Pit Town
Admiral Biscuit
A train woke me up. For a moment, I thought that it was the afternoon train, the same one I had arrived on, but the room was too dark for that.
It could have been the southbound train, but I thought that that arrived later in the day. Not that there was a rule that there could only be two trains, of course.
This wasn’t a passenger train. It was a long train of coal cars, slowly making its way towards the main line. The gates I’d seen yesterday that protected the sidewalk were down, and I could see the gate tender standing there. As I watched, she waved to the crew of the locomotive, then went back to scanning the sidewalk just in case someone was so oblivious as to bump into the side of the train.
Given my experience back on Earth, that was actually a reasonable worry.
I watched as the entire train snaked by and the gate tender winched the gates back up, then made her way back to the train station.
There wasn’t much point in going back to bed, so I decided that it was time to explore.
It turned out that there wasn’t a whole lot to the town. Besides the inn, spa, and bar, there was also a general store, a small cafe, a smithy, and a library, all of which were currently closed. Small towns just didn’t have the 24-hour cycle that cities did.
The side street was lined with simple homes. Most of them looked hastily constructed, yet they were all well-landscaped. A couple even had small orchards in the backyard.
Just a ways out of town, the farms began, and those buildings generally appeared more substantial. At a guess, this had started off as a small farming town and then the railroad had come and it had turned into a bit of a boomtown.
As I surveyed the four blocks that made up the town proper, I thought back to the railroad clerk asking if I wanted a return ticket and I think that he had known what I was going to find out here. Maybe I should have at least looked at a travel guide before choosing my destination.
But then I remembered the mares I’d met the night before and their offer to give me a tour of a coal mine, and that wasn’t something that was likely to be on a travel brochure. In that regard, at least, I’d done well.
The pub didn’t have its hours posted. Probably ponies who lived in town already knew, and for visitors, it was either open or not. Surely there had been a time in human history when stores didn’t post their hours, either. It was something that I’d never really paid attention to in Manehattan, since there always seemed to be something to do or someplace to go.
I went back to the hotel for breakfast. They, at least, were open.
Their selection was porridge, bubbling away in a large kettle over the fireplace, bread, with various selections of jams and jellies and cheeses, and fresh timothy grass. Nowhere near the selection I’d come to expect in Manehattan, but what they lacked in variety they made up for in quality. It was easily the best porridge I’d ever had, and the bread was amazing. The loaf weighed about as much as a brick. It did have a bit of a grass flavor, but that was easily offset by the creamy butter and serviceberry jam they had.
My five new friends hadn’t come to the dining room yet and I wondered if I should wait for them.
The hotel had a copy of the Manehattan Dispatch in the lobby, but it was yesterday’s. I was about to ask about that when I realized that it had probably arrived on the same train that I had. So if there’s a war, towns like Greenock won’t know until a day later. Well, the late afternoon, anyway.
I seemed to remember reading once that the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa was the first quickly-dispatched news article in history. And even that had taken some time to get down to the man on the street.
And the ponies did have a telegraph system. Plus, for really pressing news, they probably had a system of pegasus messengers who would fly from city to city.
Basically, the Pony Express.
***
It was almost noon before we set out to the coal mine. Besides the spa, the mares had also gone shopping, and their wagon was loaded up with all sorts of dry goods from the general store, along with a couple boxes of beauty supplies from the spa. Those had been bought on mine credit, Longwall told me.
“How far is it, anyway?” I should have thought to ask that before we left town. It’d be just my luck that it was ten or twenty miles.
“Three, four hours.”
“We’ll be there in plenty of time for dinner,” Longwall said.
“And if you get tired, we can move our stuff around and pull you in the wagon,” Lignite added.
“I thought you were joking about that last night.”
“Nope!”
Gytta nodded. “We carry foals to town in the wagon all the time.”
“There are foals at the coal mine?” I had sudden visions of past human labor practices.
“Where else would they be?”
“Yeah—what do humans do with their foals? Do you kick them out of the nest like birds do?”
