This Is Your Story!

by Mahayro

Chapter Four

Somewhat off the northwest edge of town, a warehouse-like log building jutted from the moon-kissed landscape. It bore strange markings from airborne collisions, and it seemed altogether too large for a one-floor establishment. A swinging sign hung by the front door bearing Berry's own face on wood, smiling with clenched-eye glee, above the words "FORGET YOUR TROUBLES HERE". She'd apparently chosen to play off of the recent legends of ponies losing track of time and forgetting hours or even a whole day of their life in this part of town. Legend or not, though, nopony really could recall how the cabin-house-barn thing got here. But now it was her family home.

Inside, a rough hay-matted wooden floor sprawled across one enormous unevenly-lit room. Knick-knacks from all over Equestria adorned the walls: three dream-catchers under a feathered headdress, a shining lucky cat sculpture from the Far East, a wild-eyed colorfully maned Tiki mask, a beautifully detailed map of Saddle Arabia, a bundle of glass tubular structures decorated with peace symbols, a modernist painting featuring Starswirl the Bearded, a ukulele, and various less recognizable artifacts. In one corner near the door behind opened curtains lay a simple four-poster bed, with the headboard bearing some three dozen small portraits of mostly unfamiliar faces and a badge from a Wonderbolt. Near the corner to the right hoof of the bed stood a shabby red piano. Between these, a great stone fireplace projected from the wall, currently only glowing with old embers. The bed's opposite corner contained the only true room of the place, and that is where the Berry Bunch slept.

Berry led the others inside and dragged out a few beanbag chairs from the remaining corner. "If you need to crash, crash." She hastened herself over to the fridge opposite the fireplace and by the house's only window, presenting its contents to the guests. "If you need to eat, eat." She then waved toward the opposite of the house, somewhat downward, toward a cellar door. "If you need to drink, let me know." She then drew herself over to the sink adjacent to the fireplace and ran water for soaking her forehooves.

She stayed to soak for several minutes, collapsing contentedly against the sink. When she'd had enough of that, she turned about to see Colgate and Carrot Top already passed out (or nearly so) among the beanbags. She quietly joined them.

Some time later in the night, Colgate stirred and got up. She headed outside, apparently to find an outhouse. After coming back in and toward bed, she turned a bit too sharply in her swift relapse to slumber and landed on Berry's side, an elbow in her gut. Berry raged to wakefulness, thrashing blindly at her now startled bed buddy. She scrunched her face somewhat at Colgate's action, then rustled a bit to settle back in. But in this process, she happened to notice Carrot's fearful shivers for the first time.

"Damn..." Life's rawness, bared in the night's atrocity, moved old Berry. Once satisfied Colgate was asleep, she sat up out of bed, faced Carrot fully, and regarded her without expression. Each pulse of Carrot's tremors jerked at Berry's tough heartstrings. Another tremor she faced head-on, and another... Somewhere beyond the count of a griffon's foretalons, the episodes claimed Berry's stolidness at last, and the first signs of weeping mingled gently with them. A tear from her visage hung on the lower edge of her cheek but did not quite acquire the mass to flee to the floor. Her mouth drew open in some shared anguish as she took the tear on the edge of a hoof and touched it against Carrot's face. And she just sat over her like this--leaning, embracing without holding.

Some moments into this, Berry noted the scene. "Now and then, you need someone older..." She chuckled ironically at the new thought accompanying her melancholy, then got up--up and off to the cellar. She was back in maybe fifteen minutes, heading not quite straight for the unconscious tormented Carrot.

She approached the one in apricot, laying close in alignment, and started to nom the back of her neck. Still unable to see or comprehend, Carrot snapped to Berry, clinging with a choking tightness about her entire frame. Berry, ever the tough nut to crack, just knowingly stroked her messy curls and nuzzled the tender spot just behind her left eye. Carrot grunted and messily blathered noises into the space between the beanbag and the mauve form that now embraced her with all fours. Then she drowsed to awareness. But she didn't care about what she saw as long as she was warm.

Carrot invested herself in Berry's ear. This tickled Berry a bit, but she restrained the giggles long enough to emit her frustrations into more appropriate channels--namely, Carrot's chest via her right forehoof. Swirling around a bit to help restore the drowsy one's awareness, Berry massaged around the navel and then up against the rarely-stimulated rib cage of her quarry. This act was balanced by Carrot attacking the high part of Berry's left neck, digging in and chomping gently, affectionately, articulately, as if to draw out her life essence for a taste.

This triggered a legitimate moan from Berry Punch--she, the slayer of stallions and mares alike. Divested of some of her noble ambitions, she sat up and threw her full body weight into Carrot's loins with a hard exhalation. Carrot was driven clear from her subconscious desires in a fit of coughs and sputters. She then more properly perceived her provider of pleasures and gently sighed.

