Who Pulls the Plough

by MyOwnNameWasTaken

2—The Beginning

“Not yet, Derpy,” whispered Carrot Top to her restless friend, for the fourth time since the mayor had begun her speech. Derpy folded her wings up against her barrel once more, though in her excitement she would likely re-open them soon. “I’ll tell you when,” Carrot Top promised.

“And so,” the mayor continued in a grandiose tone, “it is with a palpable pride and a veritable sense of accomplishment that I bring the twenty-seventh celebration of Ponyville’s very own Green Mare festival to its conclusion with, as tradition dictates, the scattering of the Mare. Just as the time has come for all of us who have gathered together here—some from across Ponyville, and others from across the breadth of our fair land of Equestria—in celebration of our love of music to break up our fellowship and return, contented, to our homes, it is also time for the great symbol and namesake of our festival, the Green Mare itself, to be scattered to the winds to carry the spirit of fun and friendship which this festival has come to…”

Carrot Top craned her neck a little, trying to see past the colourful sea of manes and hats and get a glimpse of the festival staff busying itself at the base of the Green Mare, a great hollow frame in the shape of a pony, towering over the crowd, and covered in countless panels of bright green cloth. At the base of each of its legs was a giant bellows, which, once the mayor had finally finished her long-winded speech, would send a blast of air up each leg, tearing all the cloth panels loose and sowing them on the winds. It was considered lucky to find one of the scattered cloths, and Ponyville’s foals, in particular, would be doing much searching for them over the next few weeks.

It seemed that every attendant stood in readiness, so she leaned into her impatient friend and whispered, “It’ll happen soon, once the mayor stops talking. There’ll be a signal—you won’t be able to miss it.”

They did not have to wait long. The mayor shortly wrapped up her speech (a little abruptly, in Carrot Top’s opinion) and finally called out, “I now give you: the scattering of the Green Mare!”

“Wings out, Derpy!” hissed Carrot Top, laying a foreleg over her friends’ withers to prevent an instantaneous take-off. Derpy was practically vibrating. At last, an airhorn gave a short blast, and the four bellows blew their blasts up the legs of the effigy, the green panels catching the rushing air as sails catch the wind, billowing and then tearing off, flying skywards like a vast flock of emerald birds.

“Now, Derpy! Go!” Carrot Top pulled her foreleg off Derpy’s back, and the grey pegasus pony lanced upwards, streaking up and to the right. She was not alone: over two dozen more young pegasi, who had been waiting for her ascent, shot up and out of the crowd amid gasps of surprise, twisting around the cloud of cloth in a counter-clockwise spiral.

Their wings caught the uprising draft, wrapping it into a twister, and the lower part of the unfolding cloth cloud warped into a cone, the upper third billowing out into a vast sphere from the rising air pressure within.

“Mummy, look,” squeaked a delighted foal, perched on the back of said mummy, who was standing close to Carrot Top. “It looks like an ice cream cone!” The child’s was not the only voice raised in approval—but Carrot Top only smiled. They had seen nothing yet.

At a signal from Derpy, the pegasi suddenly spun out of their spiral, arcing out, down, and looping back around to fly into the base of the twister and drag it upwards. The funnel inverted, and what had seemed an ice cream cone collapsed into merely the scoop at the top—which promptly burst open, transmuting into a bush from which grew long stems that blossomed into increasingly complex bunches of flowers. The entire crowd broke out into loud cheers at that.

The four fastest pegasus ponies in the formation slashed their flight across the base of the flower stems, and both bush and blossoms blurred into a flight of butterflies. The butterflies twisted together into a torus, which warped into a more complex structure before breaking into…

Carrot Top watched the formation with a critical eye. She had attended most of the planning and practice meetings—they had been preparing this for almost half a year—and she knew the patterns they had to fly through. It was ambitious: ten ponies circling continuously beneath to preserve lift; four teams of four weaving in and out of the cloud to reshape that lift into pictures painted on the wind; four ponies (the same who had cut the flower stems, the fastest) on intercept, to catch any stray billow of the cloud that got away from the others; and Derpy in the middle, directing the entire operation.