“No, but we don’t let them work in coal mines. Any more,” I hastily added, lest one of them be a student in human history.
“How else are they going to learn how to do it?”
That was actually a surprisingly reasonable question. I was all ready to give some explanation about how it wasn’t right to let kids risk their lives in a coal mine or use kids because the labor was cheaper, but I hadn’t really thought about it from a training perspective.
I still wasn’t sure that that was a proper thing to do, but I thought I ought to keep my mouth shut until after I’d actually had a look at the mine. There was no sense in offending my new friends before I even knew what the situation actually was.
Besides, I’d already learned that pony morals were a bit different than human morals.
***
I refrained from ever once asking ‘are we there yet?’ and I made it without riding in the wagon. That was more a matter of pride than anything. I think if they’d been unencumbered by it, they would have left me in the dust.
Aside from sore feet, though, the trip passed quickly enough. We had a lot to talk about, things that we’d never mentioned at the bar last night. I found out that I was right; Greenock had just been a small farming community before the railroad had come through, and the railroad was also what had allowed them to expand their mine and improve Pit Town.
Longwall explained to me that the tracks I’d seen the coal train on had been the wagonway that was in the railroad’s name; they’d converted it to actual railroad tracks a couple of years ago, and were working on putting a line in to Mumbles. She said that if I’d gone further north I would have seen sidings full of flat cars with rails and ties. Lignite said that it was fun to watch them work and that there were some really lonely stallions at the camp.
That was something I didn’t feel that I’d needed to know.
Pit Town was a collection of simple stone houses with thatched roofs, arranged in two rows along a central street. The mine shaft was at the end of the street, and the railroad came in from the north. The tracks had been dug down into a cut, so that wagons coming from the mine could be dumped right in, which was a nice, simple arrangement.
A steady parade of loaded wagons came out of the mine, returning a few minutes later empty. The second wagon I saw get unloaded was pulled by a bright red pony with a blonde mane, one I was sure I’d recognize from a distance if I saw her again, so I kept watch to try and get an idea what the turnaround time was. We were all the way in town and I had to stop watching since we’d arrived at their house—I hadn’t seen her return yet.
“So some ponies pull wagons and others mine coal?” If there were foals in the mine, it would make a lot more sense to have them loading the wagons rather than pulling them.
“We take turns, mostly,” Lignite said. “It’s boring doing the exact same thing every day.”
“Except for Assay,” Longwall said. “She likes pulling wagons.”
“’Cause I’m clumsy with a pickaxe, everpony knows that.”
“You are the only pony I know who can hit yourself with the pickaxe.”
“It’s a point of pride.” She grinned. “The five of us work as a team. Those four share all the mining jobs, and I pull the wagon.”
“How come you weren’t pulling it on the way here?”
“It’s my day off.”
That was reasonable.
“If you wanna look around,” Longwall said, “you can. We’re gonna unpack the wagon and put things away and then make dinner, and then after that we’ll go look at the mine, like we promised.”
“It’s going to be pretty late by then, won’t it?” And then I felt like a real idiot, when I remembered that we were looking at a mine.
“Funnily enough, the mine’s just as bright any time of the day.”
“You do have caves and mines on Earth, don’t you?” Lignite frowned. “You said you did.”
“I just forgot that it was dark inside, that’s all. Do you want any help?”
“Nah, we know where everything goes. Won’t take very long to put it all away. Assay, why don’t you show Joe around?”
“Okay.” She turned to face me. “What do you want to see first? We can go visit the loading dock, or the mine office. That’s kind of boring, though. It’s mostly paperwork. Oh—I bet you’d like to see our gem pile. Every now and then when we get enough good gems, we send a couple of carloads out with the coal.”
“Yeah, let’s look at that.”
***
I didn’t know a lot about mining, but I knew that all mines wound up taking out material that they weren’t actually looking for. Unless they were particularly lucky and had a seam of coal that was exposed on the surface which they could just follow down, they had to dig their way in, and all that dirt had to go somewhere.
