Chapter 1: Ponyville
A Gift from Celestia
Chapter 1: Ponyville
Admiral Biscuit
There weren't.
The week of Hearth's Warming was over, and Ditzy had just landed in the playground of the Ponyville school, coming in for a neat landing by the swingset. As arrivals went, she couldn't have been more conspicuous unless she'd been accompanied by the Royal Guard or Princess Celestia Herself. A moment's observation revealed that she was the only grown pegasus at the school.
A gaggle of foals ran over to her, quickly mobbing her, drawn by the novelty of her arrival. The older students stayed where they were, observing from a distance and making their first judgements on the newcomer in their midst.
Ditzy sighed. If she'd walked to school, nopony would have paid her much mind, but it was too late now. She ignored the foals, looking around curiously at the other ponies her age. There weren't very many: a small cluster of mares up against the schoolhouse wall, where they were sheltered from the biting wind, and an all-blue stallion and two colts next to a pine tree.
She pressed her way through the cluster of foals and into the school, where a few students were already sitting at their desks. Ditzy stomped off her hooves on the mat, while glancing around the small room. A few dozen desks were scattered around the room in two groups, all focused on the chalkboard. Two rows of pegs—a tall row and a short row—lined the back wall, each with a name written above it. Ditzy scanned down the upper level until she saw her hook, and hung her hat and scarf up. Right above the peg was a cubby she guessed was for her lunch and other personal belongings.
She picked a seat at the back of the classroom, squeezing herself into the uncomfortable chair. Outside, she could hear an adult speaking, and shortly thereafter, the students who'd been gathered outside began filing into the classroom, noisily putting up their winter clothes before taking seats. Ditzy looked over as a rose-colored earth pony slid into the desk beside her.
"Hey, I'm Cherry Berry," she said, sticking out a hoof. "New in town, huh?"
"Yeah," Ditzy said, hesitating slightly before giving her a quick hoof-bump. "From Las Pegasus."
"Cool. I always wanted to go there."
"You? An earth pony?" Ditzy looked at her in confusion.
"A mare can dream," she said. "If you didn't know, the teacher's name is Play Write, but everypony calls her 'Pencils', 'cause that's what her cutie mark is."
"Pencils?"
"Yeah, but don't let her hear you calling her that. She doesn't like the nickname."
Ditzy looked back as the soft rumble of dozens of hooves shook the classroom floor. A pale yellow mare with a collar and tie was herding the foals into the building, glaring at them over her half-glasses. She glanced around the room, before clearing her throat. "Does anypony know where Applejack is today?"
"I do! She had to help clear an ice dam at the farm, and can't come in today."
"Thank you, Cheerilee. Would you be so kind as to stop by the farm on your way home and share the lesson with her?"
"Yes, Miss Write."
Teacher's pet, Ditzy thought. If this pitiful excuse for a school has an honor roll, I bet she's on it.
"Pay attention, class. We have a new student today; her name is Ditzy Doo. She's a pegasus."
Please don't ask me to get up and introduce myself, Ditzy thought.
"Ditzy, would you like to say a few words about yourself?"
I knew it . . . every teacher ever . . . "Um, I'm Ditzy. I'm from Las Pegasus, and, um, that's about it."
"Very good. Now, if everypony will take out a sheet of paper, we'll pick up with where we left off: division, which is the opposite of multiplication."
Ditzy sighed as she picked up her pencil. Who the hay needs to know division?
• • •
At lunchtime, she went to her cubby and pulled out the small bag containing her lunch: a sandwich and a carton of juice. When she turned to go back to her desk, she tripped over an energetic light-blue maned lavender filly, dropped the bag, took a side-step, and promptly stepped on her own lunch.
“Way to go, derpy hooves," a stallion's voice rang out.
Face hot, she turned to face the speaker. He was all blue—named Blue Bonnet if she remembered right. “It wasn’t my fault!”
“Sure it was.” He rolled his eyes up. “Cloud-brain.”
"She tripped me," Ditzy said, pointing to the filly.
"If you'd looked where you were going, you wouldn't have run into her," he replied. "I guess that's hard to do when your eyes are all derpy, though." He began twirling a hoof around his ear. "And bubbles—that's because you're a complete airhead, right?"
