Cynical Pone Parody

by Nonagon

An Ordinary Day OR IS IT? (it is.)

CHAPTER THE ONE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN THE FIRST ONE BUT ISN'T
"AN ORDINARY DAY OR IS IT? (IT IS.)"
or
"LET'S SEE HOW MUCH IRRELEVANT SETUP WE CAN CRAM INTO ONE CHAPTER"

It was an ordinary day in Ponyville. That's pretty much the long and short of the setting establishment here. I could go on to describe the weather, the hour, and the present activities of various irrelevant ponies whose day-to-day lives will almost immediately be forgotten, but that would be a waste of your time as much as mine, since, if we're honest here, you pretty much got the idea after the first sentence. The only reason this paragraph goes on at all is to create the impression that this chapter begins on some kind of meaningful note, when, in reality, there was nothing at all to report. Ordinary day. Ponyville. Got it? Good. Now let's get on with it.

Our hero, Silver Scroll Vine Whip Sharp Wit Beautiful Mind Daisy Duke Omega Danger Legend screw it Nonagon the pony (because let's face it, that's who this character would have been no matter what his name was) was relaxing at the crystal castle library house of his marefriend, Twilight Sparkle-

"GET OUT!"

...was being forcefully thrown out the door of the crystal castle library house of his marefriend, Twilight Sparkle-

"AND NEVER COME AROUND HERE AGAIN, YOU CREEP!"

...ex-marefriend...

Nonagon landed hard on the road, skidding several feet on his face before coming to a halt. "But sugarplum..." he said plaintively, raising a hoof up towards the princess.

"No!" Twilight Sparkle shouted after him, still seething. "I am not your 'marefriend', I am not your 'why-foo', and I am not your 'ticket out of putting any effort into this character'! I don't know who you are or what you think you're up to, but nobody walks into my house and disrespects me or my friends like that!"

Nonagon froze, still upside-down. "Oh," he said sheepishly. "You found out about Applejack?"

"Applejack? I was talking about Rainbow Dash!" Twilight seemed to swell up as she prepared another blistering retort, then released a deep breath before she risked annihilating him on the spot. "Just leave my friends alone," she ordered, then slammed the crystal castle library house doors.

With a long groan, Nonagon rolled onto his hooves and brushed himself off. He was a pale, slender earth pony with an unruly mane that he frequently dyed depending on his mood; currently, it was jet black. His cutie mark was a complex symbol of overlapping lines which meant something very particular to him but was completely incomprehensible to everyone else. He also had one other distinguishing feature which the writer made up on the spur of the moment to try to give him more flavor, but it will never be mentioned by anyone again, so you know what, why bother. "Fine then," he grumbled, shaking the last few pebbles out of his mane. "I'll go and develop my character without your help, thanks!"

He heard a voice from the wall nearby. "You too, huh?"

He looked over. Spike was leaning against the wall of the crystal castle library house, looking dejectedly at the ground. He was bigger than he'd been the last time Nonagon had seen him, looking more like a proper drake with each day. Yes, the little dragon had been growing up lately, and this had been having consequences.

"Hey Spike," Nonagon said, trotting over. "Life got ya down again?"

"Yeah," Spike sighed. "Rarity rejected me again. I tried really hard to get her to like me, but nothing I do is enough. I know she still sees me as a friend, but it feels like every time I do this, it just pushes us further apart."

"Maybe there's a lesson in that," Nonagon mused. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Well," said Spike, raising himself up, "if there's one thing I've learned from romance stories, it's that any hole in my life has to be filled with romantic love, and nothing else, no matter what. So since Rarity doesn't want me, I'm going to abandon her completely and start a relationship with..." He rolled a set of dice, then consulted a chart. "Ugh. King Sombra. Well, this'll be a fun five thousand years."

"Yes, that sounds like a healthy, reasonable reaction to this situation," Nonagon agreed. Then he raised an eyebrow. "Wait. You're gay?"

Spike raised the patch of scales where an eyebrow might have been. "None of you are even my species. Why is that what people always get hung up on?"

"Point taken." The pair bumped claws and hooves. "Good luck, Spike. Try not to outlive all your friends and loved ones this time, all right?"

"No promises," the dragon said, standing up and starting to amble down the road.

"And try to keep things canonical!" Nonagon yelled after him.

"Now that I can do for sure!" Spike called back. Then he got in his car and drove away.

His good deed for the day done, Nonagon trotted down the road into town. "Well, that princess was a total bust," he muttered to himself. "Heh. Bust. I wonder if I can make a pun out of that." He pondered this for a minute before giving up. "Well, I guess I should do something with myself before the story kicks off," he decided, looking around for inspiration.

