Chapter 6: Sweep Away
Amber Spice
I might have only been out here for about a week so far, but I’m already starting to get a feel for the different kinds of terrain they have out here in the desert. I even have some preferences!
There are more-or-less three kinds of terrain I’ve seen in the Pegasopian Desert: There’s cracked, dry earth with a covering of parched grass that could have maybe been arable land in a past life, there are areas full of rocks of various sizes, and then there are areas filled with something that I’d never experienced until very recently: sand.
Sand is terrible.
In case you’ve never seen sand up close before, it’s like this: Imagine gravel. A pile of rough, scratchy little rocks that it’s nigh impossible to find a stable footing on. Now imagine that those rocks have spent the last several millennia beating the ever-loving horseapples out of each other so that now each one is impossibly tiny and yet is still just as rough and scratchy. Except now, there’s more of them. On top of that, since they’re so tiny, they get everywhere. My poor, abused coat is probably forty percent sand by volume by now, and sixty percent by mass.
I’d be of half-a-mind to shear it all off, if it weren’t both still quite lovely and the only thing between my skin and the blessed Sun’s scorching rays. Also, it keeps me warm at night outside of the smell-tacular tents.
But sand. I’m putting it second to Pierce the Omnipotent on my list of things the world would be better off without, with Princess Topaz a close third.
Sand, boredom, and dehydration are my three main enemies right now. The sand I can’t really do anything about aside from whine about it, and I’ve already done that. The tribe has apparently been really good about husbanding their water supply, so they have enough water to spare for me whenever I ask for a refill. One of the mares in charge of disbursing water, Merry Weather, is nice to me, even if she does like to joke about how often she sees me. So yeah, dehydration isn’t a huge danger, even if I am trying to drink less.
Boredom, now that’s the real problem. I haven’t really had anything to do since I arrived in this desert except survive, and that action item has been more-or-less trivialized at this point. Occasionally I get to tell the Tornado Trio a story, but that’s not exactly something I get to spend all day doing.
This is a dangerous situation. The last time I was this bored, I got branded a mud-pony-loving heretic and banished to a civilization-forsaken desert. I’m not eager to have a repeat performance.
Speaking of repeat performances…
“Hey there, Spicy!” the yellow-and-peach Merry Weather says. “How’s the family?”
“You know perfectly well that my family lives on distant Terra’s Horn, and that I’ve had no contact with them,” I say.
“Well who’s all the water for, then? I mean, there’s no way that all of this is being slurped up by just one pony.”
“Okay, you’ve got me,” I say with a dramatic eyeroll. “I’m actually trying to grow a second head so I can finally find some intelligent conversation around here, and the process takes a lot of water out of me.”
She looks at me as if hoping to actually find signs of a budding second head, and I give her a raised eyebrow.
“That was sarcasm,” I say. “I can’t grow a second head, and I wouldn’t want to if I could. Magic doesn’t work that way.”
“Eh, not with that attitude,” she says while doing that weird pegasus flying arm shrug instead of a sensible horn-waggle. She seems only slightly disappointed that I’m not actually sprouting a second head, which is an improvement over what happened with the last few people I got myself into similar situations with. You’d think I’d learn to rein in the sarcasm about my abilities with a bunch of people who haven’t had a clue what a unicorn was for the last three centuries, but it’s not an easy habit to break.
“So you came here for a refill, right?” she says through her ever-present, unflappable smile.
“Yes. Yes I did.”
She lands on her cloud and beckons me over with a wave of her hoof, and I float my open waterskin up to her. She grabs it with a wing and plunges it into the cloud, swishing it around a good bit to make sure it fills up.
I’d say that the novelty of magic had worn off for her rather quickly, except I’m not sure she was ever bothered by levitation in the first place. When she first saw me do it, the only reaction I got was her saying “neat” and then filling my waterskin like she’d been living with unicorns her entire life. Rather refreshing, really.
“So,” I say, dragging my hoof in a circle in the sand, “what’s a bored mare to do around here?”
And then she bursts out laughing, somehow keeping control of my waterskin the whole time.
“Hooo, boy. Now that is a dangerous word, Ms. Spice. My little colt Silver learned pretty quick not to say that around me.”
She lifts my waterskin back out of the cloud, caps it, and catches a glimpse of my unimpressed glower.
