Complaints Department

by TheDarkStarCzar

The Tapestry

Promises may be made to be broken, but mistakes are made to be mended.
-The Great and Powerful Trixie, from her autobiographical self help book, The Great and Penitent Mare

Ponyville is a nice little town filled with nice little ponies, that's what Apple Bloom had thought. After walking across the tapestry of life for half a day she'd developed serious doubts. They'd been brought here by the artist's assistant in an elevator that reminded Derpy of the ones at Ponyville General Hospital, but this one had opened from a blank wall in the studio and disgorged them out the other side onto the vast, fibrous expanse with no apparent motion. The assistant had followed them out, just until they got the lay of the land, he'd said.

It was disconcerting. Laid all about them like an infinite expanse of old mare's tatty, knotted throw rug, was the tapestry of life, taut as a drumhead. Objectively they knew it had edges, they'd seen them from below, but now it stretched to the horizons, an undulating savannah with no oasis to be found. The worst part came when they inspected the woven elements and they began to writhe wormily in their vision and produce in their mind's eye a few moments in time, loosely connected in a herky jerky, flipbook fashion.

It's one thing to see an event, it's another thing altogether to see it from inside another pony's mind and experience the internal why that had caused them to make the decisions they had. The tapestry gave them that too. It did not present ponies in a positive light. It seemed like, more often than not, they did the right thing in spite of themselves, grudgingly, accidentally and for their own reasons. At first they'd chucklingly told each other it was just Fillydelphia, which the majority of the first section they'd explored had been composed of, Fillydelphian ponies and ones largely associated with it, but Ponyville had proven no more saintly.

When Apple Bloom had lost her sense of urgency it had been Derpy who'd found that first Ponyvillian and trailed his thread to the a cluster of residents. They'd figured it for a break through, but they'd been looking for hours and discovered no more than half a dozen ponies they'd even heard of and none they knew. The problem was that even though they'd found the correct area they still had to search through every moment of every day of every pony's life, which was daunting, to say the least. Moreover, a great many strands were non-linear, zigzagging from place to place with gossamer threads that dwindled to nothing or were hopelessly buried when they were traced.

The assistant had long since given it up as hopeless and was just going through the motions, waiting for Apple Bloom and Derpy to concede. The former had grown terribly taciturn, grunting acknowledgment at any potential lead and no more. The latter seemed wholly enchanted and consumed by the task at hoof, carefully tracing her way down the gnarled tangles.

Finally Apple Bloom plopped down on her plot in defeat, causing a little ripple to radiate outward and draw the stallion's attention. He'd been examining the fabric with just as much wonder as everypony else, but not knowing anypony save for the two ponies before him, he wasn't much help.

"Are you giving up so soon?" He inquired.

Applebloom was not ready to admit to the failure she was gradually becoming resigned to, "Takin' a break's all."

"Oh, okay. I'll probably have to head back pretty soon anyway, she can't do without me for very long, it seems like." He rubbed a hoof against his chest nervously, "All part of being in demand, I guess."

Apple Bloom grumbled, thinking that she wasn't having any luck and they would eventually have to go home, "It's funny though, I ain't hungry or tired and it's been long enough I should be."

"Well...this place isn't strictly real, so I don't suppose you would get hungry in a dream, would you? Again, there's the whole time dilation thing the boss is working for you, so you probably haven't even been here very long." He scuffed the pliant fabric with his hoof, "I just wish I could help you more, but I don't know anything about your world, really, and I've never even been up here before. Truth be told, I'm rarely anywhere but the studio and the library these days, I'm not precisely worldly."

"Just bringin' us up here and givin' us a chance is enough to make me more'n grateful. Say, I don't believe I got your name, or your bosses either?" Apple Bloom graciously held out her hoof so as to require a more proper introduction. A groan implied that he'd rather it not be known, "What, don't y'all have names?"