The overburden was sorted into two piles. One of them was ordinary rocks and dirt, and looked like the pile you might see in any quarry. The other pile was like something out of a comic book: it was a mound of gems that was taller than I was. Every color of the rainbow, ranging from pebble-sized to a few that were nearly the size of a watermelon. I hadn’t seen any security ponies anywhere, and it seemed obvious that my tiny little bucket of rubies had little chance of being stolen. Any pony who wanted gems wouldn’t waste their time with that bucket; they could literally get them here by the wagonload. If this had been Earth, they wouldn’t have even bothered with the coal in this shaft, no matter how good it was.
“Where do they come from?”
“The ground?”
“I get that. But—there must be lots of gems, or else these would be worth something. Back on Earth you could polish them up and make tens of millions of dollars.”
“Why? Gems are everywhere. They’re pretty, and some of them are useful, but a lot of them are fairly useless or commonplace. That’s what we keep in the pile here. Dragons like them, though.”
“Dragons?”
“Yeah. They eat them like we eat plants. And they hoard them, ‘cause they’re afraid that they’ll run out and starve if they don’t have enough gems.” She snorted. “I’ve heard that they horde practically anything that they can get their talons on. So we trade most of the commonplace stuff to the dragons in exchange for pure metals.”
“Pure metals?” My head was spinning.
“They breath fire, you know. And can swim in lava. So it’s easy for them to purify metals. It’s a lot harder for ponies to do it, ‘cause you’ve got to build a really big furnace. About the only metal they won’t do is gold, ‘cause they want to keep it for themselves.”
“So you exchange gems for steel?”
“Yeah. Pretty smart trade, really. That pile of gems could be traded for enough steel to make another set of rails all the way back to Greenock.”
It still didn’t seem like a fair trade to me, but then I remembered that a planet had been discovered which was made largely of diamond. Someplace like that, diamonds would be nearly worthless, and things like steel might be quite valuable.
“It all gets sorted out in Manehattan,” Assay said. “I’ve been there—a whole bunch of unicorns look through everything and decide where to send it on to. It’s kind of neat to watch for a little while and then it gets boring.” She tilted her head towards the loading dock. “Wanna watch wagons get unloaded?”
I wasn’t sure how exciting that would actually be, but she was enthusiastic about it. I took one last look at the hill of gems, just to fix it firmly in my mind. That was something that I didn’t think I’d ever see in my life again, and followed her to the loading dock.
***
The loading arrangement was clever. The tracks had been built on an incline, so every time a railroad car got full, they’d release the brakes and let the train roll one car further ahead, then start loading that car.
The coal chute was attached to the loading dock in such a way that the ponies didn’t even have to back up. There were slats across the platform that the coal fell through, and a painted mark on the boards where a pony would stand to be on-target. It was obvious that they didn’t actually need that mark; of the mares and few stallions I saw unloading, not one of them bothered to look down at their hooves to see if they were on the mark.
An assistant—who was a foal—tugged a lever on the wagon, and the body tilted, dumping out the coal. He had a hoe that he’d use to pull any stray bits out, and then he’d trip a release and the wagon body would drop back down.
Every now and then, he’d kick a few lumps of loose coal into the chute before the next wagon arrived.
“Pretty neat, huh?”
I nodded. “How many teams do you have down there?”
“Usually a dozen or so. Any more than that and it gets too crowded. Sometimes if we’re working a narrow seam or side shaft, we don’t pull very many wagons up and stockpile it underground, and then spend a couple of days bringing it all up. Right now, though, we’re on a wide seam, so it’s working really efficiently. Kind of like harvest time on a farm, but we mine all year long.” She sighed. “Don’t tell Longwall I said this, but it used to be more fun before we had a train. We take turns having a couple days off now, but it used to be that we’d shut down the mine for a few days once or twice a moon, and just have fun. I liked that a lot better than the rotating schedule we have now. Maybe once they get the tracks built to Mumbles we can go back to that.”
“So the mine is always running?”
“We all get festival days off,” she said. “And Hearth’s Warming and I really shouldn’t be complaining. Is there anything else you want to see before dinner?”
“Is there a hotel here?”