“Of course,” she says, “That fairly easy for me to say. I get to talk to a fair number of ponies, doing my job, and I have a job to do besides just talking. You, on another hoof, have just been freeloading and wondering what to do between meals, I suspect. Not that I or anybody else would blame you for that. You did just get scraped off the desert floor pretty recently, after all.”
She retracts her wing from the waterskin as she sees it become enveloped in my blue levitation aura.
“Most people around here pass their time doing something that contributes to the welfare of the caravan,” she says. “Not meaning to call you lazy, but I figure doing something to repay our hospitality would get your mind off of your boredom.
“Now I’m no stranger to strange marks,” she says, pointing a hoof at the obviously broken wing depicted on her flank, “but I can’t seem to make sense of yours. My first guess was something to do with growing flowers, but that doesn’t really strike me as being your thing. Was there anything you did for a job or a hobby back on Terra’s Horn with all the other ‘unique orns’?”
I twitch. She winks.
“I suppose it’s not the most obvious cutie mark,” I say with a sigh, turning my head to look at the saffron flower adorning my own backside.
“Anyhow,” I continue, “I was the Royal Chef.
“That is,” I add on seeing her uncomprehending expression, “I was in charge of cooking meals for the King, the Princess, and the rest of the royal family.”
“Well that does sound fancy,” she says, curling into what looks like an unfairly comfortable position on her cloud. “I guess that means that flower on your flank must taste pretty special.”
“Eh, the flower itself tastes alright, I suppose, but it’s the stamen that’s really special… Maybe I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Fair enough.
“So, you’re a bored cook. I’ve seen scarier things,” she says with a mock-shudder, “but not by much. Do you think you’d like to try plying your trade here in the caravan? It may not be a magical crystal palace or whatever unicorn kings live in, but it’d keep you busy. And besides, I hear the guards’ mess is always looking for help.
“Plus,” she added with a smirk, “they have their own water cloud right outside.”
I give her a slight scowl for that last jab, but it fades quickly when I take in what she’s just offered. I could have a chance to work with food again! It would be weird, alien food that I hardly know a thing about, but aren’t strange new foods what I’ve wanted all this time? Maybe I could even get started on that project…
“So, when can I start?”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
The food here is actually pretty interesting, once you manage to ignore that a lot of it had passed through somebody’s udders at some point. It’s certainly more flavorful than anything I’ve eaten this side of saffron.
As for the cheese and yogurt, I just have to keep telling myself that it’s not so different from fermenting fruits and grains into drinks, but with things becoming more solid instead of more liquid.
It’s perfectly safe, and doesn’t smell terrible at all! Well, maybe it smells a little funny. But it’s still food, not refuse. It’s not even the smelliest thing in the room.
“Uhm…” someone decidedly smellier says.
That someone is Carver, the head (and, before I walked in, only) cook of the mess tent. Carver’s coat is a dull sort of reddish brown, and about one quarter as fluffy as mine, which matches the description Merry’d given me to a T. Right now, he seemed to be trying to muscle up the nerve to talk to the strange unicorn who’d waltzed into his kitchen unannounced and started playing with his ingredients behind the counter.
Camels, I’ve noticed, seem to have one of three reactions to meeting me. The first and most common reaction is the sort of politeness I wish had been ingrained in certain royals’ behavior. The other two types of reaction seem to spring from the, uh, incidents surrounding my “tour”. The second type of reaction is the sort of awed reverence I somehow inspired in those priests, and type three is a cagey wariness, like I was some sort of unstable alchemical experiment liable to coat them in caustic soda and broken glass if they so much as breathed wrong. All three of these feel both slightly uncomfortable and yet oddly appropriate.
“I would like to say, Ember Spires” – ah, type two, then – “how honored I am that you have graced my humble kitchen with your, ah, radiant presence.
“But, erm, what, if you will allow me to ask your, er, illustriousness, are you doing here?” he asks, warily eyeing my Blade of the Banished as the smooth section of its outer crescent ruthlessly slices through a pickle. “Not to, heh, suggest that a bearer of flame cannot come, go, and do as she pleases. No ma’am.”
And a hint of type three, as well. Joy.
I stop slicing pickles and banish the blade, turning to face Carver. It now occurs to me that walking into someone’s kitchen like I own the place might not give the best first (or, perhaps, second) impression, and I will need to be in this camel’s good graces if I want to work with food. Eye on the prize, Spicy.
