• Published 9th Jul 2013
  • 459 Views, 17 Comments

Complaints Department - TheDarkStarCzar



In an unlikely pairing, Apple Bloom and Derpy Hooves probe Equestria's underpinnings to sort out their cutiemark woes; One defective and the other ambiguous, they struggle to find somepony to remedy the situation.

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Artists and Underpinnings

Entropy is the natural state of the universe, so in the long run, I win. That being the case, we may as well have a few laughs along the way, no?
-Discord, Lord of Chaos, from his recent biography, Disinvited Guest, Ways to amuse one's self at everyponies expense without being wholly excluded from polite company and turned into a statue for a millenia, a primer





"So, have these ponies they're looking for got names?" Carrot top asked. She was standing in the corner of the kitchen near where a chalk spell circle had been drawn that supported a small, but insistent portal that ostensibly led to some shadowy dream dimension. It glowed with a green swirling energy that burned no brighter than a candle's flame. With the lights on it would hardly be noticed. She eyed it with disdain, even after Pinkie Pie's insistence that it was perfectly safe, something about arcane runes and mysterious, lost, earth pony spell craft gave her the willies. Pinkie's sometimes tenuous grasp on reality, though it always turned out alright in the end, didn't reassure her either.

"Sure," Answered Pinkie Pie with a snort, "Everypony's got a name, and they've got doozies!"

"So, you're really not comin' with us?" Apple Bloom wondered, finding it remarkable given her reputation that she would, in fact, feel much safer with Pinkie Pie along.

"Nah, I was in there earlier and I may have worn out my welcome maybe the teeny tiniest little bit." Pinkie said dismissively.

"You never did tell us how you know about all this. In fact, how do you even know how to make a portal like this?" Carrot Top asked.

"Silly, put me in the kitchen and I can whip up just about anything." Pinkie giggled and held up an index card with diagrams and instructions crammed front and back in tiny copperplate script that seemed to seethe maddeningly, as if it were expanding and contracting in time with an unseen, inky heart, "Especially since Discord gave me the recipe."

"Wait, Discord, the draconequus, the Lord of Chaos? That Discord?" Apple Bloom gasped.

"No no. No no no...well actually, yeah, exactly that one. I mean I had to ask him. Twilight didn't know and Princess Celestia didn't seem to have any idea in that letter and I didn't think Luna would know either, so I thought, who's been around as long as them and might be willing to help put together an adventure? All signs point to Discord, and Fluttershy promises he's not even evil anymore, so when he told me how to make the portal I tried it. He only did the cackling with lightning crashing behind him thing for forty five seconds, a minute tops and he said he was like, seventy five percent sure it wouldn't end up dropping me into a dimension full of eternal torment at the hooves of Tartarus spawned demon ponies, so I figured it was O-kay!" Pinkie's eyes glinted wickedly, "In you go!" Then she unceremoniously shoved the two ponies through the diminutive portal, "Have fun! Don't be long! Send a post card if you get the chance!"

Carrot Top was torn. On the one hoof, she wanted to help Apple Bloom and protect Derpy, but on the other, she needed to keep an eye on Dinky and the other potential babysitter present was clearly a madmare. Carrot Top searchingly looked at the pink pony, weighing her options, "I'm...Can you keep an eye on Dinky, maybe? I think I should go too...maybe."

Pinkie thrashed her head in the negative, mane bouncing wildly as it followed her movements at a slightly slower speed, "No can do, that's a portal built for two, or that's what Discord said. Huh. Now that he's not evil, I need a nickname for him, don't I? Dissy? Cordy? No. The big D? Nah, too easy to misinterpret. Oh well, it'll come to me. Ooh, do you wanna help me brainstorm while we're waiting?"








Derpy's entire world exploded into streamers of light as she tumbled through the portal, flailing for footing and howling in abject terror. A small hoof fitted itself over her mouth and Apple Bloom's familiar voice shushed her.

"It's alright, we're safe...ish. I guess." The coverall clad filly reassured her, though she was not feeling too confidant about their location herself. Derpy's legs and wings were splayed and locked solid. It took her considerable mental fortitude to restore mobility to her limbs."But just where in the hay are we?"

The bright, verdant world around them wavered and parts that were not under immediate scrutiny tended to melt back into an ill defined chaos of vaguely defined, impressionistic color and sound that assaulted peripheral vision and nibbled at the edges of awareness. Apple Bloom internally remarked that it was quite as Scootaloo had described her lucid dreams in which Luna had interceded.