“Nah, you can stay at our house. You can sleep in Lignite’s bed. She won’t mind.”
“I don’t mind the floor,” I said. I didn’t want to impose, and I wasn’t sure by what Assay had said if Lignite was going to be in the bed, too.
“Whatever you prefer. Alright, if you’ve seen everything, let’s get back home. Maybe dinner is ready.”
Hey, a story about real pit ponies! It might sound cruel but going by my grandfathers stories they got treated better than the miners, although they were stabled underground and only came up for a few holidays.
My grandfathers started work in the local coal mine at about age 11 back in the 1920's. Much of the ventilation system was at least partially manual back then and the youngest workers started running that which meant opening and closing various doors every so often all day. You got enough candles to provide light for a few hours a day and spent the rest of the time in the pitch black listening to the sounds of the rock moving. By about 13 they were pulling carts full of coal from the workings using a belt and hook system called locally the gus and crook, they still had the scars from where it had dug into their flesh 70 years later. By 16 they'd be working at the coal face, where we were the seams are only a few feet tall so often you'd be working on your side to cut it out.
I'm surprised the miners didn't pay for their meal with a bucket of coal rather than gems, much more practical for the hotel to heat or cook things with. Really shiny gems shouldn't be worth as much as they are given they don't have that much day to day use.
9009688
I think in the pony society there isn't a difference between natural gemstones and synthetic ones. Most of their gemstones, regardless of origin, get used for utility (like we use our sapphires and diamonds for cutting tools and shock resistant glass). The very best of Equestrian weapons tech tend to be just enchanted gemstones (elements of harmony, alicorn amulet). Gemstones appear common enough that Rarity just puts them all over her dresses without a care.
Fun things to see in horse drawn coal tramways are teh tub sized turntables and tracks going off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. Local town station had a couple that went exactly 90 degress to the main tracks with tiny turntables at the intersections. Not sure about the local village station, but that had something eveen weirder. Looking at the old maps and cross checking, it was built on the spur of hill at the top of the pass where ice damming had made the river flow backwards and cut the top of the pass out, so you ended up with rock tongue, road cut accross tip, a spinning mill on the first ledge, then the station on the next ledge, then the river, then the brickworks on the other side of the river ledge, then the sandstone, shale, fireclay, coal seam quarry cut into the corner of the pass and side tributary.
The amount of mineral, resource extraction in the area was frankly rediculous, you could almost measure spacing in yards instead of miles.
Pretty sure all the local mines, drifts, adits, inclines, shafts and variations were closed in the early 1900s at most, though there was something during the early 1900s, I get the years wrong, where local people were desperate for winter fuel, so dug their own shaft to mine for coal, and the local law enforcement came round and closed it down due to not having permits. Even in the 1980s farm help included children as I helped with the hay bales, and the farm kids themselves helped with the animals, milking etc.
One term is Apprenticeship, the current term is Vocational Training?
Wonder if thee dragons are taking gems in trade for metals, wouldnt they be taking coal as well, not for food, but because of carbon reduction of roasted ores? Given volcanic areas, there could be sustained powerful winds though ravines that with some adaptions could be used to drive smelters and forges without constant dragon breath required? Especially given volcanic updraughts can generate immense electrical discharges, where any capable pegasi, weather spelling dragons, or maybe kirin could manipulate for electrical heating of the refractory ores and metals?
If gems are so widespread, what of the chepness and use of diamond for bearings? After all, if youre worried about stress, use a bigger gem to spread it out even further? Or even watches with rubies bearings, because theyre better for the job or just because rubies are cheaper than diamond on Earth?
Incomplete sentence?
Greenock
Lignite
It's a Dragon Horde! Run away!
Yesterday chapter kinda felt like a setup for a more interesting chapter today, you did not disapoint. I really liked the description of Greenrock, it was much easier to picture it this time and get the feel of it.
And Pit Town does sound like something worth visiting, if only for the cultural shock value.
It's a daily now!
Celestiadammit, Biscuit.
I expect ponies have better labor conditions and safety, especially compared to industrial revolution Earth.
