The Last Pony on Earth

by Starscribe

Chapter 49: August 14

Author's Note:

For those who don't know, I'm currently raising money for an LPoE Hardcover print, for about the next two weeks. As part of that, I've been writing a little more in the world, capping off this early period forever with the publication of the book.

If you haven't seen the Indiegogo yet, you still have a week to order the book. The details are below:

https://igg.me/at/lpoe

Dear Diary,

Today was my first day living in Alexandria. Not Paris, Illinois, the perfectly acceptable name for a perfectly unimportant town in the middle of nowhere that didn’t need another name. If I didn’t know why they’d picked it, it might not annoy me so much.

But it’s whatever, I can live with that. In a few years we’ll have attracted so many ponies that our original population is just a blip, and no one will remember where the name came from. They’ll think it was for the library. God I hope not. If these books burn, where will we be as a species?

I had a little time to go through the collection this morning, through the strange shelves in that otherworldly place the Equestrians built for us. There’s some really interesting stuff in there—some of which might be incredibly useful for not-pony not-human civilization going forward. Like the weather control stuff—Equestria never has crop failures or natural disasters, because all of that is scheduled. I’m sure there’s a number of people that we need to get it working. But it’s not like we need to stop every hurricane on the planet. Just the area around Alexandria.

Except we don’t. You know what extreme weather happens out here? None. We get snow in winter, and rain in spring, and mild heat in summer. Climate-wise, there’s a reason this countryside is full of dying crops. It’s a fertile place. Barring some changes we may have to make to the rotation and some other boring details I’ll think about when there are fewer bags of chips and cans of vegetarian chili to salvage from every store ever.

What do you think Romulus and Remus did the day they founded Rome? Or… wait, I think maybe it was founded after one of them died? I need to look that up. I won’t forget it once I do. I won’t be able to forget it, because those are the new rules of my life. Every fact is in here forever. Not really sure how this accomplishes my hope of the species never being forgotten. I’m just one pony, and I won’t live forever. Who remembers humanity when I’m gone?

Someone harder to distract, hopefully.

We didn’t start out the day with any duels to the death, or even any pretend duels in Skyrim. Wait… that game isn’t multiplayer. Sorry not sorry Joe.

So the plan was to have just one big house with everyone living inside it, because that’s the most efficient. One large HVAC for summer, central heating for winter, and everybody’s happy. You can fudge electricity a bit, maybe more than a bit if we had a real electrician. But the plumbing is way harder. Totally out of my field, and out of my physical capabilities with stump arms. Maybe Joe could do it, if he could be persuaded to actually work at something.

Okay, that’s not true. He will work at one thing. When I brought him a spell book from the collection, he started reading right away. Said that there were some “enticing possibilities in the basic structure of assembled runes.” Something like that. It sounded pretty nerdy so I’m going to be honest that I stopped listening.

So my plan was to have just one house, but it fell apart after only one night. Hearing the… noise, made it clear that Joe and Moriah aren’t going to be discrete with their relationship. I won’t be forgetting those sounds either. FOREVER.

But then Adrian isn’t a real member of our community, or at least he refuses to commit to staying, so he still lives in his RV. I guess I can’t really fault him for it, and he doesn’t use any of our stuff, so… he’s whatever. But with Joe and Moriah unwilling to promise to freakin’ calm the hell down they decided to storm off and live somewhere else. Then Oliver said he’d be better off living wherever we put the clinic-potentially-one-day-hospital, so he can be near patients at all hours without having to trek across the city. So he laid claim to another house, and now it’s just Cloudy, me, and one good doggo.

I guess that’s not the end of the world, except that the giant house feels stupid with just the two of us. We don’t even use more than one bedroom, so why should we have five? We don’t need three deep-freezes in just our house, or four separate bathrooms. If you think you’d probably enjoy having all that luxury, remember that my head is like halfway up to where it should be, and it looks like I’m in the kingdom of the giants. It doesn’t feel like luxury, it feels like I’m trespassing. Having all the photos of gone people around doesn’t help.

So we decided—or I made a decision and cloudy went along with it because going along with decisions is what Cloudy does. She doesn’t seem to care about stuff like this anyway, and I know she’s still pouting over Joseph. Last night wasn’t easy on her, I’m sure of it.

Point is, we’re going to start looking at RVs instead of houses. We wouldn’t have made the trip here without them, so using them again makes sense. And if everybody does it—something that shouldn’t be too hard—we could probably hook up to the same grid in an RV park or something and keep us all supplied. Shutting off every RV in the park would be way easier than going around the whole city and shutting off the grid to close up leaks.

Oliver wasn’t upset with the idea so much as he said that he’d eventually move to the real hospital. Right now he has his truck of drugs on solar and that’s great, but if our town gets to any size it will need a real hospital.

“You can’t just plan not to get sick or get hurt and keep doing other things. You always need medical care when you don’t expect it. Somebody falls, somebody has a stroke, and then you wish you had everything ready to go. Where’s my surgical theater? Who’s my nurses?”