Carrot Top mostly kept an eye out for Derpy, who was not flying so much as riding the currents over and through the ever evolving cloud formation. She could not be sure at this range, but Carrot Top had a feeling Derpy was operating with her eyes closed. Given her double vision, all those separate squares of cloth billowing all about might well have been too much of a distraction—unless they all blurred together into one flowing mass… but whatever; that was not important. All that mattered was whether it worked, and it was working. Oh! It was working perfectly.

The crowd around her whooped and cheered with each new folding of the ever climbing cloud overhead, building to a great gasp as the finale was unveiled, and the Green Mare, this time rearing to the heavens, reformed once more, towering high over the clouds of Ponyville—before being turned inside out and scattered on the high winds. The crowd’s responding roar nearly knocked her over.

Carrot Top gingerly limped her way through the dispersing crowd, frequently forced to pause as gaggles of young fillies and colts rushed by with their muzzles in the air, paying more attention to the drifting green sheets high above than what was directly in front of them. She kept her own eyes trained on her target: a large tree shading a patch of green grass, which formed a natural island in the flow of ponies. Her duty to her friend done, she wanted nothing more than to lie down for a good long while.

No sooner had she let fall her saddlebags and settled down onto the grass, grateful for its coolness in the late afternoon heat, than she heard a most familiar name. Looking out she could see Derpy in—or rather, slightly over—the crowd, wending her way towards her. It was rough going for her, as she was hailed at every wing flap by enthusiastic ponies, eager to congratulate her on the spectacular show.

“Over here, Derpy,” called Carrot Top. Derpy rotated in place to face her call, one foreleg raised up to shade her eyes. Carrot Top waved to draw her gaze, and Derpy soon flitted over.

“Did you see, Carrot Top?” she drawled, in her usual, drawn-out way of speaking. “Was it good?” Derpy’s eyes were shining.

“I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that, Derpy,” Carrot Top assured her. “Isn’t every other pony in town lining up to congratulate you?”

“They are, actually. That’s pretty weird, although it feels nice.” She landed softly—she always landed softly; her special talent was a real asset there—next to Carrot Top on the soft grass. She kneeled down so her eyes were level with her reclining friend’s.

“But I want to hear what you thought,” she added. “Did you like it?”

“I did, Derpy,” answered Carrot Top, as cheerfully as she could manage. “Sure, I knew what was coming, but it was a whole different thing to see it unfold, right over everypony’s head. It really was impressive.”

“Are you OK?” asked Derpy, concern edging into her voice. “You don’t sound very impressed.”

Carrot Top winced internally. Not cheerful enough, huh? “Don’t worry about it, Derpy. It’s got nothing to do with your show. The Red Knight is just plowing up my insides again. She always did have lousy timing….”

Derpy cocked her head to one side, a frequent gesture when she was confused. “Night always looked full of blues and greys to me,” she mused. “Sunset’s pretty red, though.”

“No, ‘knight’ with a ‘k’. It’s—” Carrot Top sighed. Derpy had terrible trouble with metaphors. “I’m sorry, Derpy,” she began again. “It’s an expression. It means my period. I’m on my period right now.”

“Ooh,” sighed Derpy with sudden understanding. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Actually, yeah.” Carrot Top pointed a hoof past her, across the flow of the crowd. “See the red-and-white striped tent? In front and to the right is a striped parasol, in pink-and-pale yellow. See that?”

Derpy stood and squinted, then put a hoof over one eye. “A pink-and-yellow parasol. I see it!”

“That belongs to an ice cream cart. Could you get me some ice? I’ve got a towel I can wrap it in, to make an ice pack.”

“Sure, I can do that!” exclaimed Derpy happily. She fluttered off, low over the crowd, one hoof still over her eye.

Derpy barely cleared the tree’s lengthening shadow before—

“Derpy? Derpy! I knew it was you! The Mare, Derpy, my gosh, the Green Mare! Did you do that?”

“Oh, no, Shoeshine. That was the others. I was too busy directing.”

“That’s what I meant! That was amazing! What a show—better than fireworks, any day!”

“Of course,” agreed Derpy. “Fireworks are better at night.”

Shoeshine giggled, declared Derpy to be “a scream,” before indicating a little filly perched on her back, who was clearly star-struck. “This is my little sister Pretty Polish; she loved the show too. See, Polish, I told you I knew her! We used to go to school together.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Pretty Polish, but I have to get to that ice cream cart over there. You’ll have to walk with me if you want to talk.”