"Berry...what are..." She started to sob, very silently and without moving. There was no grace in this, though some beauty hung in the moment. Perhaps in Berry's lack of immediate reaction, her inner noise commenced--droning and oddly nasal and disquietingly deep and unconscionable, railing against the very thought of beauty like a dull razor against a hanging silken sheet. But Berry's expertise probed through all of this, and she sought Carrot's weakness--wherever it was. She tried the space some inches below and before the base of the front right leg with her teeth; and while it wasn't quite like some magical key fitting itself to a lock, Carrot immediately stopped her complaints and exhaled forcefully. Berry essayed the other side in kind, and Carrot reared her head back and breathed a "thank you" to nopony in particular. Berry continued on that front-left tenderness, but her right forehoof slid down, down, then suddenly gripping Carrot's firm flank--all while she stared intently at Carrot's exultant upturned cheeks and unfocused eyes. Then with a sloppy but devoted sneering grin, Berry peeled herself back and snickered (or perhaps nickered) before diving into the vital tissue just behind the chin, dead center above Carrot's throat. Most would just gag or disrupt at the effort, but Berry was beyond that consideration...and as it turned out, Carrot was beyond whatever governed that instinct. Her eyes rolled back hard and her breathing gave way to panting. She was ready to be taken utterly.

Carrot's counterpart then rose to stand. "Come on, get up." She shivered just once, humming with whatever feeling transcended her objective effort of Carrot's satisfaction.

When Carrot finally did, Berry came to, then held Carrot's chin in locked-eye regard, resolute, uncompromising, pronouncing as plainly as her lips would allow, still somewhat slurred and breathy: "You. I...can make you feel...like a mare. You don' even know all the things I keep in my brain, or un'er my bed. But you know I can. I can do tha' for you. And I will."

Carrot fretted a bit, perhaps realizing the implications of such a deed with such an important figure in her life.

Berry followed, not flinching and barely even losing focus in the few seconds' silence there: "And no one'll know. No one. No words. Just come."

She and Carrot and a chorus of unseen angels waggled and fluttered to the bed, and she drew the curtain shut. The curtain held a cheerful sign similar to the one outside, only reading a jagged "DND!".

Stirred by some noise, Colgate awoke again. Totally alone but quickly discerning the reason, she considered her options and settled on some ice cream from the fridge. Everypony gets a bit naughty sometimes.

The next one to stir was not a pony. A certain tabby-coated ball of fluff had ignored the warning on the curtain and waltzed right in, meowing presumably for want of something. The window indicated the time to be around the other, pre-dawn period of false twilight.

The protestations were Berry's: "Echo! Seriously?? Buuuuuck..." The curtain parted only enough to release the two of them, and she groggily shifted to a corner by the kids' room to fetch the cat his food. She stroked the cat just once before wandering back to bed. But she hesitated before re-entering. Wasn't something...missing?

Colgate?

"Coooole?"

A frazzled mare responding to that name advanced from around a nook between the fireplace and the wall. She bore ill to her caller in her eyes, in her modest scowl, in her depressed cheeks and flattened ears.

"Oh, hun, I am not about to do this right now. You get back to bed right now, Cole."

Colgate laughed with malevolence. The emotion didn't carry well from one so inexperienced in it. She scowled more deeply. Her approaching hoofbeats continued.

"Every time... It rains... You are... Gone. Gone. From me." Her words were labored and not altogether clear.

"Dude, what?"

Colgate swiftly levitated a poker from the fireplace to bear against her...betrayer?

"This ain't like you at all. Like, what the shit?"

"Then I wake up." The poker spun swiftly in the air for a few seconds, then hovered at Berry's now flinching face. "Then I... Wake up." The poker dove down, scoring her right foreleg and instantly releasing a slivering stream of claret before hitting the floor with a hay-hushed clink. Berry staggered slightly from the pain but otherwise held her ground.

Colgate's eyes focused hard for a moment. In heavy movements of speech: "Betrayer. I thought...you did this all for me! To make me...whole again! It was our agreement. I...needed you. And you agreed. Because you...couldn't have him!"

"I am so...so not getting you." A moment's pause...while Colgate continued the advance, arresting uncomfortably close to the other's face. "Wait a--are you bucking serious? Really? You thought you could take Falcon's place?"

No response.

Berry presented a chiseled frown and puffed nostrils. Her breath sounded through those nostrils while her eyes gained a fearful dimension, half-shut from below and unwavering. "You have five...seconds...to get off of whatever drugs you're on or get the buck out of my house."

No response.

