3. This Little Piggy
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T H E C O N V E R S I O N B U R E A U :
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CROSS THE AMAZON
By Chatoyance
Chapter Three: This Little Piggy
The little blue-gray mare struggled to balance the overlarge clothsack of imported Equestrian oats on her back. As she half-ran, half-stumbled under the tippy bulk, she used her hornfield to steady, push, and pull the mass to keep it from falling. The distance from the Outreach Depot to the jitney lot seemed ten times longer than before she had oats on her back.
Humans, like Dr. Kotani, didn't seem to comprehend the problems unicorns faced. A pegasus could extend her flight magic into any object she touched - such as a carriage, or a heavy sack - and move it easily. Earthponies were tireless, and had an utterly uncanny sense of balance. If she were an earthpony, there would be five sacks on her back and she wouldn't be worrying about balancing them. Humans just seemed to assume that all unicorns were at least as powerful as one of the Royal Unicorn Corps, or even the princesses themselves. Kotani had actually asked her to teleport them both to safety!
Yes, some unicorns could do some pretty amazing things - just as any particularly gifted pony could do amazing things. But not all unicorns were... what was the humanese word? 'Wizard'? Not all unicorns were 'wizards'. If Kotani needed some weaving done, or dye removed from fibers, Dropspindle knew some great spells for that. She even got a gold star in Vestication - if Kotani needed to get dressed instantly, she could probably pull off a basic clothing apport even on his bizarre human frame. But teleportation, especially at distance - that was Royal Corps stuff. Ordinary unicorns never mastered things like that. What a rude demand to make!
The air was so thin. Dropspindle was forced to pause by one of the human's many alcohol bars. The humans drank many horrible-smelling potions in order to derange themselves. At first, Dropspindle had assumed that the alcohol bars were the mirror of Equestian salt bars, but at the end of her first week in Huancabamba this assumption was violently proven wrong. On the weekends, the humans crowded the bars and drank copious quantities of the strange fluids. Their beverages were made by allowing sweetened fruit and grain juices to rot and go bad. The result - as one human native had put it - "Pickled their brains".
The effect was nothing like how salt affected ponies. The humans became loud and often violent. There had been a stumbling, uncoordinated quarrel between young humans that turned into a clumsy physical conflict. The humans struck each other with their forelimbs over and over until blood poured from their faces. One lost teeth from his head, another had his eyebrow torn open and had needed to have his flesh stapled back together. Human medicine was horrific - they had no elixirs to regrow teeth, and no unicorn medics to regenerate bone and flesh. They just stapled themselves together and went toothless.
It had been a rude awakening for Dropspindle. For two weeks after, she had shrunk away from humans on the street and crept in fear that at any moment the tall bipeds around her might go utterly mad.
Huh. Dropspindle had caught her breath fully. That hadn't taken long. The wind was fierce around her, but it was not nearly as thin as it had been for the last several months. She glanced at the half of the world that was a shimmering wall. The Barrier was moving faster than the air could either be transformed or get out of the way. The air was much thicker now. The air... 'pressure'... had increased. The Barrier must be very close indeed.
Her mouth fell open. Past the western edge of the town, just beyond the low hills, the ridge of mountains in Jacocha had been cut in half. The Barrier was devouring them, a wall against which the mountains were dissolving away. As she stood, the sack of oats balanced on her back tilting in the rushing wind, she could see the Barrier moving down the slope of the mountain at a steady pace. She could see the Barrier coming, moving towards Huancabamba. The thickening air roared louder in her ears.
"HURRY!" Dropspindle was almost galloping now, desperately clutching the sack with her hornfield. "KOTANI! HURRY!" She had expanded her telekinetic grasp so that it encompassed her own spine. She could feel the hollow shapes of her own vertebrae and the butter-soft cord within. It was a grotesquely wet and vaguely terrifying sensation - how did medical unicorns deal with such things? But it was also an excellent grip. By binding her hornfield to both the sack of oats and her own spine, she had effectively bolted the sack to her body. As long as her thaumatic strength held, the sack shouldn't fall off. It hurt a bit though, the weight tugging directly at the bones in her back.
She passed the corner that led back to the Plaza de Armas and pounded down the cracked street to the jitney lot. Where was Calloway? Where was that silly monkey... she couldn't see the human anywhere. The jitney he had chosen was ahead. She had hoped he could help her get the heavy sack into the vehicle. At the steps that led inside, Dropspindle released her field and let the sack fall. She glanced around. No Kotani.
Dropspindle whinnied and turned. She grabbed the sack with both teeth and telekinesis. She began working her way backwards up the steps into the jitney van, dragging the bulky grainsack, trying hard not to let it snag or tear.