"Everypony's got a name, it's just that I don't like mine much. I guess, though, you can call me what Galatea, that's the boss, calls me, though it's no better," He shut his eyes and shuddered, "Piggy."

"Piggy?" She quirked an eyebrow, "How bad's your real name that that's an improvement?"

Sputtering and flushing, he managed, "It's a dumb pun and it's wasted in this day and age besides. Just, don't ask."

"Okay, Piggy." She giggled, "I have to figure there's some manner of organization to all this," She gestured expansively to the continental textile, "Maybe your...Galatea, would have some kinda' idea and she just didn't want to tell us?"

"I'm afraid not. Galatea's the very embodiment of inspiration, but uncommonly single minded, it serves her well for her task. She hasn't left the studio in all our time together and unless she's been doing some heavy reading on the side, I doubt she knows any more about this place than me. We've been around forever and we've heard rumors, but in the end, we just work here."

"Ain't anypony in charge?" she asked.

"Nopony, so far as I'm aware. There doesn't really need to be. We each have our tasks and we do them as best as we are able. It's the case that we came into our roles as they themselves became necessary, and learned about the rest of the works via eons of scuttlebutt." He smirked, "You could say that we hit the ground running and never took the time to wonder why, and now...now it doesn't even matter, because what else would we do?"

Apple Bloom pondered the question but was interrupted by Derpy before she could come to a conclusion. She'd strayed hundreds of leagues away and had come gliding back, pointing a hoof and calling out gleefully, "I found my Dinky, all grown up with her own little foals!"

"That's great! Maybe we can follow her thread back to Cheerilee's class and find my cutiemark." Apple Bloom beamed, "So whereabouts did you see her?"

Derpy pointed and looked back, then her ears fell. The desert of yarny fabric all looked the same. The longer she stood still the less certain she was even about which direction she'd come from, "I guess I should have marked it somehow. Whoops."

"It's alright Derpy, if you found it once, we can find it again." Apple Bloom kindly stated, reminding the easily confused pegasus for all the world of her sister, and the condescending kindnesses she'd always offered when Derpy had failed. Apple Bloom started walking in the direction she'd thought Derpy had come from, though she had not even a guess as to just how far she'd gone.

Apple Bloom was deep in thought and started mumbling out a question, "If...if this old quilt has the future sewn up in it, too, what happens if we don't do the stuff it says we're supposed to?"

"A temporal pair of socks!" Derpy came out of her short lived funk and stated exuberantly, then made some squealy noises that she'd meant to be the whole of the universe coming unraveled in some sort of singularity. It didn't translate as well as it might have.

For his part the stallion seemed unconcerned by the fine imitation of the brutal end of an entire universe, "That's the obvious question, isn't it? But, just because somepony happens to know what you're destined to do and have recorded it here, it doesn't mean that free will is an illusion. You still chose it, after all, or will choose it...barring just the sort of interference that seeing the future and willfully choosing to diverge from it causes." He glared, "There are contingencies that account for the repair of the tapestry, should such a thing occur, but they tend to be rather slapdash and relatively unpleasant for the mavericks who've upset order, or so I hear."

Unsettled by what may have been interpreted as a threat, Apple Bloom scuffed her hooves acrost the roving that was the physical representations of a pony's life, Lovestruck's to be precise. She wasn't anyone Apple Bloom knew, but she appeared to be a Ponyvillian, though it was hard to pinpoint the time period very precisely.

Lovestruck's experiences flickered through Apple Bloom's mind as she traced the thick, multicolored tangles that orbited her. As an inveterate matchmaker, destinies seem to be greatly altered once they found their way into her thrall. The young filly blushed as she followed along one of these branches for a moment and saw the immediate results the object of her studies achieved. Lovestruck herself led a considerably more chaste life, but not by choice.