...
Heh; it's a coal mine which produces cart-loads of gemstones as overburden.
9009688
Pit ponies are totally cool. IIRC, that's why Shetlands were bred. Also, the last pit ponies lost their jobs a lot more recently than most people would imagine: 1971 in the US, and 1999 in the UK.
My grandfather started working in his teens as well, back in the mid-20s, IIRC. That's very much not what we'd do today, of course (although I'd imagine that farmers are still working their children at rather young ages, and there's a local family-owned restaurant that has their children working (although I don't know their ages).
You'd mentioned the strap scars before (on Silver Glow's Journal), and that's something that I think a lot of younger kids these days don't appreciate. I'd totally overlooked coal mine ventilation--I don't know why I forgot about that [I did remember methane gas, at least].
It was a dirty job and one that I would never want to have, although I have to think at the time it was a pretty good job. Probably they saw a lot of stuff that they would rather have not seen: I can't imagine that mines were particularly safe places back in the 20s. I know my grandpa once told me that when he was interviewing for a job, he saw a man get killed, and decided that that wasn't the job for him.
The only way they'd get a bucket of coal is if they stole it (well, I suppose the mine could give it to them as a perk). The gems--the mine's got no use for them, and they aren't worth much of anything, so ponies are free to take them. Probably, at one time, the bar accepted them, but now they have more gems than they have a use for.
Of course she was.
(Wait, if Assay knows Lignite wouldn't mind a human in her bed, then they've likely talked about it. "Try and subtly ask the human if he wants to cuddle. I heard they give really good ear-scritches.")
9009723
I don't think that they have synthetic ones like we'd think of them (i.e., made in a lab). I think that they do grow them sometimes--on rock farms--and the cultivated ones are better than the wild ones, usually.
That I do agree with. I think that they use them for ornamentation in the same way that we might use glass gems or even glitter, or use them for other utility purposes since they've got more than they know what to do with. If you want a strong window, here's a bucket of sapphire. If you want a good cutting tool, here's a whole cart full of diamonds. Need a simple spell focus? How about emeralds--now free in every box of cereal.
(Related; I think that the reason they still largely use quills is because pegasi molt twice a year and they have such a surplus of them they're basically free.)
9009860
Fixed, fixed, and fixed!
Thank you!
9009986
IRL synthetic gemstones are cheaper to produce, are available in higher volumes and are higher quality than natural gemstones. Natural gemstones actually have more defects. The only reason we still treasure just the natural gemstones is because marketing has ingrained in us that natural must mean a more sincere gift
However some of the younger audience are starting to realize the truth (sales of cheap synthetic gemstones jewelry are going up thanks to PSAs on social media)
9009809
I hadn't thought about that, but you could do all sorts of things with horses pulling train cars that you could never do with an actual train. Heck, until you'd mentioned it, I hadn't thought about the reason why horse-pulled passenger cars had such a short wheelbase, but I bet that's why.
horsesandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/j0068b-omnibus.jpg
?
I guess just put things where you've got the space. That seems un-American , but then we've got more room to spread out and a lot less history. And it's not like we don't have our share of weird; the Southern Pacific's famous Tehachapi Loop is literally a big circle of track to gain elevation, and the train actually crosses over itself.
Well, when you've got the minerals, dig holes.
There were a fair number of mines like that in the US as well, mostly in the west. One guy I watch on YouTube has a semi-abandoned mine on his property, in fact. Of course, having just anyone mine wherever they want is likely to lead to problems.
There is a lot of overlap in the two, that's for sure.
I don't think that dragons would want coal, although the ponies could provide it if they've discovered the advantages of high-carbon steel. I'm no expert on geology, but I can't think of any place on Earth where we have the open liquid lava pits that they have in the dragon lands.
Yeah, you could probably arrange something with the winds and a volcanically active area. Not sure exactly what, but heat + air = wind and weather, and smart pegasi could probably use that to their advantage, somehow. I don't see them having much in the way of electricity; on the other hand, you could run a stamping mill by wind-power just below your source of steel. And yeah, you could also potentially use all the lightning from an active volcano for weather purposes. Given the nature of volcanic ash, hopefully pegasi on that duty get hazard pay. And they're probably all nicknamed 'Ash.'
