Complaints Department

by TheDarkStarCzar

Correcting Errors

All of us make mistakes.
-Princess Luna, from her collected musings on lunar exile.

Apple Bloom shrunk under the mare's withering glare, managing only to stammer out, "But, I...I only cut the one little thread, I...I didn't think..."

"You sure didn't think, and where does that put us? Minus one world." Galatea snorted, "See, you think it's just one thread and it shouldn't matter, but every pony is connected in that textile that is life, and if you go hacking at it things just start coming apart." She picked up a fresh scroll from the in basket on her cluttered table and studied it briefly.

"Looks like you saved a couple ponies, sure, but in so doing, you deprived the future Element of Honesty of the most formative experience of her young life and she goes a whole different way, which left Equestria one champion shy when that Nightmare Moon came back and everypony died, more or less."

"Princess Luna wouldn't kill everypony, she's a pretty nice Princess. I got to meet her on Nightmare Night and she shared her candy with me and helped me refill the apple bobbing tub when I bobbed the drain plug the second time." Derpy insisted. Galatea rolled her eyes.

Galatea stated simply, "Crops do not grow well in the moonlight and Nightmare Moon is rather less sensible about such things than Princess Luna, even if they are the same...-ish."

"But, that don't make any sense. Shouldn't everythin' before that Summer Sun Celebration have stayed the same?" Rather than exploding in a great dandelion poof, Apple Bloom thought.

"This isn't some time travel rubbish from some fairy book. Fate is interdependent, interwoven. Try to remove a single strand from a spiderweb and the whole thing folds over on itself, it's like that."

Piggy scoffed, "Now I don't think that's an apt simile. I like it, mind you, but if you do it opposite of how the spider put it together you should be able to..."

Galatea turned on him, "Oh, and is that what she did? Carefully study the construction and reverse engineer it to achieve the desired results without interrupting fate's design?"

"I wasn't there," Derpy admitted, "But I think she must have just cut something with those big rusty scissors."

"Quite. Yes, that's just what she did, hacked away at eons of labor with roofing shears and no regard for the consequences." Galatea flounced down onto her workstool, leaned back until it began to creak and pop and sighed.

"But, y'all can fix, it, right? It's not really the end of everything, is it?" The little filly pled, a shimmer of moisture building up in her eyes, threatening to break their bounds.

"Sure, sure. We can fix it." Piggy nodded.

"With all the other aspects working together, I suppose we can at that, and faster than the first time since we know pretty well how it's going to go this time and don't have to come up with everything off the top of our heads." Galatea concurred, sadly, but with a shade of optimism peeking through, "If everything goes okay we could probably get it right back to where we had it in...say...four hundred and thirty million years? I mean that would be tight, but there's a lot of corners we can cut in prehistory. Nopony will be around to complain if we use a little deus ex machina to skip some of the boring primordial stuff and do some natural selection with a mallet every once and a while."

"Four hundred thirty million years? But...we can't just hang around here that long." Apple Bloom protested.

"In fact, you have no choice." Galatea pointed out, "There's not really anywhere to go back to, is there?"

"But, I left my Dinky with Carrot Top, she's going to be awfully mad if I leave her to babysit for all those millions of years." Derpy's ears flopped and she dropped to her haunches at the prospect of a displeased Carrot Top. Maybe she'll understand?

Apple Bloom was despondent, she'd destroyed the world and would pay with millions of years trapped in it's underpinnings. She'd go mad for certain if she was trapped here that long. It would be worse for Derpy, it seemed she still didn't get the implications and it wasn't even her fault. A thought bubbled to the surface, and she almost let it evaporate away, but ended up asking anyway, "This place looks the same, how'd you even know what happened?"

"They sent me a report." Galatea indicated the scroll on the table, "Aside from that I could see the whole thing coming down out the window, see?"

Though she pointed to the window, Apple Bloom at first refused to look, saying that she didn't need to see it again, she'd been right in the middle of it.

"You really should look out there and see how mad the aspects of fate are." Piggy chastised her, but with a knowing grin, "They're out there trying to scrounge up all the leftover bits to see if there's anything they can salvage."

Piggy gestured again and raised an eyebrow, he didn't look mad and Apple Bloom didn't understand it, so she went to the window and looked out. Where she'd expected three angry titans and an empty sky she found the giants and the tapestry, standing and hung just as they previously had been, "You...you've just been buckin' with me, haven't you?"