They stood just outside of a ruin. A dusty stone floor surrounded on three sides by high, vaulted windows set into crudely mortared stone walls with no ceilings that partitioned off a gymnasium sized patch of the world. In the center stood a statue of a mare with a brush in her mouth, caught in the midst of a vicious swipe at a canvas that would forever be absent. Around it was a boundless, tropical jungle, accentuated by temples, ruins and towers that bravely rose through the canopy. The vegetation partially encroached on the room, dwarfed sentries of the great trees around them stood against the interior walls and poked through the gaping, unglazed window frames. At this point it was more a suggestion of a room than any sort of proper structure.

Scanning the forest, suggestions of numerous ponies were visible, bright blurs flitting about in the far distances, to and from the various edifices the pegasi flew and unicorns teleported by magic, the telltale flashes of their transit marking their passage. Presumably the humbler earth ponies made the same journeys beneath the canopy and out of view. For all they knew there could be a whole railroad concealed in the shade of the lush forest.

"Hey, look at that in the sky!" Derpy pointed excitedly and Apple Bloom took in the oddities that rose above them. From the horizons, arching into the cerulean dome with as ghostly an outline as the moon in the full daylight, but taking up a full third of the sky's expanse, three titanic white ponies could be seen towering high above. They were engaged in weaving a tapestry so large that it might just as well be the sky itself. They moved slowly, as was most suitable in scale to their extraordinary size, and were working diligently at their various tasks.

One, it seemed, was taking individual strands and spinning them into threads of varying thickness at a monumentally sized wheel. The second one sat at a rude loom whose frame spanned the sky, and interwove the threads into unimaginably complex patterns, her deft hooves never ceasing their movement. The third appeared to be overseeing the whole process and occasionally reached out, snipped an offending thread and did away with the remains.

They were dumbstruck and looked on in awe for some time before Apple Bloom spat out, "Is that what I think it is?"

Derpy didn't know what to think it was, she'd never seen anything so grand yet confusing. On the whole it reminded her of modern art, full of whorls and snarls that could just as easily have been put there by chance as on purpose and that's not even mentioning the giants themselves.

"Whatever you think it is, it's probably not." A shy but velvety sounding voice from inside the vacant room spoke, startling them, but when they looked around they could not ascertain it's source.

"What is it then? It looks like that tapestry of life thing that Miss Cheerilee was telling us about, but that was supposed to be a legend, she said there ain't no hook rug nowhere that's controlling our lives." Apple Bloom asked as they followed the voice towards the room.

"Well...it's a tapestry of life, yes, but done largely for symbolism at this point as we've taken to storing information in more practical, if less poetic ways. I mean symbolism is great, don't get me wrong, but it's bulk data entry that pays the bills. Come come, all the action's over this way." He said and so they stepped into the room. As soon as their hooves crossed the seemingly ill defined threshold they found themselves in a more conventionally behaving room the same dimensions and style as the pseudo-ruin. This one, however, was enclosed on all four sides, five counting the plaster ceiling that came into being. The windows were all sealed and the trees around the periphery were all much smaller than before and potted besides. Moreover, the details were content to stay put rather than skitter away as soon as one's eye wandered, though the room was now covered with book strewn tables and canvases leaned against every available surface.

Before them stood a fine black stallion, the finest specimen that might ever be seen. His stature was just a hair smaller than a Royal Guard's might be, but he was superbly built. He carried a stack of books upon his back. On his flank he bore a rendering of a pony whose back half was depicted as stone and whose front half seemed just come to life.

"Are you the one we see about gettin' a cutimark changed?" Apple Bloom asked, taking the relative oddity of their environs in stride. She was considerably less sensitive to his stallionly charms than the grey pegasus mare who was presently staring in an unseemly, borderline lascivious, fashion, or looking shyly at the floor. Again it's according to which eye was telling the more honest truth.

"What? Oh my, No! Nowadays I'm just an assistant here, keeping the boss supplied with inspirational books and paints and what have you, aside from which I keep the paperwork in order." He smiled timidly and pointed to a corner of the room that was cleared out slightly better than the rest of them, "The boss is over there, but I suspect you'll have little enough luck. Genius and a supercilious nature walk hoof in shoe and complaining about a cutiemark is akin to blasphemy around here."

