Surprise And The Laughing Ghosts, or, Bran Muffins
SBMS108
One afternoon in late summer I was idling in the dining hall long after lunch, moping at Rye, who had started out trying to cheer me up, but had instead been infected by my evil mood. A pair of new recruits from Rennet had gotten letters from their irate relatives, and they had passed along the news, such as it was.
My name was still blood in the province, and worse, but not for my sins, but rather my - I don't know what you'd call it, my whims? Nopony really cared about a few palace murders, not outside of those ponies' immediate relatives. That's what aristocrats did, they plotted and they poisoned and they set up madponies to wipe out their problems in roaring rampages of revenge. If anything, I had inadvertently left my foals an inheritance of mythic proportions. They were the progeny of a dangerous, lunatic sire would might rain bloody vengeance upon the polls of anypony fool enough to threaten them or their interests. Well, whatever interests a pair of three-month-old duchesse's bastards might have. A goodly supply of nursery toys? Uninterrupted afternoon naps? Quickly cleaned nappies? Even Bonforte enjoyed the penumbra of my savage crimes - she had been developing a reputation for being a soft touch, a milquetoast before I painted the walls of her guest quarters with the viscera of the main reason ponies thought she was weak.
It was better to be feared, than loved, wrote the bitterly reformed courtier to his Princess, hoping to be freed from the prison she had thrown him into, to rot for being the sniveling republican rat he had been in public life. And now everypony was a little afraid of what lurked behind the skirts of the duchesse. And that was fine. Not good, not true, but if anything could come of what I'd done, the better of a lot of bad options.
It was what she was using her evil new reputation to do which was breaking my mood. The bull-calves had been noticed, and their training with the ducal guard noted with alarm. Parts of the province, primarily those parts of the province with firm contracts with the old bulls and their milking harems, were alarmed. The universal conviction was that the duchesse was pondering, possibly planning the seizure and expropriation of the dairy industry in Rennet via a picked and trained force of young bulls who would decapitate the herds via traditional duello.
It had certainly never been my intention to threaten such a thing. The point hadn't been to seize the commanding heights of the dairy industry, it had been to give the bull-calves an option other than death, exile or castration.
The world will forgive the worst things you could ever imagine doing, the worst crimes that the worst version of you is capable of, those crimes you thought you hadn't had inside you, just waiting to be let out. The world respects and fears evil. But it will never forgive your good intentions, and is always waiting to crush you for a moment of empathy.
No word on what Bonforte had named the foals.
As Rye sat and fumed for my sake, and I just sat, Cup Cake came out with a steaming plate of bran muffins.
"You two look you need some roughage. Definitely not a moment for sweetness and light. Here. Clear you right out, especially you, Sawbones. All that organ meat can't be good for a pony, I don't care what the monster you worship did to your teeth, you've probably still got a pony's guts behind the teeth."
"Why does nopony take me by my stated intentions and my actions, Cup Cake? Am I that much of a blank slate?"
"Because you lie like a rug, you madpony. Worse, you lie to yourself, constantly. Well, that's not the worst possible thing - you say some truly horrible things about yourself and others. Better that they be lies than the celestial honest truth. Hey! Cheer up. Bad news and a miserable face is no better than bad news and a good laugh. Not that laughter is a universal cure, I grant you. Hey, Rye, I ever tell you all about Surprise and the Laughing Ghosts?"
"You know that I'm a little too old for fawn's tales, Miss Cake. Those are for Cherie and the younger apprentices."
"Oooh, aren't you all fierce and grown up. Too grown up to be helping your master mope about like this, young doe. Now Surprise grew up fast, as pegasi often do. But the problem was, she did nothing but go up. She was hard to bring back down to earth. Her family were weather-ponies, but she never was any good at it. Clouds flitted away when she touched them, winds became unpredictable and capricious in the wake of her wings. She was strong, but completely unfocused, and incapable of concentrating upon her work.
"When she got her cutie mark, her parents brought her before a mark-seer, to try and work out what they could do with their drift-mare. The mark-seer looked at young Surprise and her cryptic mark, and narrowed her eyes. 'I see such things, my poor little filly. You will never stay in one place for more than a moon!'
"'Ooh, I'm gonna get to travel? All over Equestria! That's great!' burbled Surprise.
"'No, no, you're never going to sleep under your own roof', explained the mystic, trying to regain her dignity and poise.
"'And ponies are going to invite me into their homes? Ponies are so generous, aren't they!' squealed Surprise.
"The seer made one last attempt to establish her dominance and air of superiority, saying balefully 'You shall never have your own friends and family!'
"'Oh!' exclaimed the cursed little pony, looking serious, "Then I guess I'll have to have everypony else's friends and family! Nice to meet you, Auntie Seer! You should really get that cough looked at, it sounds a little phlegmy!'