The artist and her assistant both broke down in hysterical laughter. Piggy, at length, explained, "I told you in the first place, it's largely symbolic. You mortals, ooh, boy, give you a pair of scissors and some misguided notion that you can change the past and just watch you lot hack away at the very firmaments on which you stand."

Galatea tittered, "Better than the ones who look ahead at the future and make a paradox. They're the worst because they've got to untangle those themselves and they take forever! Not that we've had the dubious pleasure of mortal company ourselves before, but some of the best stories I've heard around here deal with just this occurrence, and you certainly didn't disappoint."

"So this has happened before and none of that was real?" A cold anger rising in the yellow filly. She scooped up the scroll from the table which told of her exploits with more underlines and exclamation points than is proper for a serious report on a world ending cataclysm. The fact that she'd done it in the vague hope of saving her parents wasn't even taken seriously and it ended with the line, 'What a maroon!' and she dashed the scroll against the floor and stomped on it.

"Well...it's what really would have happened if it were real, so be glad it wasn't." The artist scolded between her ebbing laughter.

"So hunting for my cutiemark was all..."

"Oh, no, now symbolic or not, your cutiemark is real, make no mistake about that. It's all very..." She rolled her hoof in the air, looking for a word.

"Capricious? Arbitrary?" Piggy suggested.

"I was looking for something that means just that in, perhaps, a less pejorative sense. Something that implies an underlying grace to the whole thing, ineffable or something, I don't know. I do hope you managed to retrieve it?" Galatea held out her hooves greedily. Apple Bloom retrieved the gossamer thing from her pocket, fluffed it lightly and presented it for inspection. Some fault must have been found with it as both Piggy and Galatea fell to prodding it and muttering over it.

"You tore it. Looks like you just pulled it loose from one end instead of snipping it loose like I told you to. It's going to take forever just to patch it back up to the way it was." The artist flattened out the fibers, smoothing them with a hoof and forcing it to slowly revert to the form of a ripped canvas the color of Apple Bloom's flank. In the center lay the cutiemark Apple Bloom had sought to conceal, a trio of flowers laid over a crossed wrench and claw hammer, "What's wrong with it anyway? Aside from the damage you've done, it looks like a perfectly good cutiemark to me. To tell you the plain truth, I'm underwhelmed after all the buildup. I expected a steaming pile of horseapples, or that one like the unicorn proctologist had, you remember that one Piggy? I'll admit that one was a bit tongue in cheek...or horn in cheeks, as the case may be. That one, though, is downright mundane. How'd you get it?"

"Well...See there's been a problem with the bees this year. Winter wrap up was late, so the flowers were to and we had to get the apple trees goin', which is hard when there ain't enough bees around to do the pollinatin'. Well we were all set to do it by hoof, one flower at a time, when I come up with this idea on how to build somethin' to pollinate a whole tree's worth of flowers all at once. See, it shakes the tree enough to get the pollen into the air, then sucks it up while it blows pollen it collected from the other trees back out in a little tornado." Apple Bloom's eyes lit up as she started explaining, "I realized that all I needed was to tent the tree like a fumigator and draw a vacuum with a ducted fan that'd pull the loose pollen into a cyclonic filter, then a simple venturi to draw the pollen from the other trees into the exhaust stream and spray it back out and...and...you don't care about none of this do you?"

"It's not that we don't care, we just don't understand the..." Piggy started.

"Not a bit." The artist interrupted, "But it seems to me that the mark is quite apt. Your talent is for designing agricultural machinery, clearly, so what's your problem? You acted like whatever that mark was managed to be the worst possible thing."

"Look at the flowers." Apple Blossom indicated the white blossoms on the torn canvas, but nopony could tell what she was pointing at, they just looked like flowers, "That ain't an apple blossom!"

"So what is it? With a name like yours it'd be a lark if it was a pear flower." Piggy chortled.

"Oh, it's way worse than that. If anypony ever saw that I'd be laughed off the farm and never be able to live it down." She grimaced at the marble floor and scuffed a hoof acrost it, "I might just as well try to be a real rock farmer with rock candy on my flank as to farm apples with that...thing as a cutiemark. See that tube of petals stickin' out around the stamen? Apple blooms don't have that and it took me a while to remember just what it was meant to be. It's a kumquat, a goldern kumquat bloom is what it is!"

Galatea had gotten down one of her books, a well worn volume dedicated exclusively to arboreal forms. She hoofed through it and stopped at the apple blossom, then flipped to the page on kumquats, flipping from one to the other and glancing at the canvas in between, "They're close enough that nopony would know the difference but you. Even so, maybe you're destined to take on a different crop?"

