For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils
There’s no academy for Dream Police. Not that I would have gone anyway, because I do what I want. Despite that, the proper policing of the pony dreamscape was going to go on regardless.
Just as soon as I could convince Luna to entrust me with the task.
“It’s not like I’ll be alone,” I argued. “Sweetie will be with me.”
“Adding a filly assistant to help you doesn’t necessarily mean less trouble will happen.” Luna stared at me. “Perhaps agreeing to this was a bad idea.”
“Well, you can either do that or I’ll offer a little incentive,” I said.
Luna’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I was recently contacted by a few ponies that you may have heard of,” I said. “They’re the Flim Flam Brothers.”
Luna’s face only grew more suspicious.
I went on. “See, they have this product called Powerthirst. I don’t know what the active ingredient is, but they said it would make everyone so energetic that it would practically wake the dead. I figured if I dump enough of it in the water supply, nopony will ever sleep again.” I stared at Luna. “No sleep, no dreams.”
Luna carefully composed herself before replying. “Valiant, do you realize that you slip closer and closer to being a terrorist every time you open your mouth?”
That hit me like a punch to the gut. How dare she! But…
“Then I’ll have the Flim Flam Brothers destroy the supply of their beverage that is poised to enter the municipal water facility if you grant me access to the dream world while you are on vacation.”
“That’s the exact same offer, except worded more positively,” Luna protested.
“It’s better than the alternative,” I pointed out. “Like I said, I didn’t ask what the stuff is made of. It could be hazardous. Nobody wants that around.”
“Hey,” said Sweetie Belle, breaking in, “Taking care of the dream world; somepony has to do it, right? I mean, I think I can keep Valiant from doing anything crazy. I know the two of us get along well, and I’m more capable than most ponies, especially my sister, think.”
“Rarity on you about something again?” I asked.
“She’s just so vocal about me having to leave Ponyville because of the ninja thing.” Sweetie sighed.
“I can sympathize,” Luna said.
“Not really,” I retorted. “You're a princess. She's a filly who is being forced to move away from home. Not much similarity there.”
I frowned. “Wait, didn’t we already have this conversation about sympathizing?”
“I meant that both of us have sisters that can sometimes be slightly overbearing,” Luna said.
“So take a vacation,” I prodded.
Luna stared at me for several seconds before sighing. “All right, I will. But if I come back and the dream world is in shambles, I will be holding you accountable, Valiant.”
That was nothing new, being held accountable for something. Sweetie and I waited while Luna packed up her things. She filled her suitcase, and put on a hat and sunglasses.
“Now then,” said Luna, coming over to us. “Let me perform the spell that will allow the two of you to roam the dreamscape.” Her horn lit up, and she cast a spell.
“Oh, okay,” I said, recognizing some of the tell-tale things from the library books I had been reading recently. They were some from Twilight’s special extra-secret magic section. “That’s just a simple keying spell, that sort of lets us through the proverbial locked door that keeps everypony else out of dream control.”
“You weren’t supposed to know that!” Luna groaned. “This was just supposed to be a temporary pass to let you in!”
“Well, it’s not my fault your security sucks and now I know how to recreate the spell.” I shrugged.
Luna gritted her teeth. “You’d need somepony with a horn to cast it.”
“Trixie would. Sunset would if I told her to. Twilight would if I conned her.”
Luna looked like she was about to say something, but changed her mind and stalked away, carrying her suitcase.
I turned to Sweetie. “You ready?”
“I guess.” She frowned. “But I’m not sleepy. It’s also not even night.”
“That is a problem.” I frowned. “I wouldn’t feel right giving a kid tequila for relaxation and sleeperation purposes. Plus, it might affect my dreams and I would want to be at my prime for this.”
“So…food coma?” Sweetie suggested.
I nodded and smiled. “Let’s go to Joe’s.”
We left the castle and went across the street to the donut shop. While a food coma was a great way to visit the dream world, we only had donuts to work with. That would give us a sugar rush that would only eventually lead to a blood glucose crash. My poor pancreas had seen worse, although it wasn’t like I was going to let one organ hold me back anyway.
Sweetie and I chowed on donuts. Joe kept bringing them, although I could see he was suspicious about a filly and a grown stallion who clearly weren’t relatives eating snack food together.
I picked up another donut that had little colored decorations all over it and stuffed it in my mouth in one bite. I looked at Joe, who was staring disapprovingly.
“Really rustles your jimmies,” I said.
Through my mouthful of donut, Joe somehow understood. Maybe he was used to customers talking that way. He shook his head. “You cannot even imagine how unrustled my jimmies are.”
“Wait, I thought they were called sprinkles?” said Sweetie.
“So does it wrinkle your sprinkles, Joe?” I asked.