I suppose there must have been a time where I wasn’t the master of whatever kitchen I surveyed…
“Oh. Sorry, Carver, I did not mean to usurp your kitchen. I’d heard that you needed help in the mess tent. How may I be of assistance?”
I give him my best, widest subservient grin. Judging by his lack of a reciprocal patronizing smirk, I may be out of practice.
…Or maybe it’s that he’s too busy staring at where my knife used to be to notice.
I step into his line of sight. “Ahem! No, I did not make the knife disappear just now. I only banished it back to my saddlebags.”
By way of demonstration, I summon and banish the Blade of the Banished a few more times.
“See?” I say. “Nothing to get worked-up about. And I can only do it with the knife because it’s been bound—”
I notice Carver shakily raising a—huh. I guess they’re not really hooves. A foot? Anyhow, raising a foot like a schoolfilly who’s scared to ask to go to the bathroom.
“Yes, Carver?”
“Um, do you b-banish the sinful like that, or do you have to –” *gulp* “– bind them first?”
“Oh, I wish I could banish people. I can think of a couple of ponies I’d send straight to Tartarus if I had the opportunity.”
And then I notice that Carver is cowering. Great choice of words there, Spicy. Top-notch situational awareness, too.
“No, Carver,” I say with a sigh, “I can’t banish people. As I was saying earlier, I can only banish my knife because it’s been magically bound to my saddlebags. And you can’t” – as far as I know – “bind living creatures to things. I’m not here to smite you; I’m here to help.
“So, Carver, what can I do for you?”
“Ember Spires,” – still the wrong name, but he’s obviously stressed and this is progress – “would your holiness, um, please go out front to the counter while your humble servant prepares the food?”
Oh, Terra flatten it with her mountainous plot!
“No! You are not my servant. I’m the one ser—”
Noticing the barely restrained terror on the camel’s face (and a slight intensification of his odor), I take a calming breath to rein myself in.
“Actually, fine. I’ll serve out front, while you cook back here.”
As I walk out of the kitchen and into the mess proper, I hear him mutter, “Dear, sweet, merciful Terra, I thank thee for not smiting this unworthy, sinful flesh this day…”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
Aerial Sweep
“Come on, Rize. You’ve gotta eat something,” I say as we’re flying back to the caravan at sundown. “I can understand eating just two meals a day when pulling double shifts –” my stomach voices its dissent. I can’t seem to get it to understand “– but one? That’s just not enough.”
“’Mnot hungry,” he lies.
“Skyplops you’re not. You’ve been ‘not hungry’ for dinner for the past week. Look at yourself,” I say, flying some quick horizontal circles around him. “You’re moving like a fly through agave nectar. You can barely outpace the caravan the last couple days.”
We keep flying at a tortoise’s pace for a couple minutes, silent, before he finally speaks up.
“Just a drain on resources. Less I drain, the better.”
“No,” I counter, flying in front of him to poke him in the chest, “you are not a drain on resources as long as you’re doing your duty. And part of that duty is to eat regularly so that you’re in top form. You’ve been lucky we haven’t run into any bandits lately, or you’d be just another corpse littering the dunes. You’re no use to anyone dead.”
“Lucky. Right. Maybe if I weren’t a waste of water I’d agree. As it stands…”
“No, you’re not a waste,” I say with a sigh. I’d had this conversation with him before, but not in a long time. “You have a friend, and he seems to think you’re worth at least a little water. Some food, too.”
“Would this friend kindly buzz off, so I can get back to drying out and blowing away?”
“Golden rain, Rize, stop wallowing! Do you have any idea how much this hurts to watch a second time? Maybe if you’d get outside your own feather-stuffed head once in a while, you’d notice that there are people who care about you! Yes, people. As in more than one. Terra’s tears, some colts even look up to you!”
I take a deep breath.
“Y’know what, Rize, just flop down on a cloud somewhere. I’ll be back in a bit with some food, and you’ll eat it if I have to force it down your throat.”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
The mess is unusually crowded for this hour. It’s not quite flying-room only, but none of the mats are entirely unoccupied, either. There’s even a bit of a line to get to the food.
I hate being forceful with Rize. With anyone, really. It’s just… Well, when I want to influence things, I prefer to guide others and help them think my ideas were really their ideas all along. I don’t like being involved in conflicts.
As I make my way through the line, I overhear a few snatches of conversation.
“You’re just complaining because you wouldn’t know the difference between milk and tzatziki sauce.”