The two foals who'd been hanging out with him in the schoolyard began snickering. "I bet she runs into stuff all the time," one opined.
Ditzy bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. "I'm only here with you mudponies because my Mom got a job here," she hissed.
"Mudponies?" He bared his teeth. "Fly away, featherbrain. We don't want your kind here."
She jumped up and tackled him, forgetting that there were rules against flying and fighting while in school. She had also forgotten that earth ponies were much stronger than pegasi, although his kick to her belly only launched her back to hovering altitude. At that point, the fight began in earnest. The rest of the class circled around them, watching the combatants intently.
For a moment, Ditzy thought she had the upper hoof. Every time he rolled her onto her back, she countered with a wing-flip, eventually pushing hard enough to roll him over. As she considered her next move, he bit down on her wing and jerked his head sideways. She flopped over on her side gasping in pain as he spit out a mouthful of feathers.
An instant later, she was back at him. He'd made the mistake of thinking that a wing-bite would end the fight, but he didn't know that pegasi wings were a lot stronger than they looked. Ditzy bucked his legs out from under him with her hind hooves, and grabbed a mouthful of mane—she'd been going for his ear, but her aim was off. She wrapped her hind legs around his barrel, pinning him in position, and yanked his head back.
“What in Tartarus is going on in here?” Several dozen pairs of guilty eyes faced the vengeful stare of their teacher.
“You. Ditzy. Outside. You, too, Blue.”
Meekly, heads lowered, they shuffled out to the yard and into the snow. Pencils followed, her voice muffled by the willow switch she’d grabbed on her way out the door. “I won’t have fighting in my classroom. You’re here to learn.”
Ditzy didn’t need to look behind her to know that all her classmates had their muzzles pressed against the window, watching eagerly for punishment to be meted out. After all, she would have done the exact same thing in their shoes.
She started on Blue Bonnet first. He was already whimpering. What a coward, Ditzy thought. I can endure this. But the first smack of the switch was bone-jarringly loud, and each subsequent hit sounded worse.
Finally, there was a moment of respite, marred only by the stallion’s quiet sobbing. Ditzy bit her lip, waiting for the axe to fall, tensing herself for the blow. For an agonizingly long time, it did not. She began to wonder if she was being spared—maybe Pencils had learned that Blue Bonnet had started the whole thing and was—
SMACK!
A trail of fire lanced across her rump. Before she could even gasp, the switch came back the other way. She began crying, unable to help herself.
Ditzy didn't know how many times the switch hit her—she lost count after the third strike. By the time it was over, she felt like she'd sat in a campfire. Pencils didn't say anything when she was done, she simply walked back to the schoolhouse.
Ditzy gave Blue Bonnet a hate-filled glare before she followed her teacher back to the classroom. She looked around at her classmates, all of whom were busily engaged with their lunches and not making eye contact with either of them. She went back to her desk, took one look at her mashed lunchbag—which somepony had put on her desk—and grabbed it in her teeth and tossed it in the wastebasket.
She suffered through the rest of the day standing by her desk, totally ignoring the lecture. Her wing had started to spasm, and she didn't want to draw any more attention to herself by unfolding it, so she kept it clamped tightly to her side, even though she knew that would ultimately make it worse. Her only slight consolation was that Blue Bonnet had made the mistake of sitting in his chair.
When they were finally dismissed for the day, Ditzy was the first one to her cubby, and she wasted no time grabbing her things and rushing out the door. Behind her, she could hear a few snide remarks, but she ignored them, trotting to the relative anonymity of the back of the schoolhouse.
With a pained moan, she extended her wing, wincing as her muscles cramped. There was no way she was going to be able to fly home until she'd done a complete stretching regimen, and the last place she wanted to do it was right here, in full view of a school full of hateful mudponies. On the other hoof, there was one primary with a broken vane that she had to do something about; it was itching like crazy. She bent her head back into her wing and worked her lips around the offending feather, gently tugging it straight and working it into her mouth with her tongue so she could bite it off.