"Surprise's family 'encouraged' her to go find her destiny in the big, broad world. So she set out, floating about as the breeze blew her. Her first job was at a Manehattan manufactory, working with rubber and latex products, mostly sealants and grommets. She lost that job when her experiments with industrial-byproducts caught half the shop-floor on fire. They didn't even appreciate her invention of the lighter-than-air balloon! At least they gave her the remnant of her experiments, and she and her balloons floated away in the next gust of air over the smoking ruins.
"She next went to Fillydelphia, and walked into a politician's office. She asked for a job. The mare asked her, 'And who sent ya?'
"'Nopony sent me, I'm new in town!'
"'Well, we don't need nopony that nopony sent. Go sell newspapers, wide-eyes.'
"'But I don't have any newspapers. You think I should become a writer?'
"'Ugh, I think if you become a reporter, we'll have rioters in the streets in a moon. Here, this idiot needs ponies, and thinks I owe her a favour. She deserves you.'
"Surprise went to the cynical pony's rival, and found work as a ward-hoofer, talking to ponies in the tenements, and finding out what they wanted the bosses to give them for their votes. But somehow the stories she heard, were never the stories she told the bosses, and orders she passed out to the fillos from up the traces were never exactly what the big mares had wanted to happen.
"As she was driven out of town, the papers were full of enraged ranting about the horrors of the reign of the wicked 'Tally-Ho' and their vote-buying machine. Reformers coasted into office on the winds of Surprise's chaos. They were bound and determined to show that the good-intentioned were just as capable of screwing up city government and wasting the public fisc as the deliberately corrupt and venial. Last time Surprise heard, they had succeeded beyond all expectations, and the Tally-Ho had crept back like the tide. Ah, politics!
"The winds soon enough blew Surprise west into Hollow Shades. Untold generations of sweat and terror had swept the dread forests from most of Equestria by Surprise's day, but the evil old woods lurked still in certain quarters, and quiet corners. Even today, my hometown sits next-door to one of these last holdouts, and let me tell you, the Everfree's a scary place, and no place for a pony like Surprise.
"But Surprise didn't care, and she visited with rangers and ward-mages and the narrow, suspicious earth-ponies who tilled the narrow, shadowed fields hacked out of the jealous grasp of those nasty trees that surrounded struggling Hollow Shades.
"And the ponies of Hollow Shades recoiled in universal disgust and horror at the bubbly floating mare, because she laughed. Oh, she didn't laugh meanly, or in a bullying sort of way, but the ponies of Hollow Shades feared laughter like a sailor fears dark clouds on a northeasterly, like a soldier fears the enemy's battle-cry, like the dove fears the hawk's shadow. Because laughter in the woods was the warning-sign that the Laughing Ghosts were about to descend upon the town.
"For generations, the thing that had preserved the dark forests around Hollow Shades was the depredations of the Ghosts, horrible, grey mists within which something giggled and cackled, that choked magic and terrorized ponies. A season of Laughing Ghosts could drive even the sanest pony mad, drive family and friends apart, and leave loving mothers stroking pillows over their sleeping foals, sweet-tempered brides sharpening razors and eyeing the throats of their new-wed husbands.
"Surprise narrowed her eyes, when she heard this story of the Laughing Ghosts, and said, in a grim, gritty voice, 'That's not what laughter is for. Somepony ought to do something about it, right now.'
"Then, they say, she blinked, and was all grins again. 'Hey!' she chirped. 'I think I'm somepony! I gotta go see a ghost about a horse.' And then she was gone, flying further west into the heart of the groves from which they say the Laughing Ghosts rose when they came. That night and the next and the next, a great and dreadful wind blew through town, and the countryside, and every town and farm from Fillydelphia to the furthest peak of the Foal Mountains, and some say, even to the outskirts of Canterlot herself. A storm like an inland hurricane shook the eaves of snug houses, and tore at the crops in the fields, and ripped leaves from the branches of dead and living trees alike.
"Ponies nearest the edges of that dark forest heard the strangest of sounds, an argument entirely in the form of laughter. Cackling was rebutted by giggling; sniggering was refuted by guffaws. High, mad tittering which couldn't possibly have come from anything in this world was replied with a skirling, demented bray of hilarity that couldn't possibly have come from the vocal chords of a pony.
"On the dawn of the third night, the winds stilled, and the laughter stopped. And a cracked, giddy voice as great as the heavens above echoed above the stunned town, and it said, 'And that is how you do it, by Celestia!'
"Nopony in Hollow Shades ever saw Surprise after she went into the woods. But they say that sometimes, if you stand still under the leaves of the slightly dim groves west of town, you can hear the chuckling of a kind-hearted mare laughing at some cowed, cringing spirit in the depths of the woods.