He stared at me and gestured at the rack of pastries behind him. “It doesn’t even jitter my fritters.”
“So if you were in the potato chip business it might jingle your Pringles?” I thought for a moment. “Eh, copyrighted name. Let’s go back to the fritters. Applejack makes fritters. How can we make fun of her in this conversation?”
“Or maybe make fun of my sister and her clothing?” Sweetie suggested. “It would really stem her hems.”
“We could do something with Fluttershy,” I said. “Who do you call to pet-sit when you’re away? She’ll sitter your critters.”
“I swear I’ll hammer your head open if you keep going,” threatened Joe.
“Oh, a sledge pledge?” I asked.
We went on like that for a while before Joe threw us out. Totally worth it. Especially when I got to the part about how if Trixie ever got insultingly low pay for a magic show inside a prison, I’d need something that monitored her anger and gave the results on a nice paper printout – a stage mage cage wage rage gauge page.
Anyway, after all that Seussing, the dreams turned out to be relatively tame. When we got to sleep, that is. I rented a hotel room with two beds, and Sweetie and I dropped into our sugar comas right on schedule.
The dream world was at first hard to tell from the real one. You first had to realize you were dreaming and then start putting some mental effort into making changes. With a little practice I was able to get the hang of manipulating things.
The dreamverse spread out like a great starmap, plotting out nebulas of dreams. I could sort of see why it was Luna’s domain. It did bring up a good question of what had happened to the place while she was Nightmare Mooning it up.
I did pick out a few dreams that I really wanted to check out. I glanced around for Sweetie. “Hey, do your ninja tricks work here, too?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “I mean, this is like the ultimate in lucid dreaming. We can basically do whatever we want.”
Yay!
So we did whatever we wanted. There was trolling in large amounts.
Well, maybe only in little amounts. Had to maintain the semblance of responsibility, after all.
Time passed. It being a dream we could go as fast or slow as we wanted. More dreamers began to appear as the sun set and ponies began going to sleep.
It was an incredible boon to intelligence gathering. Here before me, I had access to the inner thoughts of every pony. Some were on the surface, like Rainbow Dash, who dreamt of being a dragon. Some I had to dig for, like Twilight, who after I prodded her subconscious long enough admitted that she didn’t really like books themselves but instead adored the information they contained.
While the revelation about Twilight wasn’t particularly surprising-get her some internet, folks-the fact that I uncovered nothing embarrassing was kind of surprising. Guess she didn’t have any dirty secrets. Or maybe they were just really well buried. Could she do a memory spell on herself so that something wouldn’t even show up in her subconscious?
Although speaking of secrets, I soon stumbled on Sunset Shimmer. She was dreaming of…me.
Maybe I shouldn’t have stared. That did feel rather self-indulgent of me. Luckily, Sweetie came along just then. “Wow, that’s so touching! She’s really got a thing for you, Valiant!”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Sweetie turned to me. “When you get back to the real world, you should ask her on a date or something.”
“But…won’t I have to explain why I thought it would be okay? She wouldn’t like that I was snooping around in her dreams. What makes you qualified to give relationship advice anyway? How old are you, ten?”
“I’m just saying, she’s clearly interested in you.” Sweetie shrugged. “You’re the manipulative type. Get her to ask you out instead.”
“Hey, what’s that over there!” I pointed and galloped away across the dreamscape.
It turned out to be Trixie…who was also thinking about me. In a family sort of way, though, which made it way less awkward.
At a glance, I could see that she wasn’t having such a good time of it. As little as she wanted to do with her biological family, she still wanted to know that they were all right.
Hmm. Well, I did have this super big dreamscape in which to locate ponies…
I didn’t know who or where Trixie’s parents were. In fact, all I had to go on was the tip Guinness had given me about Trixie’s grandmother. He’d only vaguely described where she lived, but I did manage to find her.
And when I got there, she was dreaming about Trixie, too. Granted, she hadn’t seen Trixie since she was a little filly, but it would have been heartwrenching as hell, if I actually cared about that sort of thing.
I do have a heart, but it doesn’t give a damn either.
Anyway, I did drop some calming mojo into Trixie’s grandmother’s dream. Old folks need their rest. However even as she relaxed, I wasn’t able to learn anything. She didn’t know where Trixie’s parents were, though there was a faint clue about Trixie’s brother.
Trixie had mentioned her brother to me once. She’d gone looking for him because she’d thought he was in danger. Then she got all caught up in other things like revenge against Twilight and nuclear radiation and never completed her search for him.
I took another look at her grandmother’s dreams. She knew Trixie’s brother might have been in Trottingham at one point, but it had been so long since anyone had seen him.
I made a mental note to act on later, in the real world, and moved on. Trixie would be happy to learn that I’d found her grandmother. I’d have to do more digging for the rest of her family.