The Verdulería Chévere de Huancabamba was very dark, now that the power for the town had suddenly shut down. The plascrete-and-glassite Peruvian equivalent of Googlezon featured a bizarre blend of ancient and new. Calloway had found it fascinating that handmade, traditional ayahuasca vessels sat side-by-side with the latest romball players and last year's MicroSony Mindset. It was a colorful store.
It was also a store that had supplies for miners and tourist elites come to sample local Shamanism. Canteens and ropes, shovels and candles and, best of all, GovRation foodpaks. Calloway made a careful path into the pitch recesses of the market where those goods were. Several times his cart slammed into an unseen display or edge of a shelf. Outside the wind howled, it was getting louder by the minute.
The silver-and-black checks gleamed in the available light. Calloway grabbed handfuls of the foodpaks from the shelves and dumped them into the cart. These were the same traveling rations Blackmesh carried when they needed to cross zones on foot. When the cart was overflowing, Calloway snatched canteens by the armful and began racing back to the front of the store. In the dim light, the cart collided several times, spilling paks, but there was no time to waste trying to gather them back. He pushed the door open and rammed the cart outside. With the cart holding the door open, Calloway turned suddenly and ran to a display that held compasses and LED flashlights. He grabbed several of each, stuffing them into his pockets. Then he ran back to the cart.
The market door was rattling from the wind, Calloway watched as a foodpak sailed away from the cart to scud and flap down the street. The Barrier was a nightmare wall now, eating the very mountains as it came. It was as high as the stars and as wide as the sky itself, it divided the world in half. Even glancing at its massiveness made him feel a sensation of vertigo mixed with a bizarre terror that the impossibly tall thing would topple over and crush him somehow.
He began pushing the rattling shop cart down the cracked street. Water. Those canteens needed to be filled. He had noted a cafe by the jitney lot, it must have a sink. The electricity was gone, but the water should still hopefully work. If it didn't, he would be in trouble soon. Calloway had to take a detour down an alley because the road was in greater disrepair - out the other side he found the next street over in better condition. He began to run, as best he could, pushing the cart ahead of him. The canteens dangled from their straps and whacked constantly into the metal cart and his legs both. After two more blocks he noted he would have bruises the next day.
If he survived to the next day.
How fast was the Barrier moving? As Calloway ran and pushed and rattled and grew more sore from the punishing canteen impacts, he tried to work it out in his head. It was Year Five, which meant that the hypersphere intersecting the earth was... somewhere around fifteen... sixteen thousand kilometers in diameter? Something like that. All of the Northamerizone was gone, the Barrier had just touched the continental Eastasiazone. That was the reason Kotani had decided to take a couple of months off on the Worldgovernment ticket. He'd made the decision just after Nippon had become Included.
He had never expected to see his grandmother's homeland, the homeland of his people. No Wandering Japanese ever did. It was a radioactive exclusion zone, the entire region. It would be 50,000 years before humans could ever live there again, at minimum. But somehow it had mattered that the land was still there. As long as Nippon existed, as long as the land was there, even if it was death, even if it was poison, then he still had a homeland and a past. When there had been nations, that would have been his. But Equestria had devoured it. Nippon was gone. The deadly mountains, the poison streams, the radioactive cities taken by what was left of wilderness... all gone. Forever.
Calloway Kotani was now truly a man without a home. Even fifty thousand years from now, the Wandering Japanese could never return. There was no land to return to. Nippon was just more Equestria now. Somewhere behind that shimmering wall, everything that Kotani's family, his ancestors had ever made, every place they had ever walked, or died, or lived, was now air and land for ponies only.
Perhaps it was a strange justice. They had killed their islands and been forced to wander the earth. Nippon had been recycled, was all. Perhaps ponies could take better care of it than Man had.
The cart nearly tipped over as Calloway passed the plaza. Fifteen or Sixteen thousand, five years - no, six years. Year Zero was when the bubble in the North Pacific first appeared. The count was from Zero. So six years, about nine thousand kilometers over all - the distance to Hawaii, which was vaguely near where Equestria first appeared. South of. About five thousand kilometers per year... but then the expansion was not constant. Sometimes it went, sometimes it paused... but overall...
As Kotani reached the edge of the jitney lot, he decided that the Barrier must be moving at about fourteen kilometers per day. More or less. It wasn't constant, but that was a decent average. He vaguely remembered seeing that mentioned in a kiosk news report before he went into deep mine seclusion. That would mean... um... just over half a Kay per hour.
