Sabbatical, or the Study of Garden Gnome Anatomy in South Perjina

by Casca

6: Vilage Conspiracy 2

The river bank smelled weird in that it smelled great. Sunset Shimmer had been around quite a few dried river banks in her time as part of a conservation project. She knew that those tended to stink of peat and mulching life, as innocent riverbed grass, now exposed to the elements, was broken down by hungry worms who were looking for a change of pace. Then it was their feces which fed new types of bacteria, which in turn did nasty things to the rest of the stuff at the bottom, leading to one helluva gunk to have to wash off one's favorite pair of shoes until one in the morning because that one night had to be the night she ran out of Miracle Clean, and of course there hadn't been any spare bottles because Sunset Shimmer lived alone, and so there was nobody else but her who could buy what she needed to scrape together a convincing attempt at living out her lifetime sentence—

"Peaches?" asked Starlight.

"More like honeydew," said Sunset.

"I guess," replied Starlight.

"There's something strange going on here," said Sunset.

"Tell me about it," said Starlight. She wrinkled her nose. "My cutie mark is telling me that somepony's messed up big time around here."

"Do you think it could have anything to do with the village?"

"Probably." Starlight pointed down the bank. "The feeling gets stronger down this way. Come on."

They walked along the dry patch. It was odd, too, how there was nothing growing in the bank. The fertility that came from river life no longer being in a river usually led to a burst of savagery by things like bulrushes or even mushrooms. But now...

This had probably been one of those crystal clear rivers. The sort that made postcards and beautiful scenes in folk stories. The sort that ye fayire maidenes bathed in, their faces reflected across their smiling, radiant faces. Yet nobody ever wondered why it was so clear, so devoid of living things.

It made Sunset want to taste the water, except there wasn't any. She was fairly certain it would taste of lead.

Actually, there was still a way she could find out.

With a strand of focus, she willed into being a spoon made of magic, and dug into the dirt.

Starlight turned, and said, "Or we could regress into foalhood, that's all right too."

"Wait. I'm trying to confirm something."

"That the inner child in us never really dies, despite the bitterness of reality, the strain of adult responsibilities, and even our own misguided efforts to fit in to the world around us, rather than harnessing it to bring to it that which is unique?"

"I'm not playing with the freaking dirt," growled Sunset. She flipped through her memory for the metal detection spell. The last time she had used it was when she had a bedroom in Canterlot Castle...

The spoon exploded, and so did the clod of dirt.

"It looks like that to me," said Starlight.

"Can you run a metal detection spell on the mud?" asked Sunset reluctantly. "I've forgotten how to."

Starlight shrugged, nodded, and sent a beam of light into the patch. Shortly after, a virtual panel popped up, with tiny Equestrian letters scribbled along its surface.

"Looks like nothing out of the ordinary to me," said Starlight, peering.

"I don't recall the metal detection spell being quite as... fancy," said Sunset. "Didn't it just, you know, glow red or green if the metal you were looking for was present?"

"Magic's come quite a bit since then," said Starlight.

"I guess it has," murmured Sunset.

"But your senses were spot on," said Starlight. Again with the kind smile. "While the physical properties of the mud are normal, they're also completely off. This mud matches the profile of a dry valley range about five hundred kilometers west. It's very unusual."

Sunset couldn't help but gape. "How did you figure that out?"

"Magic's come quite a bit since then," said Starlight.

"I... guess it has?"

"Anyways, so for some reason, there's dirt from way over there that's over here. It's all plains, so it can't have been runoff. There's no rivers from here to there either."

"Somepony might have been moving dirt," suggested Sunset.

"Mhm," said Starlight. "The question is: why?"

"And why so far away, too," murmured Sunset.

"Ponies normally move dirt to bury bodies," said Starlight, in what Sunset couldn't help but call fart-like. The thing with Starlight Glimmer was that, nice as she was, and earnest, she was—well—she had freed a convict so dangerous she had been banished to another dimension. Not even Nightmare Moon had gotten that degree of treatment. And that was it, with Starlight—she just didn't care.

It very well might have been carelessness, like eating too much cabbage and not enough nuts. It might be planned, in which case, it was mind-blowingly diabolical and Sunset's deepest, darkest, quietest fears were true, that she had entered the darkest timeline.

But sometimes, the stuff she said was just so random and uncontrolled. Fart-like.

"Or farm," said Sunset, because she didn't feel ready to take the next step in conversational confidence with her companion just yet. "Ponies move dirt to farm too."

Starlight nodded, but didn't seem too convinced.

It was strange. Sunset would admit that. Why was dirt from all the way there over here, in a weirdly peach-scented dried up river bank, a fair walk away from a haphazardly grammar-adherent sign? It was a mystery. It couldn't be packaged any other way.

But Sunset also knew that it likely would not lead to anything. As inexplicable as the situation was, it just wasn't... wasn't fun to unravel. There was no excitement. It was just flat out random. Like Starlight's thoughts and words and actions. It was all too likely that, just like the case of the juice box landfill, the sand pit at the top of the Vyze mountain, and that brief bout of gout about in the South, this would end in a shrug. As uneventful a shrug as befitted the scenario.

"I think it was for burying bodies," repeated Starlight.

The right thing to do was to be polite. "Hmm? What makes you say that?"

"There's a skull in the bank."

Sunset blinked and looked ahead, where Starlight had apparently opened an excavation site. The pit was wide enough to house half a house.

"Sorry," said Starlight bashfully. "I was just digging for samples, you know, and my mind got carried away. You know how it is."

"I do," said Sunset, staring down the pit, where the dirty white of an unearthed pony skull gleamed in the afternoon sun.

To be fair, the case of the juice box landfill at least had a surprising twist somewhere in the middle.

Comments

[livinthelife]

she had entered the darkest timeline.

Is Jeff missing an arm? Is everyone wearing felt beards?