Not much else happened. Sweetie and I had just about decided that it was going to be a boring night in the dreamscape. She’d entertained herself trying to decide on a place to relocate. She’d already officially left Ponyville and still had yet to find a new home.
Looking around, I spotted the dreams of Rainbow Catcher. Intrigued as to what a demonic young filly might be up to, I popped in for a look.
Catcher turned to stare at me. “This is my dream.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m not just a part of it?”
She turned to face me fully and spread her little wings to look bigger. She snarled, “I’ve been alive for more centuries than you can count. I have mastered the technique of controllable, lucid reveries. I know when one intrudes upon my dreams, mortal.”
“Pardon me, but the name’s Plymouth Valiant, and I killed a lot of people to get the respect and distinction to be addressed as such.”
“Um, since when does killing people merit that?” Sweetie asked.
“You have to agree, most of them were bad and/or monsters and therefore not really people,” I said. “I just used ‘people’ to signify all their collective lives that I ended.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that you took a lot of lives?” Catcher asked.
I gritted my teeth. “Shut up, that’s why.”
“Mortal, you are cruising for a bruising,” Catcher growled, baring her hellish totally-not-fit-for-a-baby teeth.
“Wait, where did you learn a phrase like that?” I asked.
“Tom Cruise is part of my religion. Why does it matter? I’m going to tear you limb from limb.” She was positively reeking of anger now, and her eyes had started to flow red.
I shrugged. “You know, you’d be intimidating if you were, well, intimidating.”
For future reference, that’s the exact trigger it takes for a demonic filly to leap at your throat.
Sweetie and I ran. I was still kind of getting used to this whole dreamy thing and hadn’t yet experimented with the fighting aspects. Catcher apparently knew quite a bit about that, given her age.
Luckily, by the power vested in me by Luna, I was still the dream master, and had some tricks up my sleeve. I took note of our surroundings, which was a dreamified version of Ponyville. I figured it was easy for Catcher to dream that, being it was where she currently resided. Luckily, I too knew Ponyville very well.
So she chased us all around the dreamy town. I guess she was too busy focusing on the hunt to dream up some NPC ponies to populate the dream town, so it remained utterly silent and still except for Catcher, Sweetie, and I.
Catcher had her tricks, and we had ours. She threw fireballs and tentacles and stuff, while Sweetie had summoned her katana and I was doing pretty good with my extendo boxing glove. Maybe not so badass, but this was a dream – the sillier the better.
I used my tail to zipline from one building to another. Sweetie briefly lost her weapon and made due with a swordfish. We did that thing with a hallway that has lots of doors and everyone is going in and out but never in and out of the doors they were in originally. It was all pretty Scooby Doo. I even hummed the chase music.
We eventually ended up at the school, which was filled with the normal classroom items. The large mechanical adding machine, the thing that would be replaced if ponies ever invented small solar cells, liquid crystal displays, and integrated calculator circuits, was knocked to the floor as we burst into the room. Papers and homework flew everywhere.
Catcher had somehow obtained the swordfish and went back and forth across the room in a duel with Sweetie. The two of them were locked in intense concentration. Neither noticed when I picked up the adding machine and brought it crashing down on Catcher’s head. She was knocked out stone cold and I hope she woke up in her bed screaming. That would serve her, Rainbow, and Guinness right.
After conking someone in the head with an old-school calculator, there was really only one thing to do. Sweetie and I slipped on our sunglasses and I said, “I guess Rainbow Catcher wasn’t counting on that.”
And then, this being a dream, David Caruso appeared in a fanfare of The Who.
So I woke up.
Of all the things I wasn’t expecting to see on my bed in that hotel room in Canterlot, it was Twilight.
As my eyes opened, she threw a hooful of paperwork in my face and shouted, “I give up! There is no such place as Tiny Vamp Atoll!”
I sat up and stared at all the notes she’d taken. Twilight had apparently ordered translations on every geography book ever written and nowhere in any of them was mention of an island with that name. She’d also crossreferenced everything else that might have to do with tiny things or vamp things.
“First off, why are you here?” I asked.
“I was so frustrated that I reached a breaking point and simply couldn’t continue!” she complained. “So I used a tracking spell to try and find Princess Luna, but apparently it needs tweaking because it brought me to you instead.”
“Well, you know why you didn’t find anything, right?” I said. I yawned. Man, I was still tired and not really thinking straight.
“Why?” Twilight demanded.
“Well, you remember when I first found that note on the keytar. It said that it came from ‘Uh…Tiny Vamp Atoll?’”
“Just ‘Tiny Vamp Atoll,’” Twilight corrected.
I shook my head. “No, the ‘uh’ was an integral part of it. It was on the note I found. I even tried to correct you. Remember when I invited you guys to the basement? Just before that you were talking about your findings and I repeated verbatim what the note said.”
