Dan Vs. The Magic of Friendship(Season 1)

by Barrobroadcaster

Final: In My Prefight Confessions

Dan was entirely honest with his friends. He went to rally the troops, recruit everyone he could, spread the word and rouse the allies for one final battle. He needed them all. He just didn't know if they needed him.

But they all needed every advantage they could get. Apart from all the superweapons, the magic spells, the tricks and tactics and talents of all those assembled, even getting snacks and making sure everybody had everything they needed, there was one last thing he could do. So, he set out to do that, too.

Manehattan
Temple Beth Akhale-Teke

In the middle of the week, in particular at this time of day, the Manehattan temple didn't get many visitors. There were a few ponies there, a few donkeys and goats but not many. Still, some noticed Dan and recognized him. But none bothered him.

The building was old, one of the oldest in Manehattan and a bit naturally chilly because of it. There were plenty of lanterns and candles, lighting up the place probably more than it needed. There were stained glass windows, high up on the walls. Because of the high rises and skyscrapers nearby, they didn't get a lot of light, probably the reason for the lanterns. The building shined from light within.

Dan looked up at the stained glass as he passed by the pews. Walls were even higher than the halls of Canterlot Castle, and there were no images of Celestia or Luna. The image held in these glass windows was that of the Fausticorn on one side, and Megan Williams on the other.

"Did you need something? Can I help you?"

"Yes, I..." Dan looked around. Suddenly, he didn't know why he was here. He knew why he was there, but he didn't know how to get what he came for. "I, uh... umm I just-"

"Would you like to speak to the rabbi? He should be back from lunch soon."

Dan nodded nervously. "Yeah, yeah I think... yeah, that would be good."

She nodded. "His office is this way."

"Thanks."

She led him down the hall to a small room. Even as he departed, he could hear a couple of the visitors whispering about him. Being a nobleman and a celebrity now, he knew he should start getting used to it.

"Hi-uh, hello there," the rabbi said upon entering. Dan had already taken a seat. Shuffling a bit, the stallion rounded the table to take his seat, immediately pulled it up and leaned forward. Ponies in Manehattan were busy folks.

"Um, hello."

"Hello, yes, I'm a, I'm Rabbi Goldsteed." He reached out across the table and shook Dan's hand. "I'm sorry it took me a while- got caught in the lunch rush. Impromptu, didn't have time to order ahead."

"It's alright," Dan said, taking a deep breath. Where did he even begin? The rabbi looked enough like a rabbi, at least for Equestrian standards. Black hat, black suit, beard, white cloth that looked like a towel with the Star of David on either side. Actually, it WAS a towel in this case, and the Star of David was slightly angled so it looked like Twilight's cutie mark.

"What can I help you with?" Goldsteed asked. "To be quite honest, you struck me as a bit of a... well, more of a gentile."

"I just like Christmas. And sometimes Easter," Dan was quick to clarify.

"I'd heard as much. About the, uh, Christmas thing. If you want, I could put you in touch with Pastor McManeis or Father O'Hayle, if you'd prefer. It's not a problem; we actually play golf together."

"No, no, this is fine," Dan shook his head. The rabbi was a fast-talker, like most Manehattanites. Dan leaned forward, rubbed his fists together. "I... uh, I really-"

"What seems to be troubling you, my friend?"

"Well..." Dan was drawing a complete blank. The Fausticorn, that was why he was here. Whether or not she was real, what her powers were, the legends of Equestria, what all they entail. But he didn't know how to ask that. "Could you explain to me exactly... what it is you believe?"

The rabbi looked down his nose at Dan, eyebrows shifting. "You want me to explain Judaism? I mean, I can if you want, but if you're really interested, I could give you a copy of the Haybrew Bible- that's probably where you should start. Don't you live in a library?"

Dan nodded. "Yeah, uh, well, I don't exactly have a lot of time to read everything. I'm about to do something, and a lot of things are happening at once and I just..." he looked away. "I need to know a little bit more. To see if I'm doing what's right for everyone here. For everypony here."

The rabbi worked his jaw, tapped his hoof on his desk. It seemed like he was almost as much at a loss as Dan was.

"Well," the rabbi began, "in essence, our people believe we made a covenant with our lord. Times of great hardship, over generations, our faith has seen us through, our faith that the Lord cares for us and watches out for us. We honor Her, and we honor that covenant to this very day. We believe that there's a place for us, and that in honoring our beliefs, we make the world a better place."

We believe.

Faith was a powerful thing. Depending on the type of belief, depending on what was believed in, faith could be the motivator, the spirit that sustained the will to do great things. This was a battle of faith and always had been. Not necessarily religious faith, but faith in one's friends, one's community, one's nation... one's fellow man. Fellow pony, in this case.