Apple Bloom was not to be deterred and approached the work area. The artist could not be seen from without, stacks of canvasses obscuring the view and when she entered the workshop proper it appeared cramped despite it's large size. It was carelessly piled with open books in an area lined with bookshelves, which themselves were full of thick tomes with dog eared pages stuffed with slips of paper to mark one thing or another. In the center of the room an odd looking earth pony mare paced nervously between a dozen half yard square paintings arrayed on eight easels. Each canvas was a solid color or shade with a stripe of contrasting or complimentary color across the top and bottom. Some had stripes mixed into that stripe.

As they watched, she painted a bugle on a green canvas in no more than a dozen strokes and one swipe with a palette knife. Her lines were crisp and bold, conveying her intent with a minimum of fussiness. Finished, the canvas seemed to burn away into a wisp of colored smoke, to float upwards, a bit of fiber to be incorporated into the thread of that growing tapestry. They both knew her work already, they'd studied it unintentionally their entire lives.

"She's painting cutiemarks!" Derpy said gleefully and rushed forward to look over her shoulder. The stallion who'd escorted them in drove her off with a withering glare and the artist herself ignored her, but gestured to her assistant, who sat the tomes from his back around his master in a semi-circle. Then he whispered in his master's ear, picked up a different pile of books and presumably went elsewhere to reshelve them.

"It's all these damned special orders," The artist said at length, with a forcefully atonal voice, grabbing up another canvas with a bony foreleg. When she turned, her profile was suddenly visible and it was clear why she looked somewhat off. Her thin legs, more elegant body, longer face and smaller eyes fell somewhere between a pony and a horse. She, like the stallion, were what ponies looked like eons before their modern era, but on a mare, instead of elegantly handsome, it just looked out of place.

Stapled to the corner of each painting was a sheet of paper. When she picked up the canvas from the stack on the left she would briefly study it, fold the paper back and set it on an easel. The other canvases already bore colors, this one was blank, but not for long. With a broad brush she laid out a pale lavender background, a white stripe on top split by a tapering pink dash. Then she studied the books that had been brought in for her, flipping around until she found the right page in each and squinting at them intently. Finally pleased she scratched out a pattern of stars with the handle of a brush, compared it to the book, grumbled a bit, considered it, then finally set the canvas aside, unfinished, and moved on to the next one. "Special orders take so much more inspiration to get right and what with the number I'm going through lately it's hard to spend the time on them I need to. Really, how many weirdo ponies with special destinies and potential alicorns do you need out there that I've got to keep pushing the boundaries?"

"Pushing boundaries is an artist's raisin deeter." Derpy said mechanically, as if she'd heard it so many times that the response had become automatic, which, in fact, was the case. It was what Carrot Top said whenever she cooked something inedible, which was more often than might be expected. Though she was a good cook in general, she was also one to experiment with new recipes in a quest for something exceptional. Derpy squinted at the mare's flank, "What's wrong with your cutiemark? It's all squiggly."

"Raison d'etre, I believe you mean. As to my cutiemark, what's it to you? Moreover, who are you and what are you doing in my studio?" The creature asked without pausing her work.

"I'm Derpy Hooves!" Derpy said with a broad smile, wasted, as the mare did not turn, "This is my friend Apple Bloom. She wants to get her cutiemark changed."

"And Derpy wants to know what her cutiemark means." Apple Bloom interjected. She, too, was studying the mare's cutie mark. Her ivory coat, when it reached her flank, indeed had a patch that was odd and distorted, a monochromatic whorl spiraling inward with every second that passed, much in the general style of the dream realm outside this room had appeared, but Apple Bloom thought she understood, "Me and Scootaloo talked about this, about how if getting our cutiemarks itself was our special talent, we'd have a cutiemark of a cutiemark which would have our cutiemark inside it and so on forever. That's what that it isn't it? It's just how I imagined it."

The artist finally halted her work to stare incredulously at Apple Bloom, "Did she tell you?"

"She, who?"

The mare let a lock of grey mane flop down and obscure her bright blue eyes and she trembled slightly, "The pink one. The only other one who ever figured out what my cutiemark meant. Are you friends with that menace, that hellion, that typhoon encapsulated in the body of a Discord cursed mad genius of a mare?"

"Oh! You mean Pinkie Pie!" Derpy bobbed her head and grinned. She always liked to be helpful where she could. Apple Bloom groaned.

"Why, what did she do? Whatever it was, we'll help fix it." Apple Bloom said sadly.

"Oh no you won't! She already helped me enough as it is!" The mare stamped her feet in anger, then started pulling paintings off the shelf that had clearly been spoilt by the hoof of the aforementioned mare, "Just look at what she's done!"