“Huh. Never would have thought to put feta inside a date.”
“I’m just saying I like to make my own decisions when I’m off-duty, and that includes food.”
“I think I’ve heard this story before. When do the bowls start singing?”
“I bet that glowy stuff is magically delicious.”
As I get closer to the front, I can see what everypony’s talking about. Bowls – and sometimes individual pieces – of food are dancing through the air, wrapped in shimmering azure auras.
And in the middle of it all is Amber Spice, the flame-colored mare that Rize scraped off the desert floor a week ago, horn wrapped in that same blue glow.
A pegasus swoops down on one of the floating olives, snapping it out of the air. Amber Spice shoots her a quick glare before turning her attention back across the serving table.
“And there you go,” she says as ingredients finish streaming into a floating pita that then wraps itself, “an olive feta pita wrap. Now don’t let go of it or you’ll spill.”
“Um, thanks?” the pegasus who was just served says, still blinking like he’s not convinced he’s still awake.
“You’re welcome. Now move along.”
I can’t really blame him. The whole place has a sort of dreamlike quality to it, where weird things happen in a matter-of-fact fashion and nopony cares enough to question it.
And speaking of dream logic, it looks like I’ve found my way to the front of the line.
“Amber Spice!” I say.
Her eyes briefly widen.
“Huh. Not many people get my name right out here. How do you know me?”
“You are kinda the only pony I’ve ever heard of with a horn growing out of her head. Well, outside of stories.”
“I suppose that does render me rather unique.”
I give her a polite chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” she asks, cocking her head.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were making a joke about your being a unique orn—”
She slams her hoof into her face and lets out a ragged sigh.
“It’s one word, and it’s pronounced ‘you-nih-corn’. I swear on Terra’s earth-rattling snores, you people all have your ears on backwards.
“Anyhow, you’re in line for dinner, so what do you want? I’m offering three wraps: feta-stuffed dates, feta olives, or dates and olives. No, you can’t have olives, feta, and dates on the same wrap; that doesn’t work. If none of those sound good, then you’re welcome to try to scrounge up some food wherever else pegasi eat.”
“‘Feta olives’ sounds good. I could really go for something salty after the day I’ve had.”
A wry grin inches onto her muzzle as the ingredients, along with a small heap of salt crystals, take to the air. “A stallion after my own heart. So, what’s eating you? Pretty mare tell you she’s not into stallions? Staring at the same stretch of sand and sky all day taking its toll?”
The way she talks kinda reminds me of Merry Weather when she’s behind the bar.
“Actually, it’s—”
That same mare from before filches another floating olive.
Amber Spice calls a bizarre crescent-shaped blade into existence, brandishes it, and bellows, “I swear, you buzzing nag, if you pull that stunt again, I WILL CUT YOU!”
Well, she’s certainly a pony not afraid of being direct. I may suck at it, myself, but I’m getting an idea…
The blade guards the rest of the olives as they file into the pita. She wraps it up and floats it over to me.
“Here you go: a feta olive wrap. Even if it’s A FEW OLIVES SHORT of what it’s supposed to be. Enjoy your meal, sir.”
“Thanks. This smells amazing.
“Actually, can I get a feta-stuffed date wrap, too? I’ve got this friend who’s been really down lately and hasn’t been eating. I figure maybe one of your creations might be able to cheer him up.”
Her face glows briefly with poorly suppressed pride. Looks like my aim was true.
“Well, since you asked so nicely…”
Dates, presumably stuffed with feta, rush into a yogurt-tracked pita, thankfully unmolested. I’m not eager to see more blood in the sand anytime soon.
“Hope your friend feels better soon,” she says as she starts to float the new pita over to me.
“Aw, horseapples,” I say, looking at my occupied wing in chagrined disappointment. “I have no clue how I’m going to fly both my and my friend’s meal up to him without spilling. Maybe if I… No, full pockets. But what if I… No, that’d send dates everywhere. Though if I tried to hold both in my mouth—”
“No no no, no, no. Don’t blow a seal over it, I can solve this easy enough. Besides, this would be a good excuse to see somepony in need appreciate my work.”
“Really? You’re sure you’re not too busy over here?”
“Hey, Carver?” she shouts, leaving me partially deafened. “I need to go make a delivery, and I think that’ll be it for me tonight. See you tomorrow!”
