Half-Baked Biscuits

by Admiral Biscuit

(Fragment): 17: Inheritance

17: Inheritance

You obscure aunt has died. leaving you her only possession—a mysterious trunk. You think you hear noises from it. . .

You’ve always been a sucker for mysteries.

Unfortunately, real life hardly ever provides them. Practically everything turns out to be mundane.

That was the case until you got the trunk.

As trunks went, it was fairly standard. What your sister called a steamer trunk. It was old, and it was locked.

It had been left to you by your aunt. She was eccentric, everypony knew it, and had willed her only possession to her youngest close relative which turned out to be you.

There was something in the trunk. You had no idea what, and there was no key.

The clear solution was to take it and wildly speculate with the help of your friends.

***

It’s sitting in the middle of the room, while the three of you poke and prod it by hoof. That provides no clues. The next obvious solution is to pick it up and estimate how much heavier it is than it would be if it were empty.

That, too, provides no clue. It’s heavy, but then things built a long time ago usually are, because ponies built things to last back then—at least, that’s what your big sister always says.

“Just open the darned thing already,” Scootaloo mutters. “And then we can go and do something fun.”

“I like the mystery,” Sweetie Bell says. “’Cause, right now it could be anything in there. And when we open it, there won’t be any more guessing.”

“It’s just going to be a dusty old book or a cooking pan or something. I know it.”

“What if it’s a turtle? Like Tank?”

“That’s a tortoise. And you can’t keep a tortoise in a box; it’d die.”

“Maybe its hibernating.”

“The box ain’t sealed,” you observe. What if it is some kind of animal? A turtle or a tortoise or a lizard—”

“Or a snake or spiders.” Sweetie Bell shivers. “You don’t think that anypony would keep spiders in a box do you?”

“Not apurpose,” you tell her. “Spiders sometimes like dark, undisturbed corners, though.”

“Eww.”

“But unless there are bugs and stuff getting in there, too, the spider ain’t gonna have anything to eat.”

Author's Note:

One of my starts to a prompt-a-day fic. My first thought was to write it as a second person story, but with the twist that you are Applebloom.

I went through and fixed the typos (most of them, anyway); otherwise, it's pretty much as I left it.

My notes on this chapter were as follows:
AB/CMC (with ‘you’ as AB?)
[delete ‘cause it sucks]

Comments

[tsaukpaetra]

What's in the box? Why, it's a drone from an alternate universe, of course! We have no idea how Queen Rainbows drone came over, but evidence shows she was merely doing science like mama Twilight.

[FanOfMostEverything]

The box contains everything and nothing, the unwritten now, unprocessed and undifferentiated ylem. And until you wrote them opening it, that's how it will stay.