Indeed she played team sports and worked out constantly in an attempt to make herself more appealing to the stallions, and attract them she did, as friends, whom she hooked up with other friends. She was never convinced of the earnestness of her suitors as she had a poor body image, self esteem issues and a considerable inferiority complex and it was all Apple Bloom could do to keep following and experiencing her uniquely pathetic outlook. What kept her following along, though, was the fact that when she flicked her eyes forward along the strand she found that another burst from the thicket, twined with it, and created a rope thick as a filly's leg, marking the mare's eventual success. Like a soap opera, she could bear wading through the overwrought drama for the promise of a satisfying bit of romance.

The bulk of the tapestry was woven in shades of beige and grey. Gouts of color were woven in at intervals, though. They were moments of special note. Achievements, milestones, tender moments and times of simple contemplation that refocused a pony's path. The intersection of those two strands was a garish explosion of reds, oranges and pinks, a gash of color that ran perpendicular for as far as the eye could see. It was a small striation, but distinctly visible. Momentous as the moment was for Lovestruck and her beau, Meadow Song, it was the circumstance of their meeting that accounted for the widely noted moment.

They met during a song, a song in which the whole town had participated, the first time, in fact, that that had happened. That was the day that Pinkie Pie had arrived in town, fresh off the rock farm and proclaimed the various sights of her newfound home, in musical form. Her innocent enthusiasm had drawn each resident into an impromptu parade and chorus, first for the sake of curiosity and then as willing participants. Apple Bloom had heard stories about it, but experiencing it first hoof through the mind of a love struck Lovestruck was a glorious experience.

She ushered for Derpy and the stallion she still couldn't think of as Piggy to come and see it as well. Derpy was immediately awash in ebullient joy, "I remember this! It seemed crazy at the time, but now it seems like every week that Pinkie has half the ponies in town singing."

"That really is something." Piggy blissfully murmured. Derpy skipped from strand to strand, grinning wildly and humming off key to the chorus as she experienced the event from as many perspectives as she could.

"Y'all know what this means?" Apple Bloom pointed a hoof to the left and then the right, "If this effected everypony in town then wherever this here little line ends is the edge of Ponyville. So this line is all the ponies in town, that line," She pointed forward and back, "Is time, even though a lot of the strands ain't no kind of parallel, I think that's true. So...we need to go forward and just find more songs, or things that effected everypony to find the right time, then we'll just have to find my place in it."

"Hey, Derpy? Can you carry me up in the air so I can get a better look at how far this stripe goes?" Apple Bloom asked, and Derpy nodded her head violently before sweeping her up in her forelegs and hauling her into the air.

The take off was rough and Derpy seemed to judder to the left every thirteenth wing beat, but the view paid for the risk. The colored stripe went on for miles uninterrupted to the right until it faded into oblivion. The other way it was simply truncated unceremoniously. Looking ahead there were further striations and she pointed Derpy towards one in particular, a thick black slash that marred the whole fabric from horizon to horizon, though it was thickest in Ponyville and in one spot in particular and the filly pointed vehemently towards it.

A troublesome landing was softened by the slightly bouncy nature of their environs, and a minor rugburn was the whole of the damage dealt by the grey pegasus' lack of depth perception. Apple Bloom sorted out her bunched and tangled coveralls and roughly knotted then back around her waist. It had been a close call, the slide of landing had nearly peeled them so far back as to expose her cursed cutie mark. That taken care of she took off at a gallop towards the snarl she'd seen from above.

The vibrant colors greyed and blackened over a scant few inches of space, and for several yards they remained that way before abruptly transitioning to gold that faded back into the mundane beige and interspersed colors. She knew without looking at the individual strands what it was and how long a period it represented. It was the time that Nightmare Moon had been at large and the bulky mass of converging threads up ahead was where the fate of the world had pivoted around six mare's bravery and determination. Most importantly to Apple Bloom, her sister was in there somewhere.

"What have we here?" Piggy halted from a trot and looked over the mound of fiber. Where the rest of the tapestry was largely flat this section rose considerably proud of the field, a gordian tangle and the filly was having a devilish time trying to track any particular pony through the all black weave.

