The Mare in the Magic Hat

by Impossible Numbers

Part I: In Which Trixie Has A Strange Encounter

Trixie began to say “I knew I should have taken that left turn at Alfalfa-Quirky,” but wisely stopped herself mid-sentence. It was tricky to claim you “knew” something when the rest of you could’ve done with knowing it sooner.

Then again, she was following a guide headed “The Royalle Mappe-Makers’ Union, Mappe 305MD, Fromm the Canter-lotte Archives”. At this particular point in time, wandering down a strange forest road that didn’t fit anything on the picture, she figured that anyone who could spell “map” with an “e” in it had to possess a special kind of incompetence.

Or criminality. No wonder it had been so cheap in the shop. This supposedly ancient document now looked suspiciously like its jaundiced papers were dripping yellow.

In the rain. Because it was raining.

Of course it’s raining, she thought as she tightened her hood around her head and splashed through the road. The Great and Powerful Trixie never gets the road of sunshine and daisies and duckies and bunnies, now does she?

Perhaps it had started all those years ago, when life was younger and fuller and it was still possible to dream of growing up to be a superhero. Years and years of being given socks for her birthday and shoes for Hearth’s Warming, when what she’d really wanted was a perfectly reasonable Power Ponies Ponytropolis Playset with the model city and all three hundred and sixty six collectible dolls from the expanded universe. One would’ve done. One. Even Humdrum would’ve been something.

Up ahead on the side of the road, sheltered under a low branch, a dry mass of black hairs sat twirling its tail contentedly. The creature watched her roll towards it. Trixie stopped, the caravan behind her creaking to a standstill, and glowered at the cat.

“I suppose you think this is funny,” she said.

The black cat blinked up at her.

“Well, go on then,” she said. “Cross paths with the Great and Powerful Trixie. I won’t even notice the extra bad luck. Get it over with.”

She knew it was just her sodden fur talking, but something about the… insouciant way the cat twirled its tail at her was rubbing her the wrong way. The motion also seemed oddly familiar.

“This has not been a good year for me,” she continued while blinking drops off her eyelashes. “Do you know how much of a knife-edge a life on the road is? I do! City ponies think it’s a picnic not having to pay a mortgage for a caravan, but I’d like to see them pay for repairs with magician money. This is my third caravan this year! And that last town didn’t give me enough to oil the axles! That’s modern life for you!”

The cat cocked its head. It mewed. Now that she was giving it a closer inspection, she noticed how thin it looked.

Trixie’s stomach rumbled.

“Sorry.” She shrugged, deflating where she stood. “I’ve got nothing. Are you crossing my path or not?”

The cat mewed again, but its dew-covered ears dropped and hung low on its head.

Trixie sighed. “Listen, I really am sorry. We’re both in the same place. I can’t help you.”

Yet try as she might, she simply couldn’t resist that purring. It was a defeated purr, the feline groan of ever-present but never-ceasing disappointment.

Feeling lower than the puddle she stood in, Trixie added, “Oh, if you insist. Come with me, then. They might have some food at the next village, if we’re lucky. But I’m not much for company on the road.”

She forced her aching limbs back into an amble and moved on. Under the endless creak of wood against wood, she thought she heard the mewing following her.

Your loss, she thought.

“I used to have a cat once,” she said over the rain, which began hammering even harder as though angry at her. “It even looked a bit like you, but mine had a white belly. Actually, I say it was mine, but it used to belong to my Aunt Thorny. She was a Canterlot mare, you know. I was born in Canterlot. But I suppose you don’t know where that is. I’d be surprised if anyone knew where it was, this far away.”

Trixie checked over her shoulder, irritably pulling the hood aside to see better. Under the moving shelter of the caravan, she could just discern the paws stepping easily around the worst of the puddles to keep up.

“Aunt Thorny could’ve left me a fortune,” she continued, surprised at how talkative she suddenly wanted to be. “Or she could’ve given me her mansion. But she had ‘better’ nieces, she said. Two older, well-behaved, gallant nieces, she said. Those were my sisters, you know. Not rowdy little tearaways, she said. Me! A tearaway! I just had an active imagination. It’s not as if the window was that expensive by Canterlot standards.”

Behind her, the cat mewed, though she had no idea if it was out of sympathy or if it was just an attempt to get some food from her.