Communities were fragile things, as were many ecosystems. One of the main problems with the United States, as Dan and Phoenix and Steve had come to know, was that there was just a lot of people. Equestria's population was large as well, and the larger a kingdom, of any kind, the bigger the problems were and the more people could slip through the cracks. Part of Dan's resentment with his own country, his own planet was the fact that people let things go, let things slide, cut corners and did all sorts of things every day that they knew they shouldn't, burying countless things under the rug until it became a mountain too big too ignore. A mountain that could trip up everything, could explode at any given notice like a volcano, or contain buried underneath it something that becomes dark and twisted... and eventually comes back to haunt you.

Dan hated the aspect of humanity that made its own problems. You are your own worst enemy. Because Dan was so much like Rice, it was even more motivation to fight him and end him once and for all. He was fighting to rid the world of people like himself. Rice truly was everything Dan would have been if Dan had not been there already. Countless lies, mistakes, cruelties, misdeeds and neglect buried in the past until it had become a mountain.

Faith can move mountains. But Dan needed enough faith and firepower to destroy one.

"Are you having doubts?" the rabbi asked.

Dan shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe."

The rabbi nodded. "It's natural to have doubts. Faith wouldn't be what it is without doubts of some kind. Just like you aren't the same person without your own unique problems and your own unique solutions to them."

"What can you tell me about faith in Equestria? Harmony, friendship, faith, all that shi-stuff. What does it mean to you, uh, you guys?" Best not to swear in a place like this.

"You mean Jews? Ponies? Or-"

"Everybody, I guess. This is uh... well, I don't really do this often. Or at all. So just tell me all you can."

The rabbi paused for a minute, then leaned forward again. "Alright, then. Well..."

And the two discussed faith in Equestria. Perhaps it was a conversation Dan needed to have a long time ago, not just with a pony, not just so he could learn more about Equestria itself, but so he could learn what faith, among other things, truly meant to him. Not just him, either, but the world and people around them, on Earth as well. He still didn't share quite the same beliefs as Rabbi Goldsteed, or anyone else for that matter, but he could share the same faith.

He went into the temple thinking about how he could use others, how he could use faith to motivate everyone. Dan left having learned how to use it for himself. He had a better idea for a game plan now.

The two talked for a couple of hours.

"Thank you," Dan said. "Thank you for your time."

"It's fine, you're welcome."

He looked up at the rabbi one more time. "The Fausticorn departed Equestria thousands of years ago, right?"

"Yes, over five-thousand years ago."

Dan decided not to bring up the issues with timing and things like that. Suffice to say, there were a few discrepancies, but perhaps certain details were more of an understanding for ponies then, and that what changed was their understanding now. Fluffle Puff and Chrys were both thousands of years old, and they never saw the Fausticorn.

Not that Dan was aware of, anyway.

"Why did Faust leave Equestria?"

"Well," the rabbi smiled, "we don't know. The texts don't really tell us a reason for every decision the divine makes. It's simply stated in the early books that the Fausticorn created Equestria, and divined all the creatures that call it home, and that she cared for them all. She set before us a destiny and that one day, we would fulfill it. After that, she departed, and watches us to this very day."

Dan nodded. It made sense one pony wouldn't have all the answers. He got up. "Thank you again for your time, rabbi." The old Dan would have stayed and likely argued with the rabbi for hours, picked apart every story and found holes in everything to the point he'd get thrown out. This Dan, however, simply thanked him for his time and got up to leave. He also stole several pens, candies and all the bits from the collection plate. He was still Dan, after all. Lunch in Manehattan was not cheap.

Dan was halfway out the door when the rabbi said, "There's uh, well there is one other thing."

"Yeah?"

The rabbi leaned forward again. "Well, maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, but there is another legend about the Fausticorn."

Slowly, Dan closed the door. "Go on."

"It's not in any Haybrew texts. Most other rabbis probably wouldn't tell you this, but the gypsies, you know, they have stories. There's one about the Fausticorn."

"Gypsies?" Dan asked. "Not like the hippies, I hope. Please, NOT the hippies."

The rabbi held up his hooves. "Hippies, gypsies- look, I hear things. We get a lot of travelers here, we don't send people away just because they don't necessarily... bathe as often as we'd all like. Are you interested or not?"

Dan folded his arms, weighed the decision. "...Fine."

"Well, civilizations have come and gone throughout our history. During the Great Exodus from the Valley, there's records that a lot of kingdoms were encountered by ponies, others, and some disappeared. But not all of the inhabitants disappeared, no, some joined the gypsies, they say. Some survivors, surviving families joined the traveling caravans and such, and although they lost most of their customs, some of their histories survived as legends and stories."

Dan took his seat again. Old civilizations were things Daring Do was interested in, but there was more than one reason she was a mostly-fiction author. Very little was still known about pre-Equestrian cultures. The Great Exodus was a long period when the three tribes of Equestria departed the Kingdom of the Enchanted Valley, called Enchantria for short at the time. The ponies were the last group to do so due to food shortages. Archaeologists had searched for years but Enchantria remained a mystery, its location lost to time.

"One of these stories involved the Fausticorn. It's said that when she was finished making Equestria, she became lonely. It's said she never really left at all."