Lunatic or savant, Pinkie Pie painted in a fairly foalish manner, and each canvas bore crudely rendered marks that might suit her, but not some random, run of the mill pony. There were every manner of pastry and baked good, party hats, noise makers, even a Twister spinner and one which Derpy was staring at trying to understand. Finally the artist pointed at it and shrilly blurted out, "It's supposed to be a balloon animal, a dog, I think." The two Ponyvillians oh'ed, turned their heads, then oh'ed again in sudden comprehension,

"Each one of these represents a pony who's going to be a blank flank longer than they were meant to be and Luna knows what effect that's going to have on the fabric of fate. A whole generation might be lost just trying to adjust for it and take up the slack, and what does she care so long as I concede myself to be her friend? Well I don't and if she thinks she's going to take over my shop and throw a party whenever she feels like it she's sadly mistaken. I'll cut ties with the mortal plain for a few centuries before that happens again! I can't abide the damage, I can't take the stress and I just don't deserve it!"

Apple Bloom waited out the tirade, "Ma'am, I'm real sorry for whatever Pinkie Pie's done, but I can't do much about spilt milk and I've got a real problem here that needs fixin' and I expect you're the only what that can help me."

"As if what I'm talking about isn't a real problem. Right, let's see, so you want your cutiemark changed and she wants to know what hers means?" They nodded, "You've come all this way for something impossible and something you could find out from any library." she stated tersely and turned back to her work, "Now leave me be. There's more ponies than you can imagine being born every day and each one needs a cutie mark to guide them to their destiny."

"I don't know," Derpy said, "I can imagine a lot of ponies. Especially if they're little foals, they don't take up nearly as much room to imagine."

The mare cocked an eyebrow and assessed Derpy, "Is she...for real?"

"Yeah, that's Derpy for you." Apple Bloom chuckled sheepishly.

"It's so odd. I really wanted to hate her, but she's just so adorable and...what's with the eyes, is she doing that on purpose?" She reared up on her hind legs, raised her hooves and moved them slowly back and forth at different rates, Derpy's eyes tracking each one independently. It caused Derpy to get dizzy and she fell back on her haunches with a plop. The artist patted her on the head, produced a sugarcube from thin air and fed it to her as if she were an animal. Apple Bloom knew that Derpy's eyes didn't work that way and she'd seen this type of magic before.

"She's a draconequus, like Discord! Be careful!" Apple Bloom shouted, fear blossoming on her young face.

The mare glared in annoyance, "Now now, you don't need to go comparing me to that someone with such a bad reputation. Besides, there's only the one draconequus and he's it. I most certainly am not so mischievous as he is, nor do I have such a weight of responsibility as he has. I am merely a humble artist, doing the best I can to guide all the little ponies' destinies in a cruel and uncaring world. Besides, I like her. She's...decorative."

"Is that why you gave her a cutiemark that doesn't mean anythin'? She ain't but just some kind of set dressin' to you?" Apple Bloom hotly demanded, "Derpy here's been bouncin' around job to job tryin' to sort out just what it is she's destined for and you think it's some kinda joke? You think she's some kind of joke?"

She was taken aback. Apple Bloom's outburst considerably blunted the mare's own anger, "Well...Perhaps I was a bit glib there. I just meant...well whatever. Sigh." She actually said sigh, aloud, "If you think it's as important as all that, let me look." She stared at Derpy's flank for a bit, clucked her tongue a bit and finally announced that she had no idea, "I just make so many cutiemarks, I'll have to check the records and get back to you."

"You don't know?" Apple Bloom huffed, "You were just sayin' how easy it would be to look up in a library and here you're supposed to be the expert and you don't know? How in the hoof can you not know?"

"Well, as I said, there's just so many and bubbles, it's, well, ambiguous? It's meaning should have been apparent from the context she got it in. Like if she was washing things they could be soap bubbles, they could have to do with diving, or they could be very literal. They could mean her special talent is blowing bubbles. I used to know someone who could blow square bubbles, but that was, erm...Discord as well. He was rather a prominent figure around here until somepony went and petrified him. The one thing I can say without equivocation is that her cutie mark does, most assuredly mean something, there's not a throwaway in the bunch."

"There's a colt in my class with a snail cutiemark." Apple Bloom stated flatly as if to call her to account for it.

"Surely a budding malacologist...or a mobile home salesman." She said with a smirk.