"This is where Princess Luna was saved by the Elements of Harmony." She said, poking at random yarny bits, "My sister's right here somewhere."

"Well, I don't think you're going to find her that way." He looked away, towards the future, "Maybe you can pick them out where it's less busy."

Apple Bloom conceded and it turned out to be just the case. Once the more regular pattern returned it was easy to pick out six thick paths, often running parallel or touching, rarely wandering farther than a dozen yards from each other. Orbiting and crisscrossing them, with spiderwebs and dendrites running far afield, were associations and shared experiences with other ponies. Running ahead she picked up four moderately sized vines that tended to stay quite close to the six mares.

The one that stayed closest in orbit, unsurprisingly, was Spike and the filly briefly saw the world through a dragon's eyes. Whether it was because they weren't so different, or the fact that he was raised by ponies, his perspective didn't seem as far removed as she would have guessed. In the back of his mind a measureless greed slumbered, only awakening for long enough to gobble down gemstones and various other delicacies.

The specific memories she saw were of simple domesticity, Spike putting the finishing touches on Twilight Sparkle's breakfast while the librarian herself finished preparations for the day's checklist. Apple Bloom had long wondered about the propriety of Spike's situation, specifically in that he seemed to be a slave. From his point of view, though, there was nothing else he'd rather be doing. Much like Applejack was to her, Twilight was both a mother and a sister to him and he was no more indentured to her than Apple Bloom herself was to Sweet Apple Acres. That didn't mean that she wasn't likely to live out her life on that farm, if only she could get her cutie mark sorted out.

A hoof nudged her and she reemerged from Spike's memories. It was Piggy scowling down at her, "You shouldn't be doing that."

She started and looked abashed, "Oh...I'm sorry, I didn't know it was against the rules or anythin', it's just that I ain't never had the chance to really understand somepony...or dragon, that way."

He shook his head and chuckled, a tentative smile softened his face, "It's not against the rules, there aren't any here. From this vantage it would be hard to swear that there's even much in the way of strategy. It just seems improper to root through the mind of those you actually know well unless there's some reason for it. It's just a matter of manners. You wouldn't want other ponies looking through your brain, would you?"

"Well...No, I guess not just anypony." She admitted.

"What about me?" Derpy butted in.

"Um...I don't know, I guess I wouldn't mind so long as you weren't gonna go around telling everypony what ya' found rattlin' around in there," Apple Bloom nodded once, firmly, Derpy could be trusted, sort of, but, "Why you askin'?"

"Because I found your brain, it's right over here." Derpy pointed a hoof at the ground up ahead and at one particular strand. It was one of the four that she'd just been looking at, the one most closely entwined with Applejack.

Proximity indicated the other pairings to be Sweetiebelle and Rarity, and at a greater distance, but no less reliably constrained, Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. Pinkie Pie's strand was a fuzzy explosion of interconnections, a background of static worming and insinuating it's way across the broad, woven expanse. It looked almost as cotton candy would, had it gotten caught in the loom. Fluttershy's cord looked desolate and lonely by comparison until one noted the background of tiny threads running in parallel, indicative of all the little lives to which she was connected.

"This bigger beige one's Applejack. I expected her to be red, like an apple, but it's just kind of tan with a few squiggles of color, just like the rest. Your thread seems pretty small and it wanders all over. Maybe you could just follow hers up to where you got your cutie mark?"

"Yeah, I reckon that's as good a plan as any." She said and started following Applejack's strand.

After several long miles of searching there was an interruption much like Nightmare Moon had caused, but it's checkerboard pattern was a telltale mark of Discord. Scootaloo, Sweetiebelle and her strands bulked up to hoof thick size. The spell had weakened and somepony would have broken it soon enough anyway, but she realized that it really had been the Cutiemark Crusaders who'd loosed the draconequus on the land and the size of their threads reflected it. All this time she'd thought Rarity had just been teasing Sweetiebelle when she told her that she'd unleashed a god of chaos on the land. It sounded a bit hyperbolic.