“All I got was a cat called Fluffy Face. Not that I have anything against cats. The Great and Powerful Trixie could’ve made it work. A nice black cat would’ve made a good familiar spirit. Give me a broom and a cauldron. A witch is kind of like a superhero: funny clothes, special powers, animal motif, dark and gritty tales of good against evil…”

Trixie squinted at a sign looming up ahead: one wooden post with a crudely cut plank nailed to it. Paint’s probably run off by now, she thought gloomily.

“OK, OK, not much like one,” she said. “Not that I had a chance to find out anyway; Fluffy Face ran off a week after I got him. And he took the silverware and half the fine china with him. It was an inside job.”

That was fun to explain to Mom and Dad. It’s not every day a cat burglar leaves a canary as a calling card.

Briefly, she threw back her hood and adjusted the crumpled remains of her pointed hat quickly, before it had time to soak. Her scalp was feeling itchy. Also, the cape under her raincoat was starting to stick to her haunches.

“Well,” she said as she drew level with the sign, “can’t be any worse than this ‘mappe’.”

Part of her hated the sign on sight. Part of her resented having to check anything so shoddy. Part of her resented the very idea that she had to scout this far afield just to get a few innocent gasps anymore, much less a few innocent bits for her trouble.

She was the Great and Powerful Trixie, for crying out loud. When she’d started out, even elderly mares and stallions had gasped and stamped and cheered whenever the lights dimmed and the smokescreen blasted across the stage and she emerged, cape billowing in the subtle and eldritch winds of the quietest fan she could afford. The children, of course, had loved it, stamping and cheering and whispering amongst themselves in excitement.

She shouldn’t be reduced to looking for less and less cynical modern audiences in the boondocks. Not in places where windmills were still considered the peak of technological sophistication. And she certainly should not be reduced to staring at bits of wood that were one crack away from becoming nothing but wet kindling.

The sign said, “YOU ARE LEAVING STONECRAFT.”

“Gee,” she muttered. “Am I? That’s useful to know.”

As she trundled past the sign, she glanced at its rear. Another plank of wood said, “YOU ARE ENTERING STONECRAFT.”

“It doesn’t even say how far the village is from here,” she said. “Amateurs.”

Then again, this was about the level of quality that “village” deserved. Stonecraft had been a street with two rows of houses either side, more like a Wild West timber settlement than a picturesque woodland village of ivy-crept cottages. She could still remember the warnings they’d given about the woodlands beyond, as though she hadn’t heard umpteen different speeches from umpteen different villages already, all along the lines of “if you go down to the woods today…”

And yet every time she’d held her breath in case the bushes rustled and a monster leaped out at her, all that had happened was a nice tree-shaded walk with birdsong accompaniment. It was probably terrifying if you’d lived your entire life in the same square mile of countryside.

At least the rain was easing off to a feeble patter. Trixie looked behind her, and saw the black cat curled up on the driver’s seat of the caravan. She hoped it would get off before they reached the next town; looking like a beast of burden to a moggy was not going to do much for her “mystical master of magicks” persona.

She raised the map to her face. Stonecraft’s forest could have been any of the splodges on it, and none of the dots inside them was labelled “Stonecraft”. She rolled it up and slipped it back into her coat.

“Well, I hope you like aimless wandering,” she said, “because we are lost. Maybe we’ll get some idea of where we are once we clear this wretched forest.”

Resigning herself to a longer trek, Trixie followed the route along its curve, splashing through a road that was not so much riddled with puddles as becoming one gigantic puddle. As she looked around she supposed, in its own dank, mossy way, that the forest was beautiful. Trunks, blackened with moisture, rose up on either side, smothered with primeval green ooze that she guessed some botanist somewhere could gush over.

Hmm, she thought. There is something strangely… spooky about it. Couldn’t you just imagine some ghost floating between those dark trees over there?

To her surprise, the cat screeched behind her. When she turned her head to look – irritably batting the hood aside – she saw the cat streak across to the ferns and vanish. Trixie stopped, as did the creak of her caravan’s wheels.

“Where are you going?” she yelled after it.

On the other side of the road, the bushes rustled. As soon as she heard them, she looked round in time to see the branches settle.

Trixie stared at the spot for a long while. Eventually, she forced herself to continue walking.