"If y'all say so." Apple Bloom said, nonplussed, "So if you're not a draconequus, what are you anyway, some kinda ghost?"

"A ghost? Such spurious allegations! Why I've never even been subjected to the indignity and ostensible wonder of being alive. All of us here are just persistent dreams in an ephemeral world." She sneered and looked to the ceiling, "Something like that anyway, maybe...I don't know. Philosophy's for ponies with too much time on their hooves, which, thanks to your friend, is not me."

Derpy laid down on her belly, shivering, "You're sure you're not a ghost?"

"I'm neither a ghost nor a god, though there might be a couple of those about still. They're getting to be a real rarity these days. There's all sorts here, behind the scenes, keeping your world in order. There's every manner of pony, zebra and horse, griffon, goblin, troll, dragon, bird of prey, bird of peace, bakeneko, minotaurs, several phoenixes, and at least one very clever tree, and that's just the ones I can think of right off. The rest of the universe can pretty well regulate itself, but it takes a lot of effort to keep your world running smoothly because you have something they don't; magic!"

"Magic makes it so that everything has to be manually controlled. The sun, moon, stars, wind, rain, all the animals and all the fish in the seas as well as the destinies of every living pony. Working in concert, our little ad hoc group of possibly imaginary creatures has been keeping a pretty good handle on it. There are darker forces too that are just as necessary to keep things running. Time that wears away the stoutest stone, pain and greed and cruelty that give kindness and love it's meaning...and death, too. Death is a big bugaboo amongst you ponies, but it makes way for new ponies with new ideas. Death is the biggest force for progress we have next to chaos."

"Oh, big surprise, you're gonna defend Discord again. I think you really are a draconequus or somethin'" Apple Bloom groused.

"Well, he is my eldest brother after all. Eldest brother to us all, if truth be told, but whether I defend him or not, chaos is vital. All order necessarily comes from chaos. But without random occurrences and atypical thoughts you'd just follow the same old lines over and over and never improve anything or get anywhere. Ponies would be no better than ants, or robots, or robot ants. Chaos is breaking the rules just because something seems like it may be better or more fun. Inventing a microscope and discovering bacteria, dipping a chocolate bar in Dijon mustard, building the first steam engine, poking a beehive for no good reason, it's all chaotic. For instance, the rules say I should throw you both out immediately, but I haven't had a break in so long and I'm enjoying this adversarial exchange, for the time being. That also is chaos. Chaos, you see, is the very root and the very pinnacle of inspiration!" She reared back and raised her hooves in a mighty gesture, eyes wild with passion, then stated quickly, and nearly under her breath, "That being said, Discord is a bit of a jerk."

"I hear he's good now, he made up with the Princess and everything." Derpy said in his defense, "He even showed Pinkie Pie how to get here."

She jolted back, "Ah, there you have it, there you have it! Even if he were an angel, he'd still be an angel with the ulterior motive of getting one over on everypony. You think he intended to help you, intended to let you plead your case but he was doing no more than spreading misery and pandemonium with that frizzy maned agent of disorder!"

"Hey!" Apple Bloom hollered, "Pinkie Pie might get a little out of hoof at times, but she ain't no agent of discord, or whatever. She's a good mare and a good friend and I don't appreciate you bad mouthin' her like that!"

The mare marched up to the filly and stood face to face, a grimace blooming on her lips, "You have no idea the damage she's done, not just to my work but to my sanity. She spent three days nonstop trying to force me to be her friend. She threw parties that took the other aspects away from their tasks, left the world unshepherded for hours at a time and she never stopped talking. Celestia, she never stopped talking. I was reduced to begging, in my own workshop, I had to kneel down and swear that I was her friend, would be her friend forever! Do you have any concept of how long forever is? It's so much longer than any of you can comprehend! Now that she's gone I have to work so hard to catch up and meet my deadlines. It took a week to get my shop back into the barest semblance of order."

"It couldn't have been any three days or a week of cleanup neither, that would have been before I went and hired her." Applebloom suspiciously said.

She chuckled, "Time works differently here, well, when I want it to. It's rather more fluid than in your world."

"If you can change time why do you keep complaining about deadlines?" Apple Bloom ventured.

She answered with a smile full of glittering teeth, "I do my best work when I'm under the gun."

Apple Bloom snorted, "What you're saying, if I haven't missed somethin' somewhere, is that it don't really matter what Pinkie Pie did 'cuz you've got all the time in the world to fix it."