Turning back to me as I flop my ears back and forth in an attempt to clear them, she says, “Eh, you’re practically the last in line, and I figure you horse fl— er, pegasi had to survive somehow before I showed up.
“That, and –” she leans over the counter so she can whisper “– I don’t want this getting out there, but the head cook is convinced that I’m some kind of avatar of Terra sent to ‘smite him for his sins’.”
“Well, you’re not, are you?” I whisper back.
She just snorts in response and pulls back.
“Well,” she says, grabbing the first pita back from me with that glowy blue stuff, “he’s your friend. Lead the way.”
That felt kinda tingly. At least, I think it did…
As we leave, I hear a mare behind us say, “Pay up. Those flying olives didn’t taste any different from the regular ones.”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
Amber Spice
“Something just occurred to me, ” I say as we make our way through the mostly deserted path to the cloud bank. “I’m helping you and your friend, but I don’t even know your names. It’s hardly fair that you already know mine and have me at a disadvantage.”
The lightish-grey pegasus whose flight I’d been following flips upside-down to look at me, while he continues to fly in the same direction as before.
“Oh,” he says, “sorry about that.”
He rolls to right himself, drops to walk beside me and says, “My name’s Aerial Sweep, and I’m a guard, in case you hadn’t figured that out already.”
“Well I don’t think I’ve seen anypony at the mess who wasn’t, so that’s fair.”
We continue walking for a minute in the quiet gloom before I speak up again.
“So, who’s your friend? Is he a guard, too?”
“Actually, yeah. Depressed-looking blue and tan guy named Horizon. Most people who know him call him Rize, though.”
Horizon?! My horn’s aura flickers and flares a little when I hear his name and I barely resist the urge to throw his wrap on the ground and grind it into the contemptible sand beneath my hooves. Destroying food this good would be criminal, so giving it to him would be the lesser of two evils.
Doesn’t mean I can’t give him a piece of my mind while I’m at it, though.
“Oooh, I know that face,” he says, biting his lip. “You’ve met him, haven’t you.”
“You could say that, yes. You could also say that he’s a self-absorbed flying horseapple, or that his taste in humor is lacking.”
“Ffffffff— Yeah… He must have really pinfeathered things with you earlier.”
Going from my limited-but-growing experience with pegasus profanity, I’d say that’s pretty accurate.
“Look,” he continues, “he obviously did something very stupid—”
“He ruined food for me,” I hiss acidly.
“Very, very stupid,” he says, eyes wide and wings snapping out. “I would like to note that ruining the idea of food for a cook is pretty tasteless.”
Aerial Sweep tucks his wings back in and sighs. “Rize has been my best friend since before we could hover, so I know him pretty well. He’s always been a bit impulsive, but nobody would ever call him a bad guy.
“Point is I really care about him, and I haven’t been able to get him to eat more than a few pickle slices in nearly a week, and I saw your food at the mess tent and saw how good it looked and hoped that it might be enough to—”
I shove a hoof in his mouth to stem the flood.
He may be turning to naked flattery to get what he wants, but he seems to honestly care for that loser.
And said loser did technically save my life.
I look into Aerial Sweep’s eyes and notice they’re watering. Ugh, he’s even worse than my brother Sepia.
I extract my hoof and say, “Fine. I can set aside our differences long enough to make sure your friend gets a good meal. One snide remark, though, and he’s getting force-fed. At high velocity.”
“Thank you, Miss Spice. That’s all I can really ask for.”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
Horizon
‘Golden rain, Rize, stop wallowing! Do you have any idea how much this hurts to watch a second time? Maybe if you’d get outside your own feather-stuffed head once in a while…’
Lying on my back on a cloud with my wings spread-out, flopped-down where Sweep had left me with those words.
Guess I hadn’t thought about what this looks like. I mean, I don’t like to watch somebody feeling sorry for themselves, and watching me whine about being a worthless and terrible pony can’t be much more fun.
Maybe if I smiled more…
My lips creak into a rictus, before giving up and falling back to a neutral position.
No, let’s not get too crazy here.
…
Maybe if I said nice things to people, it’d feel nice? Or at least feel something. Well, it’s probably worth a try.
‘More of a try than you gave to save Fairy Tales, anyway.’
Shut up! The elders said that wasn’t my fault. The Sheikh himself forbade me from trying to do more.
And besides, that’s… in the past.
…
Whatever. Just… say something nice to the next person you see. Something about them. Something to get outside your own head.
