Wonderful Mechanical: Keen Eye and the Wonderbolt Saboteur.

by Monocrome_Monogatari

What’s the most important part of a pegasus?

What would you say the most important part of a pegasus is?

…Wings? What are you, stupid?

Wings are for flying, in other words, vertical movement. A skilled unicorn can do that with teleportation, enchanting something to float, or magical fake wings. Earth ponies can do that with hot air balloons, gliders, and other flying machines. Even if all these methods aren’t as good as pegasi flight, magical research and technological development can only go forward. Once something is discovered it can’t be undiscovered. Once something’s progressed it can’t retrogress. The days of Pegasus domination of the skies are numbered.

…The brain? Are you even taking this question seriously?

Yes, the brain is important. It controls everything else. Signals have to go back and forth from it in order for a body to be anything more than a lump of hastily organized flesh and bone. If you’re brain dead, you might as well be dead in every other sense. But everpony has one of those! The question has to do with pegasi!

…Wait you were expecting me to say something about thinking? Something about how knowledge and creativity are the highest endeavors anypony can reach for, and all that nonsense? Don’t make me laugh. Being able to think is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. There’s a reason people say they want to “turn their brain off” when they want to relax. Not that I would know much about that. It seems whatever made me forgot to give me that off switch.

Anyways where were we? Oh yeah, the most important part of a pegasus? Well? If you try to be clever and say the heart then I’m not even going to bother with you anymore.

…You give up? Ugh. Fine.

It’s the eyes. Even if a unicorn or earth pony find a way to move in the air as fast and precisely as a pegasus, there’s no way they’d be able to keep it up for long. There’s a lot you have to keep track of when flying: clouds, buildings, trees, birds, other pegasi, litter carelessly thrown in the breeze, your distance from the ground, etcetera etcetera. Someone without the width and range of Pegasus far-sight wouldn’t be able to last 3 minutes at high speed before being overwhelmed, either getting dizzy and nauseous or crashing and burning. Yeah, there are pegasi that need to wear glasses, but a visually impared Pegasus still a step up from a visually impaired unicorn. The only reason I’ve gotten as far as I have in my life is due to my sharp eyesight.

I’ve been told my eyes are one of the few good things about me.

Hm? Whatever happened to “The days of Pegasus domination of the skies are numbered”? You’re making a crucial misunderstanding here.

A group doesn’t dominate something by being the best at it. A group dominates something by being the ones who make the action commonplace. A single genius unicorn can’t dominate the field of spellcasting, they’re one pony, who can only cast so many spells in so many places. The genius unicorn can only matter if their contributions better the understanding of the common spell caster. A genius who doesn’t affect the baseline of society is just a novelty, someone to wheel out for entertainment or, even worse, inspiration, and then forgotten as their abilities inevitably decline. A genius who does affect the baseline is sucked dry for their contributions, buried into the foundations, and then have caricatures of themselves erected in statues and written history books.

That’s why the pegasi domination of the skies will eventually come to a close. A Pegasus genius in flight can’t be anything but a novelty. The ones that aren’t, that discover new techniques and forms to be copied by other fliers, are still only affecting the lives of other athlete fliers. The true genius will be someone who figures out how to make flight commonplace to non-fliers, and who cheapens the field of flying by making it nothing special.

That pony would outdo even the best of the best flyers.

But that’s alright. Anypony who wants to be the best of the best is just asking for disappointment. It’s better to be average, anything else is a waste of effort. To be the best, you have to put in an unimaginable amount of work to reach the top of the hill, and even if you get there, either someone better will eventually overtake you, cutting down a core facet of your identity, or you’ll eventually grow sick of the thing you’re the best at, and your identity will rot from the inside out.

I’m the latter type. An eyesight sharp enough to get me my cutie mark, a mind active enough to rob me of any quiet rest, a stubborn streak, an endurance to match it, and a naïve and idealistic love of mystery novels, all came together to make me a detective.

A master of looking at things, the most commonplace of skills.

Somepony who’s called upon only when something horrible has happened

Somepony whose skills can’t be made available to the baseline

I was mistakenly called a genius, the best.

I was the ultimate novelty.

These days, I paint. I like to think that I’m really good at landscapes.

I still have habits from the old days. I still stubbornly cling to problems that interest me. I privately investigate fun seeming cases brought to me. My mind still spins with questions at the drop of a hat. My eyes still take in too many details about ponies, and I still play reasoning games with them. I still need to take sleeping pills to get some rest from the cacophony in my head. My skills have less to do with raw brainpower and more to do with having wider filters than others.

That’s not always a good thing.

Sometimes ponies should look away. Sometimes seeing something is a bigger burden than not seeing something. Sometimes you shouldn’t follow the reasoning to its endpoint. After all, once you know something, you can’t un-know something. Once you discover something, you can’t un-discover it. Seeing something sublime makes all other good things bland. Seeing something shocking numbs you to the mild negatives. Tasting the top makes everything below it feel like rock bottom.

Thoughts like these were running through my head as I waited outside the Wonderbolt compound, a distasteful feeling place where the strongest winged and sharpest eyed novelties dedicate themselves to burning out brightly, where the best of the best delegitimize the efforts of the common pony just by existing.

“I’m telling you guys! Rivet sent me! I have the letter right here!”

…Where I was being detained in a painful pin by a pair of stone faced security guards.

I swear, things like this happen every time I’m called in for a favor.

Comments

[Sylvian]

I have to admit, so far so good. Though this isn't the type of story I usually read, I do like it, it feels sort of Sherlock Holmes-ish almost with the analytic thinking and almost sardonic pessimism.