Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

Latrans's Cherry Berry: Astromare! #1 (Kris Overstreet's "The Maretian")

Author's Note:

[Comedy][Sci-Fi][Endnotes]

This is a continuation of Kris Overstreet's The Maretian (58,052 words at time of posting, [Adventure][Sci-Fi][Crossover][Human])

THE MARETIAN INITIAL SUMMARY: A joint Changeling Space Program-Equestrian Space Program flight to Bucephalus on the experimental Sparkle Drive hits a snag when the stutter-teleport system avoids a micrometeorite by materializing the ship in a universe with no background magic. Things go haywire, a Bad Time is very nearly had by all, and the magical exhaust of the barely controlled crash landing creates an impossibly powerful Martian dust storm, leading to one Mark Watney taking a windblown antenna through his bio-monitor as the rest of the Ares III mission crew evacuates the site. The events of The Martian unfold, heavily distorted by the presence of several magic-capable extraterrestrials, solving some problems before they show up and raising others that would've never been present otherwise.

Long story short, it pays more to be familiar with Changeling Space Program than the sequel with this one: Chrysalis wants to get into space to claim the moon for herself. Cherry Berry, with her passion for and actual understanding of aeronautics, tries to help her, because no one else believes an earth pony can fly.

Do not underestimate me. I have battled the worst demons of Tartarus!¹ I have bent the very laws of our world with my bare hooves!² My mere presence has cowed trained warriors into submission!³ I have stood over the prone form of Queen Chrysalis⁴, and now command more power within the changeling swarms than any pony in known history!⁵ I have strapped myself to explosives and been launched beyond the grasp of our world!⁶ I have traveled beyond the known plane of existence and walked on worlds beyond our universe!⁷ I returned to Equis in a fifteen-hundred-degree cloak of shock-heated plasma!⁸ I am Cherry Berry: Astromare!

Chrysalis re-read the caption. Then she turned it upside down and read it again. She turned it right side up again. She blinked, hoping that her eyes were deceiving her. They weren't. On the cover, prominently attached to the caption stood a cartoonish image that may, at one point, have been based on the loose idea of CSP's lead pilot. Unfortunately her proportions were better likened to an exaggerated supermodel in a suit that made Wonderbolt uniforms look positively baggy. She stood, holding a fishbowl helmet under one leg, on a cratered and rocky surface somewhere in space. Behind her stood stylized versions of CSP's more prominent members (and a few she didn't recognize). Precisely none of them had vacuum-appropriate gear on.

"OCCUPANT!!!"

A moment later a buck-toothed changeling poked his head through the door. "Yes, my queen?"

"What. Is THIS?!?" Chrysalis slapped the comic book down on her desk.

"A, um, a comic book? Cherry Berry: Astromare issue one, I believe."

"And why, pray tell, does it even exist?" the queen snarled.

Occupant fidgeted and did his best to hide the edges of a rather familiar comic book back under his vest without actually acknowledging its existence. "Well... you see... there was this contract, and um, it payed well and didn't require any expenditure on our part, and the other changelings all thought it was the best thing since the Fun Machine and I tried to not let word get out, but Lucky Cricket got past me with a proof copy and now they all want their own copies and then Goddard saw it and hasn't stopped cackling for two days and please don't tell Cherry."

Chrysalis held a level glare at the smaller changeling the entire time. She didn't even twitch when he nearly passed out from lack of breath. "Do you know what you've done? Every drone in the hive is going to want to do every half-baked, irresponsible, insane, impossible thing depicted in this wholly fictitious rag of lies! We get enough of that already! We don't need someone actively thinking up new ideas for them! At least it's just the one."

"Well... um... about that..."

---

¹ Tirek won. It sucked.
² Her home-built biplane.
³ The CSP prototype crew module had failed to meet some⁹ of her expectations.
⁴ Chrysalis had not been as prepared for her first ride in the centrifuge as she had hoped.
⁵ Several members of non-pony species within the CSP management hold more changelings under their authority than Cherry does as a pilot.
⁶ Rockets: barely controlled explosion in a tube.
⁷ Comments made after her return suggest that she felt additional testing of the Sparkle Drive should probably have been performed before use on a crewed flight.
⁸ Moving at 33 times the speed of sound does impressive things to the air.
⁹ All of them, even a number of them she didn't even realize she had.

Comments

[Malandy]

Those footnotes!

Typo:

"more more" > "more"

[Latrans]

Oh hey! I didn't realize I had made it in here. You honor me!

One gag I wasn't able to fit in due to the one-shot format was Chrysalis actually loving the comics and failing to fool anyone into thinking otherwise.

[horizon]

Show her the Chrysalis miniseries first, Occupant!

(She'll probably still hate it, but it'll shock her so much you'll have a few seconds' head start on your dash for safety.)

[keybounce]

Re-reading CSP right now, having a nice big thick book: I Love This!

Those 9 points ... Yes, I can see

*Cherry Berry!*
Astromare!

Standing on a splash page of a cover saying all of those.