I don't see any disadvantages for the ponies for using gems for bearings, cutting purposes, or anything else that gems are useful for. Cost would hardly be a factor. Sweetie Belle makes macaroni art out of blue sapphires, and after being used for that purpose, Rarity thinks they're 'ruined.' Real sapphires, you'd wash the glue off and use them.
9009955
When you have the opportunity to visit a coal mine, take it!
9009977
Does it mean the "lonely stallion" comment was code for "Your are alone, are you lonely?"
9009963
Until this arc is over, anyway (probably Thursday, maybe Friday).
That's not a wrong description.
Well, they certainly have a different risk calculus than humans do. Given what we've seen in the episodes, many of their structures are no better than Industrial Revolution Earth.
That's the problem with mines. You dig and you dig, and you get a lot of worthless stuff. Like rubies by the bucket.
Or maybe it's just one of those things where Lignite is the youngest of them and therefore when they have guests of any sort, she's the one who has to give up her bed for the guest.
9010002
I think (based on very little research) that that's true of most gems but not all. I believe that there are some which are nearly impossible to make in the lab, or which are cost-prohibitive to do so, and others that don't come out in gemstone quality when artificial (I know industrial diamonds look like crap, but I don't know if they can be made better [not much point if all you're using them for is saw blades and the like]). I'm also the wrong person to have an opinion on the sincerity of a gift based on how 'natural' it is, but I'll take your word for it.
That and the fact that my generation and my parent's generation kind of screwed millennials over, and y'all haven't got a lot of disposable income. And you've also got more information at your fingertips and are smart enough to actually use it (well, mostly). I've personally got no real use for shinies, and honestly wouldn't be upset at all if y'all bring the gem markets (and a few others) to their knees.
9010024
You're overreading it. Lignite may hook up with railroad building stallions, but that doesn't necessarily mean she's got any interest in Joe.
9010043
9010024
IIRC from Silver Glow's Journal, ponies are a lot more relaxed about platonic contact and sleeping together (in the literal sense); I figured she wouldn't need to be romantically interested to share a bed.
9010190
I remember that!
https://twitter.com/tarastrong/status/833501576023179265
(Turned out "Tara strong + suitcase" was the winning combo.)
9010194
I suppose they might have been their Sunday best helmets for when they go into town, maybe with bows on them as Rarity modelled in Gauntlet of Fire.
It's actually interesting to think how their lamps work, they might be candle's or oil lamps or some magic light source which ideally doesn't spark off methane. Certainly Rarity seemed to be using her horn to power her light although that wouldn't be possible in this case. I hope at least they've invented the Davy Lamp.
Locally there wasn't all that much choice where I grew up the mines were the main employer, there were some farms and of course a few shops but mostly it was the mines or starve. My maternal grandfather was a bit unusual in that his father was the Landlord of a local pub and he could probably have worked there but he decided to follow all his friends into the pits. After a few years he moved to London to seek his fortune (and play football) and ended up working on building sites before he returned home shortly before the war. He spent the whole war working the mines (and met my grandmother at about the same time). During the war Britain actually forced 1 in 10 of it's conscripts to work in the mines to ensure production continued.
Certainly, locally the miners all got part of their wages in coal to heat their houses.
The idea of Symbiosis between Ponies and Dragon's when it comes to metal production is interesting. From what we've seen I guess the trade is with older dragons, adolescents don't seem to be forward thinking enough to get beyond grab the gems, barbeque the ponies. I guess the mine has one or a small number of 'customers' who help drive off any riff raff who might try and steal things.
"I later learned she was actually a triplet, but only after throwing out my data several times."
I have to wonder what rock farmers think about such prolific gem veins. (A shame about all that carbon in the way, though.)
I wasn't sure what to think of the kids being involved in the mining, but it doesn't seem too bad. Equestria isn't exactly the kind of place that tolerates exploitative child labor.