Her assistant chose that moment to make his continued presence known with a barely stifled giggle. The artist glared at him and though he looked sheepish for a moment he quickly brushed it off, "I really think she's got you on that one, but they don't know you like I do. Making only a mountain out of a molehill would be quite liberal in your mind."

She snarled and flung a book in his direction. He caught it in his teeth and set it back down, "I'll have you know that it was my very peace of mind that was affected by her shenanigans and that is by far more precious than mere time. Now, I've wasted plenty enough of my serenity helping you lot already, so please do bug off."

"But you haven't helped us at all!" Apple Bloom protested, "Derpy doesn't know what her cutiemark means and I still need to get mine fixed!"

"I said I would help...Derpy, was it? And I will. Probably. If I remember and it's not too much trouble." She qualified, "Now as to you, it's quite impossible even if I were to accede to changing one of my masterpieces."

"It ain't no masterpiece." Apple Bloom grumbled. The artist gasped mockingly, holding a hoof over her chest as if she might swoon, "I mean I know you've got a lot of these things to turn out, but there's hardly any detail in any of 'em and they ain't as hard as you're makin' 'em out to be. You ain't got to be so prissy about it. I just need you to touch it up a bit, that's all. Nopony but me's ever seen it so nopony will know."

The creature took on an harsh tone, all pretense of humor evaporating, "I don't think you appreciate how hard it is to convey a concept with a limited color palette and still make it discernible on unkempt fur. I'll have you know I am an artist of the highest caliber. I've had eons to practice and every piece is a true master work!"

Apple Bloom quailed at her words, "Okay, okay, I see what you mean and I might have gone and oversold it a bit, but still, there's been a mistake and y'all need to set it right."

"Impossible. I never make mistakes." She huffed.

"Now, statistically that can't possibly be true." Apple Bloom pointed out. The argument was fresh in her mind, Cheerilee had been teaching probabilities and statistics all last week, Apple Bloom had paid very close attention on the grounds that she might try to use it to get a cutiemark as a cardshark, "If'n you've worked for centuries and painted millions of cutiemarks, there had to have been a couple clunkers."

"Well....Maybe in the early days when the world was young. But in the paleopony period nothing was quite so refined as it is now and the cutiemarks were likewise crude. Now I don't make mistakes. Every once and again I have happy accidents."

"If'n you can admit to these happy accidents, can't you admit that you just might have let a mistake or two slip by?" Apple Bloom goaded.

"Unlikely." She said flatly, giving little room for debate, "Besides, even if, and that's a big if, I managed to let some error slip by, there's little enough I can do to fix it. It's woven into the tapestry of life and I guess it could be picked out and redone with some effort but I don't have the slightest idea how to find it. You saw the size of that thing out there? There's millions, maybe billions of ponies represented there, who's to say? All the ponies that have ever lived and quite a few that haven't lived yet and you have to find one amongst them; yourself. Do you think you can do that?"

"We can do it!" Derpy shouted, "Just watch us!"

"It is, quite honestly, impossible. Woven in there are ponies like there are grains of sand in the desert. If you had any concept of the numbers I'm talking about you'd understand. No amount of determination is going to help you here." She said insistently.

"We still have to try." Apple Bloom said sadly.

"Ah, well, if that's how you'd like to waste your life, so be it." She walked to the corner of the shop and rummaged around. At length she produced a pair of wrought iron scissors, covered over in rust save for their keen cutting edges. Dramatically they were dropped at Apple Bloom's hooves where they gaped open with a cluck.

"Scissors?" Apple Bloom stated in confusion. They looked somewhere between a normal pair and the overgrown ones used to cut ribbons at grand openings. While it was a mystical place and all, they looked for all the world like regular roofing shears, just oversized scissors intended to cut shingles and tar paper. The barn back home had a bucket full of them, their chewed up edges just waiting to be sharpened, these looked no better.

"Yes, they are at that. Were you to find your thread, which you won't, you'd have to have a way to cut the cutiemark loose, and since we're using elemental, but very symbolist, forces here, it will have to be done manually. Just snip the errant strand loose, neatly, mind you, and bring it back here. Then will come the hard part." She sneered, "Convincing me I made a mistake."

"Oh, that won't be hard at all." Apple Bloom grumbled, looking back at her covered flank.

Author's Note:

Kind of loosely based on the vague thought of a misremembered bunch of Piers Anthony novels on the one hand, and shoddy bits of Greek legend on the other.