"What," I asked, wonderingly, "Is a lighter-than-air balloon?"
Stats
Page generated in 0.052 seconds
Total duration
998 users online
66,836 hits today, 2,054,621 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Hey! 108 chapters! There are 108 temptations on the road to nirvana, says the Buddha, 108 sensations says the monk. Nobody asks the fool playing with the prana as if it were a child's toy.
I'm kinda weirded out by how Cup Cake seems to be exercising and growing a sort of soft power inside the company.
7762192 The Company is pretty damn yang. They needed a little bit of yin before they spun completely off their spindle. The pudgy little spy was just the nearest instrument to hoof. And Harmony works in mysterious ways, her wonders to perform.
I think the Company is going to get a hot air balloon.
7762502 Or else Sawbones is going to blow himself up a little bit playing with hydrogen. Why have a good idea, when you can have a bad idea first?
7763542
I actually couldn't quite figure out how intentional that one was. As you may probably know yourself, Rennet is a necessary part of the traditional cheesemaking process and extracted from the stomachs of slaughtered calves. It looks like it's meant to be a setup to some incredibly morbid joke, but then it never seems to actually go anywhere with it.
And Casu Marzu, of course, means "rotten cheese" and is a traditional delicacy from Sicily.
...well, I thought it was funny, anyway.
I've never seen it named anywhere, but it's presumably Modern Standard Arabic, which is considered the literary standard for formal writing in most places and which is the variety most closely related to the classical Arabic the Koran is written in. From what I hear, though, the Arabic function of GT is absolutely lousy and barely makes any coherent sense at all, in any dialect.
From what a former Tunisian roommate explained to me, that comparison to the Romance languages is not too far off the mark. The difference between Moroccan Arabic and Saudi Arabic was compared to the way Swedes will say Danish sounds like someone talking with a mouth full of mashed potatoes: you can almost understand what is being said, but not quite. Kind of like the relationship between Dutch and German that way.
e: oops, ended up replying that on the index. Oh well.
7763580 Oops, no, I didn't notice that about rennet. You're right, that's inadvertently morbid, although eventually when I return to the subject of the dairy herds of Rennet, it's accidentally appropriate. I didn't do much research about cheesemaking, I ended up getting busy on other superficial research topics.
The only Arabic speakers I know are Lebanese, and they've never spoken a word to me that wasn't English. Hell, I spent a week in Lebanon and didn't manage to learn a word of Arabic, or even any new French of which I'm told the local dialect sounds half-like at times. The invincible monolinguality of Americans, you know? Too many people speak English, anywhere you go that isn't currently on fire or drowning under buffalo shit, you can generally make yourself known without learning a damn thing.
7763608
I know what you mean. Honestly, it's not really like I set out to learn any of this stuff for any reasons of practicality, either. I'm just one of those people who end up with random vocabulary stuck in their heads forever wherever they run into it.
On the flip side, it takes me weeks to learn anyone's name. I'm probably going to refer to the main character of this story as "the zebra guy" for the entire length of it, because I have actually already forgotten again what he's called. You win some, you lose some.
Gee, laughing in the face of supernatural evil (or any evil, really) ... only in Equestria could that result in anything other than a horrible death. Not the kind of lesson you should be trying to teach folk in a land as hard as Tambelon.
Cup Cake could use a reminder that "Harmony" is little more than a word, and friendship is not magic on the rest of the Chain.
Sorry, nice chapter, but something about it got my cynicism up.
Fuck, too real man.
They got in to this over at 1632 (Baen's Books). The first balloons were made in (1797? ICR), so they are certainly within the tech level of MLP. The big problem with blimps, dirigibles, etc. is that the bags need to be gas tight. At this tech level, the best way is to line them with the intestines of cattle, horses, etc. Maybe magic can substitute?
The second problem is getting hydrogen. You don't need electricity (surprised me to learn this). You can generate it with chemical reactions or pouring water over metal rods if they are hot enough (again, surprised me to learn this).
The problem for MLP is that you've got pyromancers & these things burn easier than anything except maybe gunpowder. Of course, they're not going for long term utility, just a one shot so maybe hot air can suffice?
Did Cupcake just given the gang of murder hobo a new way to destroy their ennemy? Great way to teach harmony. She will probably bang her head against the wall for that one.
I'm more surprised that she's talking about Surprise (see what I did there?) like this...the template for a pink pony running ahead of herself a few years down the line is a fun prospect. That, and she's still an instrument of chaotic change, for better or worse in her own way.
Also love that the only thing Sawbones got out of the whole conversation is to go 'wait back up what balloon was that again'? This can only end well!