She didn't have to look to know what Blue Bonnet had done with his teeth: she was going to have a small bare patch for a while, but it wasn't enough to really affect her flight once she got the rest of her feathers back into their place. She'd recieved worse injuries in fights back in Las Pegasus.
A quick nip, and Ditzy pulled her muzzle back off of her wing and spit her feather on the ground before realizing that there was another pony standing right next to her.
"Hey." Cherry Berry shuffled her hoof on the ground, making a small furrow in the snow. "'Sup?"
"I suppose you think it's funny that I can't fly right now?" Ditzy flicked her tail. "Well, go on, laugh."
"Whoa. I don't wanna pick a fight, just, um . . . look, I'm real sorry about Blue Bonnet. He's a jerk." She picked her hoof out of the snow and rubbed her chin. "I, well, me and some of the girls like to go to the bakery and hang out after class, you know? And I wonder if you wanna come along?"
Ditzy looked at her suspiciously, before untensing. "Sure, okay." She folded her wing loosely against her barrel and stepped out around the building.
"Hey, derpy hooves! How's your wing feel, huh? Maybe it'll fall—" A snowball hit Blue Bonnet right between the eyes and he dropped to the ground like he'd been poleaxed. Ditzy spun to face Cherry Berry, who had a small smile on her face.
"Come on. Let's get out of here before he gets up again," Cherry suggested.
"Hey, you stupid nag, there was a rock in that snowball," Blue Bonnet whined.
"Good thing I hit you in the head," she shouted back. "I'd hate to have hurt something important." She snorted and led Ditzy out of the schoolyard, to the path into town. "When did you get to town? Do you know your way around?"
"Just yesterday. Spent the whole day unpacking." She sighed. "Worst Hearth's Warming ever."
"I guess so. Didja get to see your family at least?"
Ditzy nodded. "Pretty much all of them, except my sister. She's in Zebrica or something. Silly filly."
"Zebrica . . . huh. That's a long ways away. What's she doing there?"
"I dunno. Probably sticking her muzzle into somepony else's business, 'cause that's what she's best at." Ditzy stretched out her wings, slowly working them as she walked, easing the tension out of her flight muscles.
They turned a corner and Ditzy stopped as pair of mares stared at her. She instinctively flared her wings out and widened her stance, which caused the orange-maned one to take a step back.
Cherry took two more steps before she realized something was off, and glanced over her shoulder at Ditzy. "Oh, come on. They're friends."
"I didn't know Cherry was going to bring a pegasus with her," the orange-maned pony whispered to her plum-coated companion—just loud enough for Ditzy to hear. "Although I'm not surprised."
"Hey!" Cherry Berry glared at her. "Come on, Goldie. Get your muzzle out of the dirt for a minute and stop being a bitch. Nothing wrong with a pegasus. Don't you remember the Hearth's Warming pageant? Three tribes, unity, and all that?"
"You just want to be one," the plum pony mumbled, and started snickering. "Maybe she'll give you a ponyback ride into the clouds. Better make sure you hold on real tight."
"If you weren't pregnant, I would so punch you right now, Berry," Cherry retorted.
"Okay, she can come with us. But you're sitting next to her. Don't pegasi have feather mites or something? Feather mites can't be good for a baby."
Cherry gave Ditzy a look that said 'you see what I deal with?' and motioned her forward. "That's Goldie on the left, and Berry on the right." She trotted up to the group and Ditzy followed them into the building. Her stomach began growling the moment the warm air, laden with the delectable smells of fresh-baked goods, wafted out to her. Licking her lips, she gazed longingly at the gleaming display cases—before she remembered she didn't have any bits. Her ears fell.
"Come on, slide in," Cherry invited, pointing to the booth. "You can sit next to me, 'cause Berry's scared of getting feather mites, which I don't even think is a thing. And if it was, she hasn't got any feathers, so why worry?"
"Totally is a thing," Golden Harvest insisted. "Cloud Chaser had 'em once. She's, like, a distant cousin. Lives in Ponyville."
"How is she 'distant' if she lives in Ponyville?" Ditzy asked. "And that sounds like a pegasus name."