Twilight’s eye twitched. “So I’ve not been looking for an island at all? Or I’ve been looking for an island called Uh Tiny Vamp Atoll?”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Go be neurotic somewhere else.”
Twilight let out an extended frustrated grunt and teleported out. I rolled my eyes, sighed, and then lay back down to reenter dreamland.
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Oh Valiant, you magnificent troll you
You know, this chapter is really only marginally related to the episode. It's got Sweetie and the dreamscape, but that's about it. There's no hint of the actual plot of the episode at all.
But I think that's okay. Because really, the story your trying to tell here is so different from the show, it's amazing that you generally manage to keep it as close to the show as you do. Though I have to wonder if the story wouldn't work better if you didn't. But you can do it however you want, of course.
Cruisin' for a brusin'! Yeah!
Your OC is garbage.
I'd really like to see this bit expanded on. Dream trolling is one of my favorite tropes.
4137623 Agreed that he's not a good character, but I've got a thousand favorites on this story so I guess I'll keep writing.
By the way, how many chapters did you read before realizing this?
With every passing chapter I drift away from my previous theory towards one of two conclusions: A: There's nothing wrong with the universe(Other than Rainbow Catcher) and Valiant is just a dick. Or B: If there's anything wrong with the universe, it's BECAUSE Valiant is such a dick.
4137623
Whenever Valiant speaks:
2.bp.blogspot.com/-9Ilig-WSs74/TYFpMBmqkWI/AAAAAAAAA_A/HFcInW2eYT8/s1600/CryingEagle-Flag640.jpg
4137679 This is truly the best story on this site.
Also, [There was trolling in large amounts.]
4137623 Says the guy who between his four stories only has a total of 55 likes.
4140649
remember me? I only went to that universe to help and you pulled a knife on me
. well lucky for me that last "harmless pulse" sent my spirit back into the planet. but remember I am there to help so I put my invention in my grave and a little note with it. hope your happy
Yep, knew it. "Tiny Vamp Atoll." I had gotten an idea way back when, but didn't include the "uh." Literally right after he said the "uh..." was important, I figured it out completely.
4141519 What's more important is how long I've been setting this up.
4138614
Oh yes, turn this into a number of followers pissing contest.
Classy.
4137679
So you're writing something you know is bad?
Shit dude, why not just try to write something good instead? A thousand likes for crap are meaningless. It's like someone who has 5,000 facebook friends because they keep reposting other popular links.
4141795 I've accepted my role as a B-fic writer. Someone has to do it, and it sure takes less effort. When people need quick mindless entertainment, they come to me.
4141549 True, but still. I had it half right, and I feel dumb I didn't get it back then.
4141794 Just saying that you yourself don't have a story that's has any sighs of being good, granted there's not many dislikes ether, so that's not really anything against the stories ether.
I was more going for that since you gave a not so thought out criticism that I'd give a bad comeback. Seemed fitting.
Now, I can see if Valiant could be seen as a "Gary Stu" by first glance, or by people who misunderstand the meaning of the term. Watch this video to get a good definition.
Now, bring this back to Valiant, sure he's a genius and sure he tends to no give any fucks about most things, but that doesn't mean that he's never challenged by anything or emotionless. In the chapters based off of season three Valiant was challenged by the Black twins and was even beaten by them a few times, he even had a hard time beating Trixie in a giant robot battle. As for the personality part, yes Valiant does have one, sure it's dickish, but he has been shown to be capable of compassion, as show when the took Trixie in as a daughter when a spell made her a foal. Even when he considered just fixing whatever weird things are going on in Equestria by basically restarting the universe he didn't because he couldn't bring himself to ruin the lives and relationships of the ponies he's come across.
So yeah, tell me how is Valiant "garbage"? Enlighten me.
4141794
4143372
Guys, please no fights in the comments.
So many references... Like always. Keep it up!
4144381 Oh I'm not trying to fight with anyone. I'm trying to have a civil discussion and to see what this gentleman or madam can give as a counterargument to my what I said.
4150458 Yeah, It was one of the things that I could look back on later and have a chuckle
4154687
[George Bush Intensifies]
We have received word that the Taliban have begun building weapons of mass destruction. Preliminary intel suggests they are planning to deploy these weapons with the assistance of communist horses. In the name of the free world, we will find them.
This was one of the funniest chapters yet.
Oh wow... nice one Valiant... "Uh Tiny Vamp Atoll" is an anagram for, you guessed it, "Plymouth Valiant". Really original...
4207743
4141519
Anyone else want to take a guess? The mystery might be deeper than you think.
4213235 trolls
So many Helsing Abridged references i think ima kill over.
4376156
You're gonna keel over
Called it!
Also, I ship it.