Walking speed was... what... three or four Kays per hour? Even on foot staying ahead of the Barrier shouldn't be too hard. Yes, it was coming. But just in shoes a man could move eight times faster than that deadly wall! Just keep going. And in a van, it should be possible to leave the Barrier far behind. This wasn't as dangerous as that pony was making it out to be! This was eminently doable. They had cars, they had roads, and there had to be some cities down below. That meant more fuel to drive farther... heck, there would have to be an airship field out there, somewhere. The Southamerizone was huge!
Kotani didn't actually know much about it though - most of his career had been spent looking for oil and other resources in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Franz Joseph Land, New Arctica, Hyperborea - all the iceless islands and microcontinents of the Northpolarzone. He'd also done some work in the Gamburtsevs in warming Antarctica. Peru had sounded exotic. It still had towns. It wasn't really part of the Worldfavela. The brochures he had read on the hypernet described it as a 'taste of the pre-Collapse world'.
It had not exactly lived up to the brochures, unless the pre-Collapse world was a crumbling hovel for impoverished native peoples. Still, it had several bars and a nice, deep mine - and easy Googlezon delivery by lifting body transport drones. All on the WorldGov creditstick.
It was easy to breath. That was new. The air was positively thick. The barometric pressure must have risen to sea-level values - or close to it. The Barrier was squashing the atmosphere because it could only process earth matter so fast. Calloway had watched an article about what it was like near the Barrier. The abstract had become real - the Barrier was visibly creeping down the mountain behind him.
"Where have you been?" The excitable unicorn was at the jitney. Drophandle. Spindle. Whatever.
"Look!" Calloway let go of the cart and let it bang into the jitney van. He waved his arms slowly up and down. "Canteens! There's a cafe right over there - " He pointed the direction "Help me fill these up. Maybe there will still be some picarones or something to snack on for the journey. Oh, and if there is any pie, synthetic or not, grab it. No reason this can't be fun!"
Dropspindle stared in disbelief at the human's cavalier attitude. "The Barrier is coming!" Was this monkey mentally challenged?
"You really need to calm down. I've worked it out. We can outwalk the damn thing on foot." Calloway grinned. "Or hoof. Point is, you've got me all panicked for nothing. We've got a car, it's topped up, there's extra barrels of alcohol bolted on top - you ponies underestimate the power of human technology. We've got all the time in the..."
"Have you even looked at a map of this part of your world?" Dropspindle had several canteens around her neck, and was floating two more with her hornfield.
Kotani shook his head as they walked. "No. Grab a map if they have one. You can navigate while I drive. Just get us to the freeway, and..."
Dropspindle stopped in the middle of the street, just outside the cafe. She stared at the insane monkey for a moment. "Calloway. Kotani." She worked to control her temper. It wasn't easy. "Just where do you imagine are we going?"
Kotani slumped. Yakity-yak. This mare definitely liked the dramatic talk stuff. He returned her baleful glare.
"Where we are going, where we have to go - to escape certain doom, for both of us - there are steep cliffs, torturous heights, incredibly rough terrain, endless lengthy switchbacks, maze-like canyons - and the only roads are crumbling dirt paths barely wide enough for that bulky wheeled monstrosity of yours!"
Kotani didn't know that. He had imagined a luxurious drive.
The little unicorn mare gave the shaved ape another glare. "And that is just to get off this one particular plateau."
"Oh?"
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Oh, Miss Dropspindle...I know certain Clubs where you could make a lot of bits with such a talent.
More seriously, I love when writers try to look at the downside of being a unicorn as opposed to one of the other pony subtypes.
Well the extraterrestrials are living up to their reputation of being more knowledgeable than the natives. :P
6139780
My guide for this is the show itself.
Rarity is a unicorn, yet she has only been shown to know a tiny number of spells. She has Vestication, clearly - we see her instantly dress Twilight in a vest in my favorite episode of all time 'Winter Wrap Up'. We have seen her magically shape topiary leaf sculptures in "Look Before You Sleep'. We have seen her use telekinesis to manipulate cloth, needles, and her sewing machine - basic hand-equivalent actions, nothing more. And that is all. She can't do much, if anything else. And she is one of the Mane Six, a primary protagonist.
Twilight Sparkle is a poor example of the average unicorn, because she is not average. She is from the start exceptionally gifted and clearly marked for a greater fate. As a foal she goes full 'Akira' and nearly destroys part of canterlot until Celestia intervenes. She is an ubercorn, just waiting for inevitable alicorn status.
No other unicorn besides Trixie demonstrates power even vaguely near her level, and Trixie is nowhere near Twilight's capacities.