Nearby, a couple of mares were relaxing on a park bench, chatting amicably. The local balloonist stood near the edge of the park, looking for customers. A magician in a hat and cape trundled past, struggling to drag her stage carriage behind her. Across the street, near a pile of rubble, a large pegasus was shouting at a distressed wall-eyed mare. An angry white cat stalked across the road, looking lost. A grey earth pony and a white unicorn were putting up posters for two separate music events, occasionally stopping to glare at one another. Behind a carrot stall, a zebra was making some kind of trade with a pair of tall ponies in pinstripes, looking around nervously. A towering crystal train had just pulled into the train station. A familiar-looking stallion emerged from a large, mysterious blue box that Nonagon was sure hadn't been there a few minutes ago. From a nearby alleyway, a shadowy, cloaked pony beckoned, gesturing behind himself towards a shelf full of objects glowing with dark energy.

"Bah, I can't find any plot threads anywhere!" Nonagon complained, stomping away. He sighed deeply, wracking his brain for ideas. "Since nothing else is going on, I guess I'll go and visit my best friend, um..." He cast his gaze around lazily. "Uh... Tree... Um... Er... House."

"Hey Nonagon!" said Treehouse, winking into existence. "How've you been?"

"Treehouse!" Nonagon called in relief. "My best friend, whom I have known since childhood, and with whom I have shared many happy memories! How've you been?"

"Um... fine?" Treehouse paused, one hoof still off the ground.

"Hey, remember that fishing trip we went on last summer?" Nonagon continued in a loud voice, unflinching as other ponies started to stare. "Boy, those sure were some character-building experiences we shared together! I hope that our friendship, which is powerful enough to pierce the heavens, will last forever! It sure would be traumatic for me if anything were to cause us to part ways for any reason!"

"Nona, are you feeling okay?"

"All I'm saying is that it would be really sad, and would generate a lot of sympathy for me, if my best friend were to perish in some hypothetical disaster which might hypothetically take place a few minutes from now." He leaned forward and winked. "Hint hint."

Treehouse glared at him flatly. "You just created me so I could die, didn't you?"

"What? No!" Nonagon quickly shook his head, laughing. "No, no, no. No no no no no no no no no. No. No. No no no. No. Yes. C'mon, let's get some ice cream."

The two friends set off towards Sugarcube Corner, Treehouse only grudgingly. "You know, you can't define your character solely based on how you interact with others," he argued, dodging around an unexplained pothole. "You have to have some traits of your own."

"What? I just told you, I like ice cream," Nonagon said. "Specifically, vanilla ice cream. I know that doesn't sound very particular, but when it comes to ice cream, sticking with the base flavor is both deliberate and unusual. So that's like three traits right there."

"I would have said strawberry."

"Strawberry? What... that..." Nonagon huffed and looked away. "Nobody likes strawberry. That's dumb."

"Well, it's not as if my opinion matters to you anyway," Treehouse huffed right back. "You know, seeing how I'm just here to die and all."

"Are you still hung up on that? I told you, it's gonna be super-dramatic. The readers are gonna love it. It's still better than being some no-name background pony, right?" Treehouse was still scowling, so Nonagon softened a little. "All right, all right. I'll bring you back as a ghost or something. That way you can at least have a speaking role. Ghosts are canon, right?" He considered this. "No, wait, no they're not. Meh, I'll figure something out."

"You could at least tell me what pony type I am," Treehouse grumbled. "Or a colour, or something. I've had no description at all and it's starting to get ridiculous."

Nonagon looked at him for a second, then shrugged. "Nah, I like you better this way. Anonymity is what's cool right now." He turned back to the street, then put on a pair of sunglasses just so he could peer over the tops of them. "And speaking of what's cool right now..."

A pleasant-looking mare strolled by in the opposite direction, wearing a pair of saddlebags. She smiled at Nonagon, who smiled back, and the pair shared a full second of eye contact before they passed one another. "Phew," Nonagon breathed once she was out of earshot. "That was a close one. I was worried I would have to go through this whole story with no love interest at all."

"...Wait, her?" Treehouse looked back at her. "She's your love interest?"

"Well, yeah." Nonagon took off his sunglasses, storing them for later use. "You saw how she smiled at me, right? Total knockout. We'll definitely be hooking up by the end of this."

Treehouse looked at him like he was crazy, which Nonagon found difficult to tell from a regular expression. "You mean you think that because she smiled at you, which she probably does to everyone she sees, you two are somehow destined to be together?"

"Conservation of detail, dude. Conservation of detail." Nonagon tapped the side of his head. "She took up a whole two sentences, so that means she's got to be important. And she's conventionally pretty, which means that she has to be a love interest of some sort. Sure, there's a small chance that she'll turn out to be evil and I'll have to kill her, but only after we've already made out at least once, and that's a chance I'm willing to take, you know?"