"Lady, are you nuts? My whole family's apple farmers, expert apple farmers. Every one of them old enough to eat an apple is gonna' know that that's not an apple bloom and once it gets out everypony's just going to know me as that filly with the kumquat cutiemark. When the next reunion rolls around it'll be just about time for me to take a real role on the farm, but I'll never be anything more than a second stringer with this dang thing to make me look ignorant. Foalish. Kumquats are the red maned step foal of the ol' fruit industry. I'll be a pariah. Admit it. You goofed."

"I think you're exaggerating. It's certainly close enough to get the point across."

"Close only counts in horseshoes and harmony and I can't be having my whole life ruint because you can't tell apples from kumquats." The little filly was worked up to the point that she was jabbing the artist in the chest with sharp hooves. She was more than a little cowed, though not prepared in the slightest to concede the point.

She rolled her eyes derisively, "You're overreacting, but...Look, you went to all the trouble...and now I'm going to have to patch up the canvas anyway...so I guess I can touch it up a bit, if it means that much to you, that is."

"It does."

"Fine, fine. It'll take a while though. I've got to reuse the canvas and a seamless patch takes a while. You'll probably be the last of your classmates to get a cutiemark."

"I...I don't care about that anymore. I just need it fixed. I can't be the laughingstock of the whole Apple family. I just can't." She hid her face in her shoulder and shuddered at the thought of it, then with a sudden realization she peeled back her coveralls, looked back and was thrilled for once to find her flank quite blank, as it had been since the debacle with the tapestry of fate. She grinned, and spun in place for a full revolution, trying to come closer than was physically possible to her own rump to verify the absence. Then she turned to the grey pegasus who'd tagged along good naturedly this whole time, "Now that we've settled that, Derpy, didja find out what your cutiemark means?"

Derpy hung her head, "No, I was pretty close but everything went to pieces and I had to catch Piggy. I guess I'll just never know."

"Oh, I'm so sorry about that Derpy, I didn't mean to...Shoot. If I'd'a just acted more sensible we'd both have what we wanted and been done with all this. Now how we gonna' figure it out now?"

Derpy's eyes brightened and her smile returned, "Don't worry about it, Apple Bloom, I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. Until then I can just keep chugging along, and one good thing about having so many jobs, I get to meet lots of nice ponies I'd never have met any other way."

Piggy rolled his eyes, "Look, we could waste a lot of time, go back up there and run around some more, but I'm going to go out on a limb and make an educated guess that your mark isn't a vocational one at all. It's about perseverance. Bubbles always rise to the top. Some of them may pop along the way, and it may even seem like you can hold them down, but invariably they'll find a way to break out, just like that smile...yadda yadda. Ad astra per aspera and all that."

"Awww...I like that." Cooed Derpy, "It makes it sound like my special talent is having bad luck but finding a way of being happy."

"When you say it like that it sounds like a pretty crummy talent." Apple Bloom scowled.

"It's better than having good luck and being unhappy anyway. I already know too many ponies like that." Derpy countered and Apple Bloom had to concede the point, "But...I still don't know what job I'm supposed to do."

"Well...I don't know about the cutiemark end of it, but how 'bout mailmare?" Apple Bloom speculated, "You did alright as a package delivery mare so long as you didn't have to haul heavy stuff and you'd get to talk to near everypony in town that way."

"Also it's a government job. I've heard it's almost impossible to get fired from those." Piggy mentioned, which implied he knew more about Derpy than Apple Bloom had suspected.

"The mailpony we've got now is half blind and keeps mixin' up the deliveries. He means to retire pretty soon. I could get my sister to put in a good word for you, I think. Big Macintosh, too."

"Really? You think I'd be a good mailmare?" Derpy reared up in excitement, "That sound like a great job for me!"

Derpy resolved to look into it as soon as she got back and after saying their polite thank yous and goodbyes, Piggy led them back to the spot where they'd arrived and they passed back through the dimly pulsing portal.

Pinky Pie and Carrot Top, both being bakers, were hotly debating the merits of non-stick enchantments versus traditional sprays and greases when their two friends reappeared. Apple Bloom was looking to Derpy, "What was it I said again? Don't give up, it gets easier once you get one end loose, and don'tcha go snooping around? Something like that? I wish I woulda gone and told myself something useful, like don't trust them crazy artists not to be pulling pranks on me."

Derpy simply nodded.

"How's the cutiemark?" Pinkie chirped, craning her neck to see Apple Bloom's freshly blankened flank.

"It's in the shop." Apple Bloom said wryly, "I expect once I get it back that it should be okay."