"Is." Golden Harvest waved a hoof at a gangly stallion wearing an apron. "A couple of my grandparents weren't too picky, I guess." She grinned. "Like Berry, here."
"Hey! Me and Cormano got a house by ourselves together. That's more than you can say, Carrot Top, you still live at home." She looked at Cherry. "She's got a house, too."
"Not all of us want to get away from our parents as fast as we can," Goldie countered. "And I'd rather spend my bits buying more land, rather than paying for a house. Maybe someday when I've got a family of my own, maybe then."
"No stallion's going to be interested in a mare who hasn't got her own place," Berry insisted.
Ditzy ignored them, instead watching the amber stallion who'd been behind the counter as he approached their booth. If he and Blue Bonnet were a representative sample of the adult males in Ponyville, the town was in danger of dying out from pure patheticness. Her minimal interest in a non-pegaus paramour was reduced to about zero—while she'd heard rumors about earth pony stallions being better endowed than pegasi, his unfortunate face was a bigger turn-off than what he might be blessed with.
"You girls ready to order?" the stallion asked in a squeaky voice, his eyes frequently flitting over to Ditzy.
"Same thing as always," Goldie said.
"Me, too," Cherry said.
He looked expectantly at Berry, who was puzzling over her menu like it was written in Neighponese. Finally, triumphantly, she folded it up and looked at him. "I want a scone, and a cupcake with blue frosting. And two pieces of rye toast. No, two cupcakes, and only one piece of rye toast."
"And you, miss?"
"Nothing," Ditzy whispered.
"You gotta get something," Cherry insisted. "Cup's the best baker in town—you can't come in here and not eat something."
"I don't have any bits," she mumbled.
"Get her a slice of double-chocolate cake and a hot chocolate," Cherry ordered. "Put it on my tab."
"I want a hot chocolate too," Berry added.
"You don't—"
"I do." Cherry put a hoof over Ditzy's mouth. "You can pay me back later, if you don't wanna accept a gift."
"Anything else?" He looked at the mares, before nodding and turning back to the counter to fill their orders.
• • •
The other three mares seemed more interested in talking than eating, and Ditzy felt a little greedy for wolfing down her food as quickly as she had—she'd barely even tasted the cake, and when it was gone her eyes were drawn to the thick slice of toast on Berry's plate—a slice of toast that went ignored as the mares talked about stallions and hoofball. It almost felt like she was back in Las Pegasus again, except that the stallion at the counter kept staring at her when he thought she wasn't looking, and occasional customers would do a double-take when they saw her wings.
Berry finally caught her staring at the toast, and shoved the plate across the table to her. “Go on, you're just a scrawny little thing. You don't want to turn out like Carrot.” She pointed a hoof at the stallion.
“Don't make fun of him,” Golden Harvest muttered. “Even if he is scrawny and gangly.”
“And he's a . . . he,” Cherry added. “So Ditzy doesn't have to worry about becoming Carrot.”
“I'm still eating the toast,” Ditzy said with her mouth full. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
“You're pretty cool for a pegasus,” Berry declared. “It was nice meeting you, but now I've gotta go. Cormano'll be home soon, and he gets lonely when I stay out with the girls. You'd think he'd never figured out how to use his own hoof.”
Golden Harvest slapped her hoof to her forehead. "Oh, Celestia."
"I just threw up in my mouth," Cherry frowned. "Ugh, who wants to know about Cormano's, ah, private life?"
"What?" Berry slid out of the booth before looking back at the other three mares. "Everypony does it, right? Carrot's probably thinking about Cup's chubby rump when he—"
Goldie clamped her forehooves over her ears. "I'm not listening, I'm not!"
"Bunch of fucking prudes," Berry muttered as she turned tail on the group.
“I have to go, too,” Golden Harvest said once Berry was gone. “I need to check on the carrots before it gets dark. Make sure they're warm enough. I'll see you around, Ditzy.”
“I should head home. I've got . . . stuff to do.” Cherry looked at Ditzy. “Wanna walk with me back to my house? It's on the south side of town . . . I guess I don't know where you live, so maybe it's not on the way.”