Next, what can even Twilight - the pony savior - do besides magic? Not much. She is physically weak and cannot help with anything physical in 'Winter Wrap Up'. In the 'Running Of The Leaves' she is slow and plodding, though she is smart enough to make what use she can of what little she has. She is not terribly graceful - dancing, she is a dork. At no time does she show uncanny balance, like Pinky the Earthpony.
Even as an alicorn, she can barely fly - she will never equal Rainbow Dash, likely she will not outclass Derpy... who can at least transmit flight power to a carriage.
I have become convinced that of the three breeds, unicorns are at a disadvantage in many ways. They are not strong, or graceful or capable of incredible balance, they are not able to transmit their power into objects, they get tired easily. Most unicorns only know a few spells at most, though all are capable of telekinesis as a basic ability. What spells they do know seem to only involve their profession or interest.
Unicorns are the weakest of the three breeds, but they are the only pony with the capacity for delicate, intricate manipulation of matter thanks to their telekinetic hornfields. This is a fantastic ability - they basically have a dozen hands - but most of pony day-today life doesn't require hands. Unicorns can potentially become the most powerful of the three breeds - magic being the great equalizer and even superiorizer - but it would seem that very, very, very few unicorns have the talent to achieve such potential. Twilight is clearly a rare case.
Unicorns, I think, are both the weakest, and yet still desperately necessary to the pony breeds. Most can only do one trick - manipulate objects better than hands ever could. Otherwise, they are wimps. But - in a world of teeth and hooves, that one trick is a vital one, because somepony needs to be able to pluck a splinter, shape molten metal into tiny perfect objects, sew and weave cloth, and all the myriad craft-skills that a post-agricultural society depends on.
Each of the breeds is vital for the survival of all. And, after a fashion, all are advantaged - and strongly limited - in ways that make them equal to each other, with none the true superior. If unicorns were also strong and had super balance, if they also could fly and impart flight into what they were connected to - they would be gods. Or rather, princesses. Hence the alicorns.
So, unicorns, for balance alone, are nerfed in many, many ways. And that is a good thing, from the position of harmony among the three breeds. Or so I think.
Ohhhhh, I'm getting all jittery!
You write like a lot of "real deal" writers, you know that? This is really good. I have high hopes for you.
It does feel a little silly to talk about a teetotaling Equestria when one of the Mane Six is named after a kind alcohol.
Probably a translation artifact.
In any case, we have two fish far out of their respective ponds. Dropspindle isn't going to be rewriting reality any time soon, and Kotani has been living in the Earth's basement since he got to Peru. So we have a pony poorly equipped for a desperate race with a plains ape, and a man who is only now gaining appreciation for the reality he's facing.
They fight crime!This will be interesting. At least they're going to be... fairly well supplied.6139902
I just have one question as far as your comment is concerned. What does Vestication mean?
6139902
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I find it hilarious how underrated earthponies are, because "they don't have [obvious] magic". Strength, endurance, balance, affinity for their attuned element, magical fertilizer powers that can grow ROCKS.... Earthponies OP, nerf plz. (Actually, no. I wanna be an OP earthpony!
6140042
Vestication is a word I made up, based on Latin roots. There is a real word, vesticate, which means 'to blister' - which doesn't sound very appropriate until you realize that the root is vestis which means a dress. From vestis we get vestimentum, which is any garment. Vesticate means to be 'covered in blisters' today, but it derives from simply 'being covered' - which is what clothing does.
I slapped that sucker together with '-cian' or rather '-cation' which means 'possessing a specific skill or art' as in magician or physician. '-cation' directly means to increase or to have high price - as in 'magnification', but it derives from a commonality between greatness and clothing - 'clothing makes the man' was true in ancient Rome. Toga conferring citizenship, for example.
So, just like J.K. Rowling inventing Latin based names for her Potter spells, I did exactly the same thing and invented a Potter-like Latin-based magical spell of my own - Vestication: to apport clothing directly onto the body of another being.
I wrote up some stats about Dropspindle when I created her - taken from my brief notes to help me remember who she is before I started writing - here are the spells she knows:
The only magical spells Dropspindle ever learned:
Vestication (standard apportation of clothing on or off),
Tincturation (remove or apply dye from cloth magically),
Ausokinesis (automatic weaving),
Adjunctication (imbue spells in cloth for visual and tactile effects),
Clothometry (knowledge from textiles).
Not the most useful tools for survival on a harsh planet that can kill you a thousand different ways, but hey - she knows five entire spells! That's pretty good for your average unicorn. Rarity herself has only demonstrated two spells in the entire show - Vestication and some sort of topiary spell that can change leaves and branches into pretty shapes. We might assume she knows some clothing related magic, but they haven't shown it. And Rarity is one of the Mane Six!