"Oh, and I decided I'm going to be a mailmare!" Derpy enthusiastically stated. Unsurprisingly, Pinkie Pie knew the postmaster and offered to help her in this endeavor, which the klutzy pegasus gratefully accepted.

Apple Bloom said her farewells to Pinkie Pie and Carrot Top, promising to tell them about her quest when she had more time, but for now, she needed to get home. First she stopped and gave Derpy a heartfelt hug and a nuzzle, "Thanks for all your help, Derpy. I couldn't have done it without'cha."

On the way back to Sweet Apple Acres a pair of fillies caught up with her, "What's with that hideous outfit? Those overalls make you look like even more of a bumpkin loser than usual."

"Now Diamond Tiara," Silver Spoon mocked, "She's probably just gotten to be so embarrassed by her big, blank flank that she had to cover it up."

"Do you think her family's so poor that she couldn't have afforded something more stylish, or do you think she just doesn't have any fashion sense?" Diamond Tiara asked.

"I don't know." Silver Spoon derisively laughed, "Probably both."

Apple Bloom's nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed. She gave every indication that she was about to lash out until the recent knowledge about Diamond Tiara asserted itself, cooling her rage like quenching steel. She realized that, although Silver Spoon was still fair game, she likely had a story every bit as rough as Diamond Tiara's. Bullies are made, not born, and like most problems in Equestria a liberal application of friendship was what was called for.

Apple Bloom removed the coveralls, folded them neatly and slung them on her back as the two bullies watched. She took a deep breath, "Look, Diamond Tiara, just 'cuz you've got a beauty queen crown on your flank...well that don't mean that that's all you can ever be." Diamond Tiara started to speak, but her voice hitched when Apple Bloom's words struck home, "It's just a start, and you can do so much more, be more, and you ain't stuck here if you don't wanna be. Just don't give up and settle for less 'cuz you think that's what you've been saddled with."

"What are you even talking about you lamebrained..." Silver Spoon started, but was interrupted by her friend.

"What do you know?" She shot back and then said sarcastically, "It's not like I'm overburdened with other marketable skills, you know? Barnyard Bargains owns me, and a smiling face for Daddy's ads is all I'll ever be and all I'll ever need. I'm practically set for life."

"Maybe, but you've still got time to learn and do whatever you want to, something that might actually make you happy instead of having to play the big fish in this little pond. I expect that even your pa wants more for you than that." Apple Bloom turned to the other little filly, "You too, Silver Spoon. I expect there's more to you than just bein' spoilt and took care of like a bird in a cage. I'll have to talk to Scoots and Sweetiebelle about it, but maybe we could expand our charter and add lookin' for y'all's true callin's to our search if'n you want."

"You...you'd do that for us, after the way we've treated you all this time?" Diamond Tiara stuttered. Whether it was the unexpected baring of her soul or the joyous revelation that followed, she was on the verge of tears.

"Well sure." Apple Bloom smiled gently, "Shoot, I've known since I was just a little thing what I wanted to do with my life. It's only fair that I lend a hoof and help y'all find something that'll make you happy too. Truth is, it's goin' to be a bit of a letdown when I finally do get my cutiemark on account of there'll be no surprise to it, but it really is what I want to do and my destiny besides. Y'all should definitely join up, we've got all kinds of ideas we ain't tried yet, and maybe one of 'em will suit you."

"We...we'll think about it." Diamond Tiara bowed and started off with Silver Spoon, then turned back for a moment, "Either way, thanks Apple Bloom. You're a good mare."

You can't fight fate, sure enough, but sometimes you can cheat your way around it, just a bit.

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it!
Also, I hope no one's too disappointed I didn't have something more extreme for her cutie mark, but I kind of thought that the "cutiemark crusaders get inappropriate cutiemarks" schtick was played out, so...
That.
If you liked it, thumbs up it and tell your friends.
Thanks again.

Comments

[Jonathon Smythe]

Heh. An engineer getting caught up in the small details. Clever. Why this doesn't have more views, I don't know.

[TheDarkStarCzar]

2933245
Thanks for saying, and I hope everyone who did read it enjoyed it.
I do find the lack of views somewhat disheartening, but then I do little in the way of promoting myself or...well...making friends here, which is ironic. A bit.
Regardless, thanks to everyone who did read it!

[bahatumay]

I have no idea why this isn't more popular. You've got a fun story of self discovery, playing with fate, funny throwaway lines (natural selection with a mallet) and a quick but fulfilling resolution. Easy thumbs up.