Berry drew herself up to her hindhooves, raising her fores to combat.

No response.

"Girl, you better call in sick to work today." A quick left straight in the eye. "Mama's orders." A right hook on the ear.

Seeing her possessed friend still unfazed by this, she ran back and grabbed an empty crate near the fridge, not even noting the milk bottle atop it fly up and then shatter on the unmatted patch of floor where the crate had lain.

Berry did, however, note Colgate's utter lack of response to the more serious threat. "Maybe you are sick. But you'd better explain yourself, right now! The sign outside does not read, 'Shit all over everyone with your troubles here'!"

Then Colgate shook and yelled and threw herself at Berry, all awkwardly. Berry responded with an impending faceful of wood.

But Colgate's survival insti

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Curses were heard. Rapid muffled hoofbeats fled out the suddenly open door. The curses chased the hoofbeats, but they found nothing.

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♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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Author's Note:

This ends the first "act" of the story. Four more chapters await tomorrow. Come back then!

Comments

[Cheesey Microwave]

I'd read more, but I was disappointed by all the cursing. Yes, I noticed it was rated Teen, but I was hoping that was just because of alcoholic references. It really seems interesting, but the foul language makes it hard for me to enjoy it.

[Mahayro]

5316505 My apologies. I did try to make that clear in the very beginning, but I could add a description note too.

I actually really don't like the idea of vulgarity in a standard MLP universe myself. But Berry has to be that way and I've always thought of her that way. She's the exception to my own rule.

[NorsePony]

I took a stab at this story because the premise is ambitious, and ambition is respectable. But had I not been set on giving feedback, I would have stopped reading somewhere in the second chapter. The frequent passive sentence constructions made many sections hard to parse; the randomly-appearing Seussian alliteration and rhyming threw me out of the story every time; and the (mostly) cinematic POV made the characters closed books whose motivations and feelings I rarely understood.

Having read all four chapters that are available at this point, the plot seems virtually nonexistent. The premise promises three characters who have trauma in their pasts but have found a coping mechanism in each other and in "the shared satisfaction of small personal successes," but the story is almost exclusively about Carrot Top's immediate and very present trauma, with the other two relegated to being dispensers of sex or comfort before or after one of her many breakdowns. That didn't bother me per se, because that's still a potentially interesting story. But it's not the story that the summary promised. And the (mostly) cinematic POV hurt the telling of it, because when Berry and Colgate are dispensing support to Carrot Top, they were almost always doing so for reasons that the cinematic POV kept opaque. Without being privy to what the characters are thinking and feeling, I rarely had the information needed to understand their motivations, so my ability to sympathize with the characters was severely limited, and beyond that, it meant that I lacked the ability to understand whether the events in the story were advancing a plot or moving a character along their arc. The end result was that the story felt plotless, like a series of events rather than a story.

Chapter three was the one that really lost my interest. The bulk of that chapter doesn't have any bearing on the story. Instead it's an extended description of the party with no relevance to the main characters. When we finally get back to Carrot Top near the end of the chapter, the cinematic POV is rescinded a little and we get a brief and superficial peek into her thoughts and feelings, but those didn't mean much to me because I didn't have the information about her that would be necessary to put them into any context. For example, the narration there tells me that intimacy makes Carrot Top go wild, but since I don't know anything about her history or her feelings or her memories, I don't know why that is. It's just an isolated data point that doesn't help me understand her.

At the beginning of chapter four, Carrot Top has a reaction to Drum. I can't understand what that reaction is or what it means, because the narration doesn't know what it is or means. The cinematic POV prevents the narration from showing the characters' thoughts or feelings, so the reader is given no information to understand the characters' actions. As a result, Carrot Top's actions throughout the story seem almost completely random, like she's some sort of talking, fighting slot machine. That made her impossible to sympathize with, and since she is the de facto main character of the story, that made the story hard to sympathize with.

Hard talk aside, I really like the premise you set out for. It's ambitious and interesting, and I hope you figure out how to tell that story (which sounds backhanded as hell, but that's not the way I intend it, I promise).

[Mahayro]

5317246 The "cinematic" narration and the occasional floridness of the verbiage serves a purpose. Part of that purpose is to play with my own inner voice and find some consistency. This is experimental in more ways than one.

As for the rest, I have to respect the wisdom of anyone better-read than I (a very simple accomplishment, trust me). I discovered right away that I'm a characterization-first, flow-second kind of writer. And getting good at balancing that takes a lot of time. Hopefully it takes less than the last ten years I've spent of making no creative contribution whatsoever to the world at large.

Chapter Three is fluff. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

[Cheesey Microwave]

5317191 Ah, yes. We all have those. Well, good luck with accumulating likes, you nice-seeming person!