“I am,” I answered, both because I was being stubborn and also because it would mean I could hang out with him a little more. Mostly because I was arguing, and I didn’t really want to be wrong. “We can clear out a big trailer. I’ll be close if you need me.”

“You’re not trained,” he argued. “And I’m not sure you’re, uh… tall enough.”

“I am!” I stood up on my hind legs, much better balance than he could ever manage. I’ve been to Equestria now, I can show all the ponies when I have to. “See! I can reach anything you can! And I’ll remember everything about, uh… nursing?”

“Okay.” But it was one of those “I’m done talking about this” sort of okays, not the “you’re right Alex, I should’ve realized how silly I was being” sort of okays. Oliver can be…

At least Joe and Moriah didn’t fight me about it. Moriah wants to go up to Chicago to get something brand new and way nice if she has to live in an RV. A “40-footer.” I’m not even sure they come that big. And of bucking course she won’t be the one to drive it down here, because she’s scared of driving anything larger than a pickup.

Housing didn’t take up the whole day though, that was just my first nightmare. There are all sorts of other quite insignificant details that have to be worked out.

After breakfast, Cloudy and I went out to check on the cows. They’re still pretty shaken up after their trip across the country—apparently it’s hard on an animal to move them that far, and that’s still true today. In Equestria I met a cow once, and she talked to me. At least I know that I’m not a compulsory vegan. Half the things we cook would be wasted without milk.

But the cows seemed to be doing fine. Or as fine as any cow can be. I asked Cloudy what cows even like—and she even entertained the idea of them living in houses like we did. Like maybe they’d want trailers of their own. I had to point out all the obvious problems with this, like the fact that they still weigh half a ton each and they couldn’t even get inside most trailers without breaking the floor.

It’s quite an amazing relationship when you think about it, just how much smaller we are than cows. At least humans can stand up real big, and I guess we did lots of cow stuff on horseback in the past. Or maybe I’m just thinking of the old west.

We didn’t give them houses, or even promise they would get houses. The lake here has plenty of water for them, and it’s surrounded by grass that got totally overgrown with no people around to care for the place. Really, having grazers is doing us a favor. All we have to do for the cows is be there to milk them—which I guess is pretty perfect, since that’s all having them does for us. We aren’t getting any juicier steaks when the smell makes us sick.

Even if we can still eat the stuff, I don’t know if I could anymore. Not after hearing one of them talk to me in Equestria. Eating them would be like, having a Neanderthal-burger. No thanks.

Cloudy flew across the lake, showing off again. I guess there’s no reason to be surprised—I’d want to do that too if I could fly. Even if wings don’t seem as practical as magic. She flew, and I watched. She’s incredibly graceful, way more than me. I guess that comes from being born this way instead of a recent change.

Moriah found us out there, ruining the fun is kinda her thing. She said she found some evidence that there might be a gas leak somewhere in town—apparently there’s a natural gas tank somewhere for the residents, and maybe someone had the stove on or something when the Event happened.

So we had to track that down—the wind blows that kinda thing away, but if the leak is in a structure, it might be a bomb just waiting to go off and burn our city down. I wasn’t going to lose another home before we even made it ours.

So we busted out the municipal maps, then hopped in Moriah’s new van and rode out to the gas plant. We brought a battery bank in case we needed it, though there was no telling if it would be enough. Turns out, we didn’t need even that. There were emergency procedures in place for closing down the system without power.

By the time we did that, it was past lunch, and so we headed back. Nothing really to do about wherever the leak might’ve been but to pray that it all got out into the air before a spark found it.

I’m not sure what happened to Cloudy, but Oliver found me and said he made lunch. When I went to get the others, he was a little weird about it, and said it was for just me. But I’m not sure why I would argue with Oliver, I mean, just look at him.

Turns out he’d been all over town gathering “wild greens.” Not just grass-clippings, though I might’ve thought that a few months ago. But he’s taught me otherwise. These are salads, the things that healthy people used to eat before the Event. Now all of us eat them a lot more.

But he’d used some canned oranges to make them taste a little less bland, and some kinda dressing I’d never had before.

I thought it might not be a good idea to ask him why the others weren’t invited. My guess is that there wasn’t enough for everyone, and he figured that I was the one working hardest. Well, he wasn’t wrong about that.

Or maybe it’s some kinda earth-pony solidarity thing. We have all the disadvantages, with none of the cool perks. No magic, no flying, not even night-vision like those cool nighttime ponies in Equestria. Just stump-hands, tiny-size, and horse mouth.

It was good anyway, and I made sure he knew how grateful I was. Better than what I would’ve found in a can. I told him that he could probably have a hospital, if he could wait long enough for us to get a grid set up for the RVs first. We’d be living in them, after all. He didn’t argue with me about it.