“We've got a cloudhouse; it's not really much farther from anyplace in Ponyville than anyplace else,” Ditzy said. That wasn't true, of course, but she felt obligated to hang out with Cherry a little bit longer, if that's what she wanted. She spent some of her bits on me, so I owe her at least that much, Ditzy thought.
“Cool.”
“How come you've got your own house, even though you're still in school?” Ditzy asked once they were walking down the main street. “Aren't you a little . . . young, to have your own place?”
“Nah. Mom and Dad set me up with some land, so I could start my own orchard. Thing was, there weren't any places close to their house where cherry trees would do well, and I can't just farm one place for a couple of years and then move on somewhere else, you know? So I built a little house so that I don't have to walk back to my parents' all the time.” She sighed. “I don't have to stay there in the winter; the trees are dormant, but I've got a little . . . project, in my barn, and I like to work on it whenever I can.” She looked glumly at her saddlebags. “When Pencils doesn’t give us too much homework, anyway.”
“Homework?”
“Yeah, all those division problems?”
“I thought that's what we were going to do tomorrow! Didn't she say 'do tomorrow?'”
“Due,” Cherry corrected. “You have to solve the problems on your own, and then turn them in in the morning.”
“That's stupid. Why can't we just do them in class? That's how we did stuff in Las Pegasus.”
“I dunno. I guess we're supposed to remember it better if we do it at home. Hey, listen. If you don't want to get in trouble with her tomorrow for not doing your homework, we could do it together at my place. I'll make some snacks, too.”
“Okay, but I've gotta be home by dark or else Mother will get mad. She doesn't like me to be out late. Says that's when the bat ponies are out.”
"Bat ponies?" Cherry looked at her in confusion. "What the hay are 'bat ponies?'"
"You've never heard of them?" Ditzy frowned. "They're like pegasi, but they have bat-wings instead of real wings. They were once Nightmare Moon's guard. When she was banished to the moon, they were cursed to wander Equestria. They stalk the night—especially when there's a full moon—looking for pegasi. When they find one, they bite her, and she becomes one of them, forever a creature of the darkness, cursed to serve a Princess who is no longer there."
"I've never seen one," Cherry declared, "so they can't be real. The Everfree forest is full of strange creatures, but there aren't any batponies there."
"Just because you haven't seen one doesn't mean they don't exist," Ditzy insisted.
"I've never seen the Princess, but I know she exists."
"I have," Ditzy said. "She was in Las Pegasus for the Summer Sun Celebration five years ago." She sighed. "The Princess is so beautiful. Her coat glows like a pearl, and Her mane is like a pool of liquid rainbow, but prettier."
"She'll never come here," Cherry said sadly. "Ponyville is just too small."
• • •
When Ditzy finally arrived home, it was well after dark—she'd been unpleasantly surprised when she had left Cherry Berry's house at how dark it was.
"You'd better have a good excuse," her mom had growled.
"I was doing homework with Cherry Berry, one of the mares in my class," Ditzy explained. "Division."
"Math, huh?" Ditzy's mom pulled a plate off the stove and set it on the table. "I don't want you hanging out with these earth ponies. They'll put bad ideas in your head." She set the plate in front of Ditzy. "Cherry Berry better not be a stallion."
"She isn't."
"Well, who can tell with the dumb names they have?"
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Okay.... why did Dizty's mom have them move to an Earth pony town if she's racist against earth ponies?
4229439
Her job--she didn't really have much of a choice there.
My family had to move three times when I was in school 'cause of my dad's job. They weren't always places we wanted to move to, but if he wanted to keep his job, he went where they told him to go.
I see you added some more things here and there, including more foul language. Made for an interesting read, even after having read it already several times!
4229659
It wouldn't feel right without having Berry Punch use the F-word at least once.
Yeaaah . . . I think the first, less obvious version of that Berry Punch line about her boy toy may've been a bit funnier. Marshmallow hooves!
4229676
Actually, that's something I've been meaning to ask. There've been plenty of in-universe equivalents to the F-bomb . . . why choose that over 'bucking', or, hell, the old Firefly standby, 'rutting'?
4232536
I changed it back. I liked it better the first way, too.