Definitely an interesting glimpse at local culture. And I learned about that high-carbon exoplanet, which is especially neat.
Ah, June berries. This brings back one of my greatest regrets. There was some sort of hybrid Juneberry tree growing out of the foundation of a very old house in our town of Browns Mills, near Whitesbogs (the place where the commercial blueberry was developed) and it produced enormous berries, as large as the largest Jersey variety blueberries, and just as sweet and delicious.
But by the time I realized it might be special, it had been cut down. I've never found another like it. It's a similar story to a rare pink-fleshed apple that grew near my great-grandmother's house. It was both very sweet and very tart. Applesauce made from it needed no additional sugar. And as far as I can tell, it was the only one of its kind.
Most produce today is Monsanto-engineered garbage, made for massive production at the cost of flavor. Whenever I can find the old varieties now, I nab them, for they are far superior than the mass-produced watery cardboard that makes up most commercial produce. The sole exception are melons, for which flavor was the primary trait desired.
Pony coal is magical and actually GOOD for the lungs!
Everything is better in Equestria! You should become JUST LIKE US. (This ad paid for by the Conversion Bureau)
How do they find gems in the coal? Coal tends to form in between thick layers of sandstone or mudstone (slate, shale, and other such sedimentary rocks) while gems are found in metamorphic, igneous, and basaltic rocks (especially diamonds, which are found primarily in large volcanic plugs).
Clearly this is PROOF that Equestria was created by Minecraft software designers!
9012212
Given that gems are just everywhere, and the magical nature of Equestria, it's entirely possible gems are more of a contaminant in various layers of earth created be ambient magic that does weird crap to other natural materials.
9010659
That's true, but in Lignite's defense, a coal miner wouldn't necessarily want to share a bed with a complete stranger who bought her dinner in a bar once.
9011104
For some reason, I just was having no luck finding that image.
Anyway, that's one of Meghan's fallback plans, if everything else fails. Hope that the border agent is asleep on his hooves and doesn't bother to look in all the suitcases (and if she keeps trying, she might get lucky one day).
9011277
Oh, yeah, they should have had bows on them. No reason to wear a boring hard hat, after all.
I would assume that if they haven't got magical lights of some kind (which I assume they do), they at least have some kind of safety lamp that's unlikely to spark off methane. It probably doesn't take too many explosions before ponies start to figure out that open flames in a mine isn't a good idea. Plus, they've certainly encountered this type of problem with mills and granaries, which also really like to explode.
Yeah, I could see that. Certainly there are places in rural Appalachia for example where most of the good-paying jobs are mining jobs (and through mechanization and reduced demand for coal, there aren't so many of those jobs any more). My grandpa had spent some time on a farm (how much, I don't know) and he probably didn't want to spend his whole life farming so he went to find a better job. Worked his way up, too, from assembly line worker to foreman and then to an office job before he retired.
As I recall from reading James Harriot books, mining wasn't the only thing that conscripts got forced to do; they also had to do harvests to make sure that there was enough food to eat during the war.
That's actually pretty smart. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense.
I think that older and wiser dragons would be the ones that ponies would make the arrangements with. Good for the dragon; he can make his horde larger with very little effort on his part, and he's big enough to deal with the riff raff. And it works well for the ponies; not only do they likely get a peace arrangement out of it, but they also get their steel without having to build anything, and they pay for it all with gems that they don't want anyway.
9011417
That would be confusing. The other three Pie sisters look kind of the same, at least to a passing glance.
Those gems are probably crap compared to what they can grow at the rock farm. Sort of like finding a little clump of sad, stunted wild oats, and asking a farmer who grows a hundred acres of good oats what she thinks about the ones you've got.
Also, somewhat related, I was thinking of putting in the story (but forgot until too late) them using an empty room for a mushroom farm.
And in some ways, there's a very fine line between an apprenticeship and child labor.
9012190
That's a real shame. I wonder if it had somehow crossbred with something else, or if it was a variety that simply no longer exists? Or if there was something in the soil that affected the flavor? I've heard that some flowers will change color based on the mineral content of the soil they're growing in.