Joe wanted to talk about magic after that—he swore he’d found some “exploit” in the book, something that the ponies didn’t see. I’m not really sure what he meant by that. If there was any way to use magic, I’m sure the Equestrians already know it. Their whole world runs on it.

But Joe is Joe, and so he’s going to keep bashing his head into the book until he breaks something. I thought that this was one of those “tear the Band-Aid off” sorta situations, and so I took the book from him, going into the library and coming back with something else.

See, there are a few books I have that I’m not supposed to share with other colonies—books that I think might just be for me personally. But whatever, Twilight isn’t the boss of me anymore.

The forbidden books have red covers instead of tan ones, and they’re hidden in a secret compartment. Not secret from me, but… it would be secret if someone raided the library or whatever.

This particular tome was the most unfriendly one I could find: Horrors of Creative Thaumaturgy: Life and Forces. Whatever the hell that meant. Even the writing on the cover isn’t in English, other than the title. The inside of the book looked like mostly diagrams, along with the dense blocks of history.

I gave that book to Joe to chew on. “Skip right to top level,” I told him. “This is why your idea won’t work.”

I think he actually believed I’d read the book, because that was like flipping a switch on his face. He nodded solemnly, taking his little scroll and the tome and hurrying off. I didn’t see him again today.

The very first day in Alexandria ended not with a military parade or the signing of a gigantic scroll with a huge key and… I dunno, should we invent some fancy rituals? Civilization lives and dies on tradition, that’s what they say. So we need traditions. We can try to carry the American ones with us. I want a constitution, that seems like a good idea. But is it right to start drafting it when there’s only a few of us? That’s kinda like what those old homeowners’ associations used to do, when they’d have just a few people buy houses in a new property, use their majority to arbitrate the laws, and next thing you know you’ve got $500 fines for not mowing your lawn.

We’re still not even sure how many people there are. My estimates are… kinda pulled out of my ass if I’m being honest. But if LA is any guide, going by the number of people I found and the population, I figure there are between five hundred and a thousand people in the whole country right now.

That’s seven times more than Paris used to have, and almost all of them aren’t here. Some of them might’ve gotten eaten by cheetahs. Or… maybe they just starved.

I didn’t figure anything out tonight, but I did end the night with Cloudy. Our absurdly oversized house, because everyone was off doing their own thing. Just us, and an old board-game that we found in the cupboard. Candy Land is barely even a game, but if you put candy on every square it can be kinda fun.

Pictured above, at a scale that might actually make it fun.

And that’s it. Cloudy’s already in bed, I probably should be too. No disasters yet, but no really anything yet. Alexandria is new. Who knows what we’ll do with it?

—Alex

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Another day over and no major disasters.

Ponies being human though.

[FanOfMostEverything]

I’m just one pony, and I won’t live forever.

I thought it might not be a good idea to ask him why the others weren’t invited. My guess is that there wasn’t enough for everyone, and he figured that I was the one working hardest. Well, he wasn’t wrong about that.

Well, in Alex's defense, this still only a few months after the change. She doesn't think of herself as "she" yet.

Alexandria is new. Who knows what we’ll do with it?

Seriously, the dramatic irony here is thick enough to chew.

[Nitro Indigo]

I guess that comes from being born this way instead of a recent change.

Wait, what? Was there something about Cloudy Skies I missed?

One thing I never got about the setting bible is the part where transformees who are brought to Equestria aren’t allowed to know everything unless they contact Lonely Day.

Also, the TV Tropes page for Ponies After People seriously Needs Wiki Magic Love, and I don’t want to get an account.

[Condray]

9759655
I could almost swear this chapter was written with people already familiar with the entire series in mind!

[Cedric Bale]

She’s incredibly graceful, way more than me. I guess that comes from being born this way instead of a recent change.

Exqueese me? Even if this is referring to Alex's age regression rather than her transformation into a pony, "born this way" still doesn't make any sense in the context of Cloudy's grace in flying, lol.

[PiMan]

9759808
Alex was a guy before the event.

9759948
It's not her age; see above spoiler. I think that's reason enough to say it is because Cloudy was born that way, even if she wasn't born with wings.

[Neece]

This was damn nostalgic. I should get to finishing what's already up from PaP Bedtime Stories, but after the big battle I dunno. Curious if Alex ever got to meet her family again, all together.
And if she got romantic with Cloudy too, after that

[Starscribe]

9760447
That question is answered in Earth Without Us.

[Warrior Kitten]

..........So I just read this and I’m confused as to the context because it’s been so long since I last read this story that I’ve forgotten everything, yay!

So what’s happening, then? Are you going to be posting more chapters like this? If so, why? I didn’t really get the gist of it from the AN.

[harts fire]

yep i am really missing Alex.
wondering how she is doing with being a Alicorn now.

[Yami Vizzini]

Ah, so much irony....
Sweet to see the rest of the old gang once more (in all their loving acrimony).

[Inucroft1]

Img at the end is broken. Need a re-upload or fix