"Why?" Dan asked. "She just literally MADE a planet and a bunch of new species. Why be lonely?"

The rabbi shifted. "I don't know. One of the theories is that she is too powerful to be among us, her very thoughts and voice too powerful to be near and so, she removed herself from the world. It's why her magic works through things like the Elements of Harmony, the Pillars or the Voices."

"Okay, okay. I'll let that slide, then. Continue."

"According to the gypsies, she tried to make her own friends. She used her own shadow as the form, the leftover elements as a body and echoes as her voice, but each time, it only created something twisted and dark. She only succeeded in creating a distorted effigy of herself, a shadowy figure without a face."

"A faceless one?"

The rabbi nodded. "Afterward, she contemplated leaving forever and in so doing, summoned a portal to another world within a mirror. But her reflection stood in her way."

"Her reflection?" Dan asked, sounding more than skeptical. Whatever faith he had did not involve any hippy crap. "Her own reflection stood in her way?" That was another difference between Haybrew books and Hippy stories- the hippy stories were a different breed of dumb.

"Her reflection mocked her, and she realized that it her reflection was like her, but backwards in every way, wrong. So she used all her power to destroy the mirror, breaking it into millions of fragments. Then, it's said she took on the guise of a regular pony, with the last of her strength, and chose to live with us on Equestria as just another friendly face."

"Okay," Dan nodded. "I can see why you didn't think you should tell me that shi- garbage."

"They're just tales the gypsies tell their children. Mirrors can be portals to other realms, and sculptures and things can take on a bit of a life of their own. It's just the way they teach their kids lessons to keep them safe, stay away from dangerous stuff," Rabbi Goldsteed explained.

Dan got up again. "Well, thank you again, rabbi. It's been enlightening."

"You're welcome. You're gonna return those bits to the collection plate, right?"

"Merry Christmas! And happy Hanukkah- tell Vinyl and Tavi I said hi when they drop by," Dan closed the door.

He left the temple pretty quickly after that. High on the walls, one of the stained glass images of the Fausticorn did catch his eye. He remembered seeing another one in the Sand Castle. But that was a different Fausticorn.

Comments

[Booster Spice]

One way of securing something is to make it so fantastical noone believes it, then leave it with manipulation of society to be considered undesirable, and always moving so theyre never expected to be were any effect might possibly show, except for bad fortune to make them movge along?

The more locations Harmonia fixes though, the more ridig the resulting global magical field and the less ability to flex, adapt, not saturate a given location and cause reality to fail?

[LadyLeomon]

A new chapter means it’s ~Sunday~ now let me see n’ere *dons reading glasses*

Dan’s going to Temple? Not gonna lie I was kinda expecting a Church but I’m also kinda glad he went to somewhere different if that makes sense? Anyhoo:

Wow, we’re getting some genuine answers from someone in the know (sorta)! But also ... hearing Dan wanting to believe in something greater ... it’s a weird mix of nice, humbling and sad ...

Now for my Favourite Quote:

"What can you tell me about faith in Equestria? Harmony, friendship, faith, all that shi-stuff. What does it mean to you, uh, you guys?" Best not to swear in a place like this.

"You mean Jews? Ponies? Or-"

"Everybody, I guess. This is uh... well, I don't really do this often. Or at all. So just tell me all you can."

The rabbi paused for a minute, then leaned forward again. "Alright, then. Well..."

I’m not overly religious but this bit just really spoke to me

Dan got up again. "Well, thank you again, rabbi. It's been enlightening."

"You're welcome. You're gonna return those bits to the collection plate, right?"

"Merry Christmas! And happy Hanukkah- tell Vinyl and Tavi I said hi when they drop by," Dan closed the door.

Aaaaaaand he lost it, he nearly had it then fumbled at the finish line ... A for Effort though!

He left the temple pretty quickly after that. High on the walls, one of the stained glass images of the Fausticorn did catch his eye. He remembered seeing another one in the Sand Castle. But that was a different Fausticorn.

Oh Faust I know who he’s talking but is this like some Pony-Satan thing?!

Wow ... my mind had been blown like Dan’s latest target after he borrowed some of the Boom-Boom Sisters’ inventory!

Phew and that’s everything I love (most) about this week’s chapter and I’ll eagerly await the next!

Awesome as always and I’ll see you ~next time~

Your Eternal Fan ^_^
(I hope this week has been kind to you and please stay safe Dan-tactic Author)

[Barrobroadcaster]

11074375
Thank you sweetheart, I'll do my best. And no, no pony Satan. Mirror Fausticorn. You be safe, too and I'll look forward to seeing you, as I do every week.

11074204
What's Harmonia?

[Booster Spice]

11074521

Sorry. I think Harmonia is a name Ive seen for the combined Tree of Harmonie in various places and the combined crystal network suspected of suffusing the planetary structure?

Ive been messing with designs and following research on the stuff for so many decades I keep forgetting that people are only used to using Wintel or Apple.