I could give some impressive literary-sounding answer . . . but it just sounds right for Berry Punch.
4233411
Pretty much the same plot, but expanded significantly.
Cherrys first project is the Hot Air Balloon?
I wonder how long she took to build the Bubblecopter, herself, or wonder f we will find out it was a mail kit from the Minotaurs or some such? Dont forget Cartoon physics. Cycling a helicopter with large body, and tiny rotors, just like a Snowflake.
4234512
Of course! In fact, I wrote two stories with that theme quite a while back: High Flight and Aviatrix
I'm torn about whether she built the helicopter herself, or ordered it as a kit. The 'contraptionology' of earth ponies is pretty impressive, and let's not forget that Pinkie Pie also had a pedal-powered helicopter, although it wasn't as polished as the one Cherry was flying.
I was convinced it was Cherry's balloon from the moment I saw her towing it back to Ponyville in Spike at your Service, and the fact that she was accepting payment to fly Fluttershy to Cloudsdale in Magical Mystery Cure means that the animators are thinking on the same wavelength as me.
Also worth noting: in Discord's song, who was wearing a pilot's outfit in the TSA-themed scene? Cherry Berry. And what did she dress up as for Nightmare Night? Bumblebee. She's an earth pony who'll do anything to get in the air.
4234677
Heh, I use the trick that currently, no flying earth Pony has tried to use a powered Fixed wing design. Maybe the animators are trying to avoid the Hudson Hawk effect.
4235216
Yet. Although hang gliders are canon, so it's believable that a pony would think of putting an airscrew on the front of a hang glider. I can guess what Cherry's next toy will be.
4235259
Well, theres two things for fixed wing flight thats possible.
The first is to use a Pegasus engine.
(AV8B Harrier)
The second is to use Vortex Drive. (Rim Driven Thrusters. look like open centre fan tail water pump wind mills.)
Most likely theyll stick with a full up modern helicopter, and at most a Wright Flyer, or Bleriot, and certainly nothing like Little Nellie, or Fairy Rotodyne.
4235285
\
You know, given that we've seen an enchanted propeller on Tank's rig, Flim and Flam's unicorn-powered contraption, and of course Twilight's come-to-life spell, I wonder if earth ponies are reluctant to use unicorn magic in their contraptions . . . that is, they know they could make a unicorn-powered flying machine, but they won't--they'd rather have it be pedal-powered.
4237552
Maybe something to consider. If it was handled decently, but this is cartoon land. Earth Ponies can pedal helicopters, because helicopters tie their hooves/Earth magic into movement, air magic, at least unicorn bulk movement style, not pegasus, wings one with the air style.
In fact, one thing Ive seen in afew other places, maybe if Snowflake, a very strong pegasus, tried to use that helicopter, even though its a flying, flying type, because he doesnt have the hooves/earth magic to flow through and strengthen the material, that he would snap, shear and otherwise effectively destroy the mechanism?
Dammit, you got me again. I'm in love with the world you're building here. Faved and upvoted, without let or reservation.
Aww! Does she put little knitted covers over them if they're to cold? I've got this vision of her reading her fields bed time stories.
Cap. [Organization]
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Wow, so her mom got a job in Earth Pony central. Yet is a hard core tribalist?
Oh, and when does Raindrops move to Ponyville? Ditzy could use her best friend about now.
So her mom's as dumb as a flying brick. Pity.
This isn't one of those stories that makes racism the central plot point, is it?
There's more stories like that than there are racists in the real world.
8356054
It's a plot point, yes. It's not the central plot point.
And technically, it's tribalism.
Well, I don't know about that. Maybe in all literature, but probably not on FimFic. Although I wish it were true, I really do.
man, Las Pegasus doesn't have homework, lucky. Although I typically didn't have to much in high school.
8358929
I think a lot of what pegasi would learn in cloud school would be weather stuff. I mean, they also get the basics, which I suppose is one place that there could be homeword. Not sure you'd want to give a bunch of students weather management as homework--that seems like the kind of thing that could spiral out of control pretty quick.
My Little Pony, Friendship is racism. I kid. Liking so far.
9515777
Thank you!