“…should be coming up on where I left him.”
My ears twitch. That’s Sweep, but who’s he talking to?
I tuck a wing and roll onto my belly to peer over the edge of my cloud. In the moonlit gloom, three points are shedding light like blue torches: two hovering pita wraps, and one orange horn. Well, I guess I’ve found my target.
“Hey, jerk!” the horn’s owner yells. “Come down and eat this food so that your friend here doesn’t cry!”
Sweep’s blue-illuminated hoof impacts his face. I can hear his sigh from here.
“No, it’s okay,” he says. “I can just fly them up one-at-a-time from here. Rize doesn’t have to move.”
“No, Sweep,” I croak, “it’s fine. I can still fly.”
I sluggishly flap my way down to the ground in front of them.
Y’know, I think this is the first time she’s seen me without my armor.
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
Amber Spice
He looks nearly skeletal. Almost like those sickly bat-winged demons from the U-day pageant, but without most of the threatening bits. This isn’t the work of one week’s starvation.
“So,” he says, his eyes nearly smiling, “how has your day been?”
I haven’t been asked that question in a long time.
“Well…” I say, my gaze drifting up to the emerging stars. “For starters, sand is terrible…”
—_(\\_/\_//)_—
Horizon
I’m not sure what I expected when I asked that question, but it probably wasn’t a detailed account of her adventures throughout the day.
“…and then the mess tent cook – I can hardly believe this myself – prayed as I walked out, thanking Terra for not making me smite him!
“Tell me, does this look like an agent of Terra’s wrath?” she asks, prodding her fluff-shrouded chest.
On occasion.
“Not usually, I would think,” I reply.
Still, it’s a lot more interesting than listening to myself mope.
“…So then I got to thinking, ‘Spicy, you fiendishly clever mare, it seems you have some time alone –” her hoof shoots up and out in a sweeping gesture “– with the food! Surely you can come up with something interesting to do with all of this foreign stuff, or what’s that flower on your flank for?”
“What’s a flower have to do with food?”
“Oh ho ho ho… What’s a flower got to do with—”
Her hoof impacts her skull so loudly I’m a little worried she’s chipped her horn. “Right. Desert. Suffice it to say that saffron is the best spice ever, and that it comes from a flower grown in a valley by Terra’s Horn. Aaanyhow, I was experimenting with the food Carver was bringing out, and…”
I look down to the pita wrap I’ve been holding in one wing. I’m still not really hungry, but she did come all this way…
I take a bite.
The fluffy, yogurt-slicked pita gives way, revealing the syrupy-sweet, crystalline dates within, which then burst between my teeth in a salty, tangy explosion of feta.
I take another bite and chew slowly, trying to savor the flavor, when I notice she’s stopped talking and is looking at me expectantly.
“So,” she says, a self-satisfied grin on her muzzle, “what do you think?”
“Wow,” I say, and take another bite.
A big thanks to SirNotAppearingInThisFic for editing this chapter all through production.
And thanks to FanOfMostEverything, too, for throwing his two cents in to help me prepare to post this. I'm glad you enjoyed the early-access version of this chapter, and hope it didn't have the same sorts of nasty surprises Steam has trained us to associate with that label. 
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I apologise for neither introducing Bugsydor to the various uses of dashes nor any of the jokes/puns that I had or will have a hand in.
Glad my comments were of some use. This is a great chapter, from Amber finding a place in the caravan to the continuing reveal of just how deep Horizon's despair really is. And the mutual culture shock never ceases to amuse.
8332072 You flatterer.
Thank you for showing me that everything is working as intended.
Carver is absolutely right to fear for his life. That fluff is the mark of a true smiter: lesser smiters strike with spells of banishment, fire, or lightning. Amber on the other hoof can smite ponies (and camels) down with diabetus just by having them gaze upon her...
8332468 Or, failing that, she can give them diabetus with her cooking.
"That fairly easy for me to say"
"That's"?
Another excellent chapter!
8332917 Oops! Thanks for the catch.
And thanks for the compliment.
8332962
You're welcome, for both. :)
Surprised nobody's referenced this yet. I guess it's up to me, then:
8337549 You'd technically be at least the second, as FoME has made that comment in a couple of places previous.
You are totally the first one to do so here, though!
8337754
Great minds think alike, I guess.
8337549 Dammit, you beat me to it. You're lucky I've been busy!
A terrible thing has happened!