As I'm sure you know, there are also people who keep heritage breeds of animals around. I went to a show that was all heritage breeds at Michigan State once, and that was really interesting. It was also over a decade ago, so I don't remember all that much about it except that there were a lot of chickens and rabbits.
Who knows, it might be.
Or maybe they just go to the unicorn doctor once a year, and he does a spell that gets all the coal dust out instantly with no pain or inflammation.
I have always wondered what it would be like to have four hooves and a tail. . . .
Ambient Equestrian magic just creates gems pretty much anywhere there is life that can receive and give off magic. So that's how there are gems scattered throughout the coal.
(Swampy, boggy land --> peat --> coal)
I'll concede that when somepony chips into a rock and an infinite lava flow comes out.
9012550
That's essentially my headcanon.
9017454
I'm told it's overrated.
That pun.
*too
I mean, unless you meant to use dark as a verb here.
"It's just, back on Earth, we found among other things that the conditions in our mines had... life shortening side-effects."
"Oh. OH Buck, what was that?"
"We called it black lung. Pon- people developed either asphma or lung cancer."
9040290
The thing is, it's true.
Correction made; thank you!
9040322
I'm not totally opposed to that being a thing in Equestria, too, but these days it's easily fixed with a unicorn's spell.
9009809
There were a few of those here and some of them were only taken out of service when the wagons got too long for them. In the later years they used forklifts and tractors to shift the wagons.
9061498
I’m kind of surprised that they didn’t keep the wheelbase of the wagons standard to avoid that problem. Maybe if the turntable was an old enough design it wasn’t worth keeping the smaller carts around any more.
Still, it’s always interesting to find out how old some industrial equipment is. Not far from where I live, there are a few 50 year old locomotives operating on the same tracks that they’ve always been on (Ann Arbor RR bought them in the 60s, and several are still operational). The oldest Great Lakes freighter made it to 111 before she was scrapped (although she served out the last few decades as a barge).
He totally will skip a cuddle opportunity, huh?
9067614
Yes, he did. Silly human.
Tell the dragons about it. They'll be more than happy to process metal for Earth, at a fraction of the cost for the long-term goal of obtaining, and devouring that planet.
10286247
Oh yeah, you’re totally right.
Heck, that’s how ponies motivate dragons to forge metals for them.
This whole chapter made me wonder what Dragon poop looks like. After all, according to physics, mass cannot be destroyed, only converted, so if the dragons are eating the gems, then there must be some material leftover that can't be converted, and must be expelled.
10294910
That’s actually a very good question, and one I haven’t thought of all that much. Done plenty of thinking about pony poop, though.
I’d imagine if they’re using the gems for some sort of biological/magical process in their bodies, they aren’t gems any more when they come out; what they are is certainly open to headcanon. Might be something valuable to humans, even.
10297813
My first thought was highly oxidized transition metals and weird chemical species with too many electrons, but then I remembered that dragons probably have livers and antioxidant enzymes to turn them into less reactive things less likely to damage cells. Maybe they poop out bulky complex ions like the sort that EDTA (fairly versatile industrial chemical) forms.
11549774
It's possible that dragon biology is set up to handle weird chemicals and whatnot--there are certainly processes in your body that produce toxic byproducts which don't in other animals because of different intermediate steps (one that comes to mind is why horses can drink methanol and you can't). And anything that's venomous/poisonous has at least parts of its body that are immune to the poison, if not entirely immune.
If we're being realistic, I would imagine that any chemical processes that happen in the course of dragon digestion would be ones that could be tightly regulated and didn't take too much energy to accomplish, but I'm certainly no expert. Issac Asimov kind of covered that in a short story about a goose that laid golden eggs--IIRC, the chemistry checked out, but the goose would basically have a fusion reaction going on inside of it which is the kind of thing that's likely to go out of control real fast and kill the goose.
Obviously, with all the magic in Equestria, magic biology is a plausible hand-wave. But I do like the idea that it's something that could be useful for other purposes.