doing a very good job of that so far but whatever.

“We’re here,” Snails announced as we came to a stop in front of a small boarded up house. I did a quick double take down the street we had just come off of, but for the love of Luna I couldn’t remember how we got here; and since when were there boarded up buildings in Ponyville.

I looked over the small one story house, which long ago had most likely been some shade of orange, but its glory days had long since past and was now clearly not fit for anyone to live in anymore. There was a caved in chimney on top, and some broken glass surrounding the base of the windows. The door had originally been two pieces, built to open on top and on bottom, but all that remained was the top portion which still allowed for me to get inside by just ducking my head a little bit. There wasn’t actually any graffiti on the outside of the run down old place, which I thought kind of felt kept the overall look of the place to be incomplete, but I wasn’t going to be the one to write anything on it.

My two companions walked across the overgrown yard, hopping between half buried stepping stones until they reached the porch which creaked eerily as they jumped onto it. “Are you coming?” Snips asked as he looked back to where I was still standing in the street.

“I guess,” I said with a shrug, walking into the tall grass which turned out to be a not so great idea. Pulling my hoof out of a deep pit of mud that I had stepped in, I sighed and leaped to the nearest stepping stone before jumping across them to end up on the porch next to the duo.

“Yeah, there are mud puddles all over the place in the grass, so we gotta jump across the stones,” Snips said simply as he turned and walked into the house. Snails followed him, bumping his head on the top part of the door as he ducked through. After wiping most of the mud off my hoof I ducked under the door and entered the house as well.

It was really dark inside the house, the only light being the light peaking in between the cracks of the boards on the windows, illuminating the dust in the air. Snips and Snails were nowhere to be found in the dark hall by the time that I entered, but the multitude of hoofprints in the dust on the floor let me know which way they had gone. Following the hoofprints and the ever growing sound of talking I walked down the hall and two doors later found myself at the entrance of the living area in the house.

There were a few colts standing around in the living area talking, though I couldn’t actually recall any of their names except for the two that I shared a class with. The old couch and chair sitting in the middle of the room were well worn and had some springs snaking their way through the cushions. Posters of...several things that I didn’t recognize in the least, hung on the walls as well as a few maps of the town and surrounding area with red markings all over them. There were assorted pieces of junk lying around, including paper trash and snack wrappers, various metal pieces that probably came from a million different things, and a pile of clothes.

“Hello, I guess you’re Ashen Stroke huh,” said a little polka-dotted colt, as he started walking away from the small group that was talking towards the back of the room. I thought I might have caught a slight english accent, but I didn’t particularly have a good ear for accents so it might have been nothing.

“Yeah,” I replied, scratching the back of my head, and finishing up my initial take in of the dimly lit room. “though I’m still kind of unclear as to why I am here.”

“I thought you were joining the club,” he said a little confused, looking back at Snips and Snails as he did so.

Snails looked over to Snips, whose eyes widened noticeably. “Oh right, you should probably join the club.”

The small spotted one face hoofed, which didn’t seem to injure him at all. Maybe in the future I wouldn’t need to restrain myself from doing them. “So, I suppose that I can explain things,” he said, extending his hoof towards me. “I’m Pip, it’s nice to meet you.”

I bumped his hoof, suppressing any glee that an actual hoofbump brought me. I was still trying to keep up some kind of facade here, so until I knew exactly what was going on I would have to play this close to the chest. “Ash, but I guess you already know that,” I replied.

He took his hoof back and looked off to the left wall. “Well heh...where should I start. Right, so...Snips was supposed to fill you in on why we wanted you in the club so I guess I will. Mostly we wanted to get you into our club before anypony else asked you.” He continued looking at the wall over to the left, shooting me a sidelong glance every few seconds.

“Okay, then why are you concerned about anypony else getting me into their club?” For some reason this was starting to really capture my interest.

“Because your brother already joined the CMC!” he replied immediately, turning his full attention back to me. “Sorry, it’s just, so weird that fillies would let them in their club.” The other colts behind them nodded in consent.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Well I guess that the CMC aren’t a no-colt club, but all the other filly ones seem to be, and if they started letting colts in then it would be really bad if they got you,” Pip explained.

“Why does what club I join matter so much?”

“Because you are a runner,” Pip said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I opened my mouth to say something, but felt myself at a complete loss for words. I had been mostly following this whole conversation until that last bit, and now had no idea what he was talking about. As I was trying to recover I realized that I was dumbly standing their with my mouth open, and decided that I might want to use it. “What?” I asked.

Pip shook his head and walked over to the left wall he had been staring at just a little bit earlier and slapped a very large map on the wall that held many red circles and x’s all over it. “You’re a runner, so we want you to join our club so you can run the torch.”

Comments

[bluemoon1996]

Jesus, Mary, and Joesph... Im five chapters behind Now

I need to prepare
mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw9153-SBPfkXm.gif
Ignore the Born Ready

[Cold Spike]

That got weird fast

[ssokolow]

Y'know, there's the good kind of mystery, which draws the reader in and the bad kind, which confuses the reader... I'm just confused and there are tons of other stories I could be reading. I think I'll give things one more chapter to start making sense again and then stop following.

[amiamera]

4509371
I kind of have to agree with you. If I had to guess the last chapter was a random "possible future" chapter that probably served as a method breaking writer's block but he really did not separate it well enough. I'm hoping the story will pick up because this chapter feels like filler until the very end.

[light snow]

... Again I say what..?

[Fawkes]

uhhhhhhh what?

[KvAT]

4509441
It says so in the title, so yes.