"You... you can't just..." Treehouse clutched at his skull, as though his friend's words were literally, physically painful to hear. "Do you... have any idea the kind of twisted, harmful messages you're sending about relationships just by having this conversation?"

"What, so pointing out that we're doing it is more harmful than every story ever playing it straight?" Nonagon laughed. "Relax, dude. This is a totally flat parody, so we're allowed to get away with this stuff."

"Can I go be her friend instead of yours?"

"No."

"Damn." Treehouse rolled his eyes, shook his head, and made every other dismissive gesture he could think of simultaneously. "Are you at least going to talk to her, maybe ask her name, or something?"

"Nah. She'll find me again. Somehow."

"Right." They walked a little more in silence. Sugarcube Corner was coming into view, the smell of fresh sweets wafting over the air. "Hey, Nona?" Treehouse said. "Do you ever worry that you're too genre-savvy for your own good?"

"No, I can't see how that would ever be any kind of problem."

---

Meanwhile, at the charred, ashy plot that was slowly transforming into the Golden Oak Memorial Garden, four of the Elements of Harm- hm. That was meant as a joke, but now that we've come to it, it's actually a pretty good point. Huh. Mane Six? No, that doesn't work in-universe. Uh... Princess Twilight Sparkle And Her Friends minus Twilight Sparkle were gathered at a small table.

"Ah sure do miss mah parents," Applejack mourned, taking off her hat. "Ah know up until now it'd seemed like Ah'd put all that behind me and learned to live a loving an' fulfilling life with the rest of my family, but Ah decided that right now would be the best time to dig all those old feelings up and share them with y'all."

"Who cares? I have a chance to join the Wonderbolts!" Rainbow Dash yelled. "All I have to do is take one small test, and I'm in! There's no way that this can possibly fail! I don't even know what would happen if I did somehow fail this test, but I don't need to, because there's no way that I'm not going to make it in!"

"Honestly, such silly problems," Rarity huffed. "Doesn't anypony care that some awful ponies have been bullying Sweetie Belle lately? This is certainly news to me, and she's in need of emotional support. Alas, I can't help her, as I'm terribly busy lately with whatever it is that I do all day."

"Um, girls?" Fluttershy interjected. "Does anypony know where Pinkie Pie is? She looked really nervous about something this morning and it's not like her to be this late for-"

"I'm here, everypony!" Princess Twilight Sparkle yelled, arriving in a flash. "Sorry I'm so late. Some crazy pony was holding me up and made a complete mess in my kitchen."

"I know the feeling," Rarity responded with a smile. "Why have you asked us to meet you here, instead of your fabulous crystal castle library house?"

"Because of this letter," Twilight answered, raising up a piece of paper with a flourish.

"Um, don't you think we should wait for Pinkie Pie before-"

"...Which warns us of an imminent attack on Ponyville!"

Everypony gasped. "Can we stop it?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"I'm not sure," Twilight answered, turning the page over. "Normally when Princess Celestia sends me this kind of letter, she gives me some kind of call to action or just vaguely reminds me to stick by my friends. This time, she just warned me that it's going to happen and asked me to do the best I can. She also asked me to stay away from the castle." She read the letter over again. "It says that the attack is going to come from some pony called Lord Paradigm, and his powers are... exactly what we think they are. I wonder what that means."

"It doesn't matter one lick what his powers are unless there's something we can do about it," Applejack said. "Is there anything we can do about it?"

"That's why I asked you here. But now that we've all arrived..." Twilight put a hoof to her chest, looking puzzled. "I'd hoped that we could use Rainbow Power to pre-emptively shield the town from whatever's coming, but... I can't feel it. Normally once we're all together, I can feel the power of friendship filling me, and turning it on is like turning on a switch. Why can't I feel anything now?"

"Um-"

"Hey, what the heck?" Rainbow Dash exclaimed, putting a hoof over her own heart. "I can't feel it either! What's going on?"

"I don't know," Twilight answered, panic rising in her. "Lord Paradigm must be somehow draining our powers before he arrives, preventing us from stopping the threat before anything interesting has time to happen!"

"Actually I think it's because Pinkie Pie isn't here, and it's really starting to worry me that no one else-"

"Oh no! Whatever will we do?" Rarity cried, swooning a little too hard and having to awkwardly catch herself before she fell out of her chair.

Seemingly from nowhere, a thousand voices answered her. "Nothing. There is nothing you can do."

Then the ground began to shake.

Comments

[Braininthejar]

The insight coming from reading this work will either allow me to write the best fic ever or make me unable to write anything at all ever again.

[pinkiepie4th]

Hey! Put that Gurren Lagann reference back where you got it from! This world is only meant to cross-over with the rest of its universe!