So, arguably, from one perspective - weaving and clothmaking - Dropspindle is perhaps the most powerful and remarkable unicorn I have ever written about. My other unicorn characters didn't even have four, much less five, entire spells. So Dropspindle is my most magically dominating unicorn ever! She's a magical powerhouse, a real prodigy by the standards of the average unicorn. Doubtless why she was allowed to go to Peru in the first place.
That said, knowing all about the desert when you are drowning in the ocean is not a superiority that matters. Dropspindle may be the most magical unicorn I have ever written, but her amazing skills are utterly useless to her current situation.
Why do this?
There has to be a reason she got to go to Peru to study human weaving - earth is dangerous, and native Equestrians are generally not encouraged to go visit it. There are strong travel advisories, and most natives respect them. Dropspindle had to have a backstory that suggested she was competent and worth the fuss of sending her - all expenses paid - to Peru, Earth.
But she also cannot be any more powerful in this situation than our human character, Calloway Kotani, because if she was, then she becomes not a person but a solution to every problem. That is bad writing.
Both Calloway and Dropspindle are experts. They are worth their elite jobs within their own cultures. But they are equally fish out of water in the Southamerizone, and that equality forces them through hell on every page - and that is good writing. Put your characters through hell, have them survive by determination and great difficulty rather than easy outs and ridiculous powers and bam - you've got a proper adventure!
And, if somewhere down the long, broken road, one of their useless talents can be repurposed cleverly for survival - hey, that would be awesome. Will that happen? I do not know. The story writes itself as I go - I have no more knowledge of what will happen next than you do. We are literally on the same page as we read this together.
I have no outline, I do not know the ending - anything can happen next. Anything. All I have when I start a story is some carefully chosen character names, a few stats about them like hair color and what they are wearing, maybe what they know or are good at, and... that's it. Oh, where they are, names of cities or places.
I only write those down because my memory sucks. Then, I just start writing. A page a day, roughly. And we read the story together, you, and I, as it comes out.
6140941
Thank you! I am honored. I hope I can make the story entertaining and exciting all the way to the end. I'm going to do my best!
6140807
Ah well that explains why I couldn't find it when I looked it up. Now I get the feeling that most of the words you've said I didn't know were ones you made up.
Actually Chatty I think Rarity three spells. Your forgetting the spell she used in A Dog and Pony Show to help her find gems buried underground.
Actually I'm too surprised that you came to the conclusion that most unicorns would only know a few spells. I came to a similar conclusion years ago that any high magic civilization would be liked this where only a small number of magic users would possess really powerful magic and know dozens of spell and that the rest of the society 90+% would like Unicorns in Equestria know at most a few spells related to there occupation and/or hobby. This was how I developed the magical interstellar civilization I wrote about back then.
Really so you just make story up as you go along? You know that might be one of the problems I've been having trying to write my own story is that I'm overthinking things and trying to plan things out too much.
6140807
If this applied to me, about here is where I would put that Austin Powers I-Also-Like-to-Live-Dangerously image.
I usually do okay with seat-of-the-pants writing, when needed, but I can't pull together an entire story from it alone. I need "waypoints," nodes in the plot to act as goals. It's why landmarks are easier for land-nav than shooting azimuths.
6141174
Probably not, but maybe. Depends on the word. I love words, I collect vocabulary the way some people collect Pokemon.
Oh! That's right! That's her primary, defining magic! I forgot that one. Good catch!
> Clothometry
By the root words, that one's knowledge ABOUT textiles, not knowledge FROM textiles. And given this distinction, I can elucidate on the function of the spell:
The most basic function of this art would be to be able to look at fabric and instantly know such things as its size, thread count, and weight (that is, its metrics).
An experienced practitioner would be able to divine more obscure facts, like how much it can stretch and how much force it would take to stretch it that far, or which orientation will allow it to drape most smoothly.
A true master would be able to identify the type of a garment and its place of manufacture from a few threads snagged on a nail at the scene of a crime. (Horatio would be jealous.)
But sadly, it is not clothomancy. You cannot grasp an ancient cloak in your hornfield and learn of the journeys of the once-legendary hero that donned it, nor can you unravel the mysteries of the red thread of fate.
Drunken apes can be terrifying. My brother was an alcoholic and he drove me out of the home I shared with my mother. At gunpoint. Six months later he cleaned out her valuables and stole her car. We never saw or heard from him again.
He's finally showing some sense.
I take it back. Kotani no baka.