I ran out of chapters.
8337549
8337754
Then it falls to me to reference another reference!
(first 20 seconds. though the rest is still amusing)
As someone who enjoys cooking (especially involving Amber's kind of SCIENCE! ) a great deal, I have to say I'm enjoying this series a lot.
Can't wait to see what she gets up to if and when she has free run of the kitchen
8775949 8775963
Please pardon the lack of additional chapters. Next one is scheduled to come out sometime after I write the next chapter of MHE, and that could take a bit.
And yes, she is finding sand in places she didn't even know she had.
It's good to see someone who appreciates cooking and related SCIENCES, too!
8776258
Good to see you're still working on this! Take your time.
8951789
Huh.
8951793
Thanks.
8951795
"Would you believe that Gdocs didn't notice?"
From my experience with the sometimes... odd choices of Gdocs's spellchecker, yes. :)
"Thanks for the various corrections."
You're welcome!
"Those aside, how did you feel about the changes?"
Well... hard to say, unfortunately; it's been a while since I last read the story, before this, and I don't have them side by side to compare; sorry. I still enjoyed the portion of the story I reread in that session, but I'm not sure which parts are old and which new.
8951804
Y'know, that works for me. It means I probably didn't screw anything up too badly, the stuff reads well, and there aren't any jarring transitions between old and new material.
Thanks for (re)reading!
8951869
"Y'know, that works for me. It means I probably didn't screw anything up too badly, the stuff reads well, and there aren't any jarring transitions between old and new material."
I don't think I've spotted any of those. :)
The only possibly jarring bit I'm remembering at the moment is right at the start, with how close the bandit encounter and unicorn encounter are. That seemed a somewhat large coincidence, given the known very low density of unicorns and expected relatively low density of bandits in the area.
"Thanks for (re)reading!"
You're welcome! Not sure when I'll get to the rest of the chapters, but they're on the list.
8960413
"
"and will be sure to let SNAF know about your feelings on the matter.
Ah, that was them? Then yes, thanks to them. :)
"Regarding your question on caravan arrangement: got it in one."
Ah, excellent! Thanks.
"Usually."
...Leaving aside your oddly ominous-feeling italics, do you mean that the mythology says she can remove it and restore it at will or that the mythology is inconsistent on whether it's attached or not? (One possible source of the ominousness, it occurs to me, being a story of how she acquired it, and from whom, in the first place.)
8961158
Heh. No, that was not me. If anything, Bugsy is poking fun at the fact that I challenged the frequency with which he used those names in a certain paragraph, but we settled on fixing up other things (e.g. Murderdrop's dialogue) so they'd make as much sense as they could instead of remove any. In fact, we ended up adding one or two more in editing.
8951881
Given the size of the desert and how long Amber would survive without water, we're still running off of coincidence that they found her at all. That doesn't mean I wasn't a right pain when it came to questioning the passage of time in various parts of this story, down to how long it takes to have a thought. Bugsy will probably attest to that, especially my being a pain.
For what it's worth, though, the caravans are bandit magnets.
8961431
Ah, okay; thanks for the inside look. :)
Well, yes, finding her was already a major coincidence, but I don't know how much that really mitigates throwing a second, apparently unrelated, coincidence on top of it. And while bandit magnets the caravans may be, there are only so many bandits to assault it, especially if even 50% of the time that ends in bandit death, and there do also appear to be long stretches of quiet for the guards. Probably neither happening on the bandit (or the bandit happening on them) nor happening on Amber Spice would stand out too much if they were alone, but they're right on top of one another, with, as far as I can see, no separation at all. Not really sure how they could be well-separated, though; I can see how the passage of time could be a subject of debate.
"“Oooh, I know that face,” he says, biting his lip. “You’ve met him, haven’t you.”"
Is Sweep deliberately hiding that he knows they've met?
"I would like to note that ruining the idea of food for a cook is pretty tasteless."
...I'm not sure, in or out of universe, whether that was intended to be a pun or not.
Aaaand back at the current end! Reread complete!
8962084
Yes, half-yes, and thanks for rereading and re-commenting!
8962578
"That was a nice line, wasn't it."
:)
"Yea/yay was an honest flub. Fixed."
Ah, glad I pointed it out, then!
8962581
"Yes"
Ah, thanks.
"half-yes"
Heh. :)
"and thanks for rereading and re-commenting!"
You're welcome; thanks for writing!