“Eat up, buttercups!” you say as you sling some pancakes onto the girls plates.
Celestia claps her hooves together and squeals while Luna sniffs her stack. “No butter again?” she whines.
“Sorry sweetheart.”
The cows in the field nearby hadn’t been cooperative. It’d be awkward if they ever cognized…
"Now Luna.” Celestia begins to scold. “Daddy worked very hard to get us these, we should show him how thankful we are.”
”We would be more thankful with some butter.” The little Nighthorse said.
“I’ll get it for you next time, sweety. Honest promise.”
Luna rests her head on her hoof on her face but smiles when she looks at you. “Thank you, Papa.”
You give her one back and the three of you enjoy a relaxing meal.
Until…
”Daddy?”
“Yes, Celestia?”
”Did you have a mommy and a daddy before you had us?”
That surprises you enough that your pancake bite gets lodged in your throat and throws you into a coughing fit. You see Celestia and Luna’s eyes widen in panic, the older sibling races over to you and begins striking the your back as quick and as hard as she can.
”Sorry! Sorry! I’m Sorry!” she cries.
Once you cough the offending food from your windpipe, you hold a hand up. “It’s fine, sweety you just…surprised me is all.”
The little princess looks down at her hooves in shame. “I’m…sorry…you don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to…”
“No no, it’s about time I told you both.
You get up from the table and sit down on the couch, patting your lap in the universal dad-signal for “climb up” which both the girls quickly respond to.
You pet the girl’s manes in your lap as you think back.
“To answer your question, yes I had a mom and a dad, everything alive has one.”
They both nod. “Were they nice?” Celestia asks.
You nod as a familiar smile crosses your lips. You can remember so vividly how they looked, their smells, even so far after the fact “The best, Celly…I wouldn’t be who I am today without them.”
”Well what were they like?” Luna asks abruptly.
You muss her mane. “Good question!” Leaning your head back, you remember as far back as you can, like they’re standing right beside you.
“Dad was…stern. Very stern. But he always had this innate sense of when something was really bothering you and in those moments he could be your best friend in the world. And he always learned from his mistakes.”
You smile and close your eyes. “And mom was always there for you, always helping you figure things out until you could do it on your own, and was always in your corner no matter what. She’d give me all the confidence I ever needed and more.”
Celestia and Luna sit quiet for a moment.
”Do they miss you? Since you’re here with us?” Celestia asks.
You had of course told your girls you weren’t native some time ago; it wasn’t a secret but what you were about to tell them had been.
“No…no my mommy and daddy passed away before I came here.”
Saying that brought back the memories of those days shortly after their deaths, but all you felt was the feeling of picking at a healed over scab at this point. The girls hang their heads in a mix of fear and sadness. One of the first lessons you had taught them was about the concept of death, as lightly as you could put it, so that they could find the appropriate appreciation for life, but it still scared them as it should young children.
”O-oh…” Luna says.
You pet them both to comfort them “Dad…got very sick one day and had to be in bed for a long time, and one day the sickness just…got too bad. Mom was very sad after that…they say she died of a broken heart.”
You feel a sensation on your lap and look down to see Celestia hugging your leg as tight as she can while Luna buries her face in your stomach.
”D-daddy please stop…”
”That’s the saddest story we ever he-heard…”
You can hear the tears in their voices when you scoop them up. “Girls, girls, it’s alright. It was a long time ago.”
After the girls first arrived here, you began to entertain the idea that it was perhaps your orphaned status that was a reason you were brought to…this place. With no one to miss you, you could be given a new purpose.
You lift the girls up and feel them nuzzle your neck for a long time. “I think my mommy and daddy would be very proud of my little girls…”
”We love you, daddy.”
”Pretty please do not leave us.”
You hug them closer. “I love you too, girls.”
You sit there a moment to let the girls calm down.
“Come on, the food is getting cold and we have a full day ahead of us!”
The girls smile at you when you take them back to the table and continue eating. You sit down and feel a wave of satisfaction wash over you, knowing now as you watched the two of them what gave your parents the motivation to do all they did for you.
Gaaaaaaaah, my heart
Feels! They burnn!