Looking too closely at her sister's strands within that section was a mistake. Everypony was full of bitterness, confusion and madness, it was overwhelming. Literally it was and she stumbled to the ground with a grunt, hooves to her temples.

"Serves you right for snooping." Piggy singsonged and helped her to her up.

"I had'ta see what was going on, didn't I?" She shot back, Discord's influence having momentarily infused a petulant rebelliousness into her mind, even from briefly browsing through the events of that strange day.

The distance between Nightmare Moon's return and Discord's was great, but it gave her a sense of scale that let her continue on at a faster clip with little need to see the fine details. Derpy and Piggy broke into a fast trot to keep pace and then a gallop as Apple Bloom crossed over another threshold, much smaller, but of sparkling white, that might have marked the return of the Crystal empire and the fall of King Sombra. Then at last, as Piggy began to pant heavily and Derpy finally realized that she had wings and took to them, the filly crossed a mauled and tangled patch, only those six strands wide to start and then hemmed in by a band of purple that stretched across the land. She finally jolted to a stop.

"Lookit!" Apple Bloom pawed the yielding ground, "That right there's the coronation, which means that right up ahead....yup, there it is, this is it. This is where I got my cutiemark." She stared contemplatively at the half yard long orange discoloration on the beige rope that was her life, then scrunched up her nose in disgust and pulled out the scissors. Their comically oversized construction was precisely the opposite of what was called for and she had to open them wide to start picking at the fibers with the sharp point.

After a time she got frustrated and threw the scissors down. Her strand of fate was a couple inches thick at this point and the errant mark was easily seen and picked at, but it was deeply embedded and interwoven making it extremely difficult to work loose.

"Just how neat do I have to be? If'n I've got to get every single bit of it I'll be at it forever!"

"I don't know, really none of this is my department, but I'd think you'd have to get most of it and try to keep it in one piece, too." Piggy posited.

Derpy offered to help, but Apple Bloom thought it a bad idea and said that it was something she needed to do for herself, even if she didn't know how she was going to manage it.

"Well, maybe you can go up ahead and see how you did it?" Derpy scratched her chin, "No, wait, what if you do it wrong because you did it wrong because you saw you doing it wrong and then you couldn't do it right?"

"Well, if I can't change anything anyway I expect it doesn't matter and I ought to just look anyway. What do you think, Piggy?" Apple Bloom deferred to her guide.

"Oh, um...I don't know. Somehow it strikes me as wrong hearted, but I can't see anything in it that's really so terrible. Why don't you try it and if it causes some sort of paradox that reduces you to a subatomic singularity, I'll know to tell the next dumb filly why she shouldn't do that." Piggy smirked. His sarcasm was ignored and Apple Bloom followed the path up ahead, right up to the very point that she went through the portal.

"It's gone!" She she exclaimed, "The whole chunk of time after I went through Pinkie's portal ain't there."

"It picks back up right here." Derpy helpfully stated from just up ahead, "It looks like we just got back and you're talking to yourself, 'Don't give up, it gets easier once you get one end loose, and don'tcha go snooping around.'"

"Huh, that's considerate of me. Hope I remember to tell myself that when I get back." Apple Bloom chuckled, "Guess it's back to work for me. It's libel to take a while, and I was thinking, Derpy, maybe you ought to go on back to when you were at camp and see how you ended up with your cutiemark. After I'm done here I can just head on back that way and find y'all. I figure if y'all follow Apple Jack's thread back 'til she got her cutimark, then go back another mile or two and you ought to be at about the right time. All you'll have to do is try'n find yourself."

Author's Note:

Dumb pun: Pygstallion, who'd carved the archetypical bodies and variations on them. After enough versions, like any good sculptor, he made molds and outsourced the project. Then he had considerable time on his hooves with little to do. Thus Galatea, the statue given life.
That was my thought on it, anyway.