I’m only walking alone. It’s just like it was before I met that cat. Except this time her heart gave a pang; she’d been abandoned, right when she’d gotten used to having someone else around to talk to. Even if its only conversational contribution would’ve been “meow”.

Besides, she was recalling exactly what the villagers had said this particular time: something about a “sorceress ogre”, a shape-shifting monster that was said to live in a magnificent castle deep in the forest. Probably stolen, they’d said, or gotten by eating the previous owner.

They said she ate children of all species, but was fond of foals. More to the point, she’d been known to make off with mares and stallions whenever the fancy took her.

Very, very slowly, Trixie summoned a little drop of telekinetic magic. She focused on the inside of her caravan, on a box amid boxes, and more specifically on the fireworks lurking deep inside. They were more like sparklers than true fireworks and were only likely to scare rather than burn – one unfortunate foal’s birthday party had long ago taught her that lesson – but anything that made escape easier was good by her lights.

The rain continued to hammer on her hood and coat, soaking into her scalp and flanks.

No, she thought angrily. No jumped-up bogeymare is going to get the drop on me, the Great and Powerful Trixie! I dealt with Ursas and Amulets and Manticores in the wider world beyond this forest! I have bested Princesses, befriended mages of prodigious magic, and thwarted common criminals and eldritch abominations alike! And I’ll have you know I am an alumnus of Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns!

True, I was the problem rather than the solution some of the time… and had some help on one or two of those… and I never really graduated…

But I remain the Great and Powerful Trixie! No force in Equestria or beyond it shall thwart my duty to the paying audiences of the world –!

Her hoof met a tripwire under the puddle.

She yelped. The world blurred. She shot upwards. When she came to, the forest and the road were half-covered by criss-crossing lines and she felt tightening ropes all around her, pressing into her spine and legs and head, curling her up.

Trixie dangled from a vine-woven net, hanging from a line suspended between two trees either side of the road. The lot must’ve been hidden under the dirt and the water. Heart sinking, and head still swimming from the sudden perspective shift, she looked down.

The caravan was in the middle of the road. Around it, emerging from bushes and ferns and tall grasses and mud, small figures prodded the thing with flint spears. One or two had on masks and headdresses that, from a distance, looked like arts and crafts projects scavenged from the leaf litter.

Three strode up to her shadowy reflection in the sodden road, two flanking the one leader. Their upturned glares caught the grey light of the clouds, and as she wriggled around to get a better look, she saw a stumpy hoof point up at her. Its owner shouted something in an obnoxiously squeaky voice.

“Oh no,” she groaned. “Not this. Anything but this.”

They were foals. They were all foals.

None of them looked pleased to see her.

---

Comments

[Starbounce]

This story is criminally underappreciated. I love the way you portray Trixie's inner thoughts, and your sense of humor and comedic timing are spot on. Trixie's dry commentary being infused inti the actual events and descriptions themselves is very well done. The only issue I have is that sometimes scenes tend to drag on for a little too long, but Trixie's input helps to relieve that. I personally think that having someone who she can consitantly play off of and who plays off her well would make for an absolutely stellar experience!

[Impossible Numbers]

8369339

I may not have many comments, but I'm delighted to find they more than make up for lack of quantity with their good quality. Thank you for the valuable critical feedback. It's always a pleasure!

Scenes dragging on for too long is a recurring weakness of mine, as I'm usually more worried about hurrying through scenes that need proper development. Well, that and sometimes I get carried away with background details: in hindsight, the worldbuilding of Part IV is a big offender here. I'll probably go back and trim it down at some point.

Also, you are correct that Trixie's character does need some company to work off of, since character interaction is a big part of any story (and one of my favourite parts at that). Sadly, in the original plan, I didn't settle on a single fixed companion for her, and it might be awkward to add one to the mix at this stage. For what it's worth, however, rest assured there will be more opportunities for her to interact with others as the story progresses.

Lastly, apologies for being so late. I took some time off the site to deal with matters elsewhere. I'm currently trying to fine-tune the next part of the story.

[RTStephens]

Saw this in your collection and decided I should give it a shot. Plenty of your other stories were great reads, and Trixie is my main mare, so the choice was easy. So far, so good. Not much to comment on at the moment, but it's a good start and Trixie's rambling is always humorous.

Moving on!