Great chapter in can't wait to see what happens next.
Oh hello mandroid, we meet again. Good story so far.
So... Did the fillies make some magic wish that made anon immortal?
Or is this old equestria so pure and wholesome that living in it's ecosystem arrests telomere decay?
7623339
That's because I can't do fuckall involving Minecraft anymore forever.
7623385
Comes with the package. You'd have to me a dumbass to let the guy watching your kids not live as long as they do.
7623604
How is that minecraft?
I was making an Austraeoh reference!
North and South edges are eternally exploding skystone firmaments, West and East edges are waterfall storms where the water goes over the edge then explosively flows in reverse after hitting the point where gravity stops working.
7623617
I don't know who or what that is.
7624864
The reason not to name the character is because of the purpose of the written work. I'm not doing this to become horse-famous or make a bold artistic story, this is second person fanfiction and when you read "Anonymous", you're supposed to put in your own name. This isn't an HiE trope, it's an AiE trope, as in ANONYMOUS in Equestria. Every AiE story features Anonymous and every story featuring Anonymous is an AiE story. That's one of the two implicit rules.
Anonymous isn't supposed to be "the character" who neatly fits into the setting and has deep lore around him, he's supposed to be the audience surrogate.
A modern example would be the movie Idiocracy. While that movie gave the main character a name, he was still just the most average joe in the world explicitly because he was meant to represent the viewer and allow them to more easily enter into the world of the setting.
If that doesn't do it for you, then the reason is because if I name him David or Jack or Dumbfuck McHitlerstalin, it's only connecting with people who have those names and pushing away everyone else, which isn't the point. Point is it's not laziness, it's a calculated and reasoned choice.
Anonymous is us and we are all Anonymous.
7624873
That's because 4chan doesn't have options to format with italics and I didn't catch it when I brought it over here, sometimes I do.
I had no clue what you meant here until I went and looked up "cognized" and, even after that, I still don't know what you mean because neither possible interpretation makes sense with the way you phrased it. (How could sapient cows be uncooperative while still being too un-perceptive to realizing what's going on? Alternatively, how could you justify cows gaining sapience in Equestria within Celestia and Luna's lifetimes?)
You should never confuse your reader that badly.
7625465
I really want to like this enough to put this on my list of good fics, but I just can't find it in me.
You claim that making it a second-person story justifies the use of "Anonymous", but Twilight is clearly the "you" being referred to, not Anonymous.
(Not even taking into account that second-person writing is probably the most difficult kind to get right.)
More damningly, though, the name Anonymous just kills the atmosphere too much every time I read it.
Good second-person writing is very careful to never have that problem, carefully limiting itself to placeholders which need no replacement. (ie. Using "you" in dialogue or narration, earned titles or nicknames which are unique to the story, careful writing to minimize the number of cases where even those are required, etc.)
One of the keys to writing a good fic is managing atmosphere, and this story feels like it has an atmosphere that's trying to build, but seeing "Anonymous" keeps shattering it in much the same way as an in-line author's note would.
Anonymous simply isn't a name that makes sense for a human to be using (even as an alias) in Equestria and it yanks the reader's attention out of its immersion in the story to focus, instead, on the nature of the fandom.
It also doesn't help that it had quite a bit of context prior to MLP:FiM. Every time I see someone referred to as Anonymous, I can't help but be taken back to the glory days of 4chan and "classic" flash animations like 4chan City Craptastrophe.
(If you're not familiar with them, 4chan city and 4chan city Craptastrophe are highly referential retellings of certain bits of "drama" that took place on 4chan back in the day, implemented as crappy knock-offs of Nightmare City and Nightmare City Catastrophe, which were similarly referential animations created by users of 2chan, the board 4chan is an English knock-off of. The original Japanese ones make more sense if you see them as condensed knock off of The Matrix trilogy where Trinity is a program like The Oracle.)
Aww, they be sad.
The sadistic part of me is grinning like a hellhound.
7836742
I think you’re looking too much into it. The joke is him finding the thought of a smart cow awkward since he milks them. Remember the episode when Applejack steers a stampede into a corral and one of them says, “You could’a just asked”? Not really sure why I remember that.