“Ice cream,” squeaked the filly. “Can we get some ice cream?”

“Sure,” laughed Derpy. “What flavour do you like?”

“Polish,” her sister cried. “We came to congratulate her; you can’t have her buy you a treat!”

“I don’t mind,” Derpy cheerfully assured her as they drifted away.

Despite her discomfort, Carrot Top looked on with savage satisfaction. Oh, she could kiss that Cheerilee! Or, Miss Cheerilee, technically, though it was hard to think of a pony not four full years older than her as a “Miss.” Beside, Carrot Top had finally finished school in June, almost two months prior. She could dispense with the title, surely.

Cheerilee had begun her practicum as a teacher this past school year, and Carrot Top could tell she was bound to go far. It was she who had suggested the stunt with the Green Mare, employing the pegasus ponies from the finishing school, as well as other graduates who had completed their mandatory elementary education but not enrolled for the optional part-time “finishing off.” Her original flight plan had been elaborated on, but Carrot Top had seen her proposal: its thoroughness was impressive, especially considering Cheerilee was herself an earth pony. She had surely consulted with pegasus ponies in the community to develop her original idea into a practical plan.

Practical, that was, provided one could find exactly the right pony to conduct the exercise. Since the school ponies were young and inexperienced, it was critical to get a pony who could direct them as needed, to keep the chaos of the expanding cloud of scattered cloth under control… and it just happened that this year’s graduating class included one pegasus pony whose special talent was for reading air currents—Derpy Hooves.

She had done it on purpose! For this, precisely for the exchange which Carrot had just witnessed. That pony, Shoeshine? In six years of elementary school and three years of finishing, how many times had that stuck-up fool deigned to speak to (let alone with) the slow-tongued, clumsy, cross-eyed pony in her class? A dozen times, if that—and that was a charitable estimate. Now she was fawning over Derpy as though she were a celebrity. “You’re such a scream?” “Meet my little sister?” “We use to go to school together?” Hah!

The ponies with whom they had gone to school, alongside whom they had grown to maturity, any of them, all of them, when they ran into Derpy around town, or whenever her name came up, would remember this. Not her clumsiness, not her vision, not her wanderings, not her speech, not her confusion, not the accidents she had caused, not that she was always last in class. But this. The Green Mare rearing over Ponyville.

Carrot Top had stood up for Derpy since she was able to stand at all, and yet Cheerilee had outdone all her efforts, simply by letting Derpy shine on her own for one glorious moment. Carrot Top resolved to seek her out, when she felt better, to thank her.

“Here you are, Carrot Top,” exclaimed Derpy, swooping down to interrupt her thoughts, a generously sized ice block held in her fore hooves. It was a most welcome sight.

“Thanks a lot, Derpy,” sighed Carrot Top as she wrapped the ice in the towel she had brought. “You’re a life saver!”

“I don’t think so,” Derpy objected after some consideration, “but I’ll be glad if it helps.”

Carrot Top lay back down fully on the grass with a groan, holding her new ice pack against her abdomen. “One quarter-moon, every moon, of every year, for three-and-a-half years now… I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this.

“Do you cramp up a lot when your period comes?” she asked suddenly, feeling the need for some conversation to distract her, but unable to think of any other topic.

“Only a little,” came the answer. “But I bleed a lot, and then I get dizzy when I fly.”

“Ugh,” winced Carrot Top. Derpy’s vision made her an erratic flyer in most cases. If she were dizzy on top of that…

“It’s been really good lately, though,” Derpy added happily.

Carrot Top grunted. “Low flow?”

“No flow. I haven’t bled at all in almost two moons now.”

An envious groan escaped Carrot Top’s lips. “Lucky you,” she muttered, throwing a foreleg over her eyes to shut the daylight out.

It took a moment for the words to fully connect. She jerked her foreleg away from her face to stare at her friend.

“Hang on. You haven’t bled in how long?”

Comments

[kirinchangeling]

What happens next? Contact was great! Why doesn't this have more 👍 when it's as good as that one? I wouldn't have found this at all if I didn't check your stories page.