Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having few to no bits in their purse, Cheese Sandwich and his little brother Tomato Sandwich set out on a quest to acquire an accordion through music and brotherhood.
Written for Tumbleweed's Springtime Sandbox-Slash-Sandbox Switcheroo!.
I had the pleasure of writing a piece based off the works of Sketcha-Holic, particularly her anthology of stories about the relationship between Cheese Sandwich and his (non-canon) little brother Tomato "Tommy" Sandwich.
As far as chronology goes, this takes place after Tales of Two Sandwiches, but before It Broke the Camel's Back, and decades before the main adventures in Brother Bothers and Brotherly Bonding Time. Hopefully I didn't miss anything which would clash with her established canon.
Reading those are not required to understand this story, but I would still highly recommend them anyway.
Somehow you messed up all the story links.
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Should be fixed now. It's the strangest bug where the word "fimfiction" just disappears from the link leaving behind www..net/rest-of-link, and it looks fine before uploading.
Thanks for the catch.
Well, I read this thing earlier and I was so overwhelmed that I needed a bit of time to gather my thoughts (helped that I was going to work and I could let my mind wander the entire shift of cleaning). But, aside from a few minor, unimportant-to-this-story things inconsistent with my 'verse, you did fantastic! I squeed when seeing the cover art of Cheese and Tommy (guess I implicitly gave permission for you to use my art by getting into this contest, seeing as asking me directly would have me catching on too early).
I loved how you absolutely nailed Cheese and Tommy's dynamic. I especially like how they're written as the little kids they are, with Cheese still being the sensible and timid older brother, and Tomato being the adorable and energetic little brother that wants to show the world how awesome his big brother is. Also, it looks like they're basically taking the first steps to their eventual special talents.
Though, I do have one complaint about this: Officer Bell Pepper technically shouldn't exist at this point in time, because she's Tomato's daughter. I found it odd, because the one of the first things mentioned in her bio is who her father is, and I always thought it was obvious thanks to coloring and the family forelock. So, either there's a Bell Pepper in some police force somewhere every generation, or she's a time traveler.
But, other than that, I really enjoyed this piece. I didn't expect Tommy to be the subject of a fanfic outside my stuff (I was fully expecting a 'Ball Pits Leading to Discord's Dimension' piece), but I'm really happy with this.
Also, One-Pony-Band guy is awesome. He just is.
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Thanks for the praise, I'm glad you like it!
I knew you were going to call me out on Bell Pepper, I just knew it! Originally it was just a generic cop, but then I found her while searching for cover art and thought 'Hey, here's a nice little bonus nod I can make to the source material. Plus her name is tangentially music related, which is a plus.' I figured that the only people who would call me out on it would be you (obviously) and your most die-hard fans so from an outside-the-range-of-this-contest perspective, she'd have a little more personality than generic cop Bookem. So maybe a little timey-wimey forces-of-fate-and-destiny moved her backwards a little to when she was needed.
Also, yes, sorry for technically using your art without permission, but as you said there wasn't really a way to ask around it without giving the game away.
My first ideas were working with the ball pit story actually, but I couldn't think of any ideas that went anywhere outside of 'another portal opens up elsewhere and some other pairing gets trapped', so I scrapped it for the much more fully fleshed out AU. On that note (admittedly I didn't have the time to read the longest installment, so I may have missed some canon details there) but the biggest thing that inspired this was the realization that the majority of their problems stemmed from the incident with the accordion. So if he cared for it to that extent, then there had to be an interesting story behind how he got it. (Though admittedly I did kinda cram just before the deadline and rushed the ending so it'd be ready in time.)
Also, one-pony-band stallion is a reference to someone important from Weird Al's backstory, which I may have made a bit too subtle, but of course this is Cheese and not Al so I didn't want him to be too obvious.
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Ah! So it was just another nod to my stuff. Heh, and here I was wondering how someone could find Bell and completely miss her parentage (well, the father side of the equation; she was ship-neutral until I decided on Tomato's official love interest one Christmas, hence why she has a strong resemblance to him). Now I'm just finding the concept of Bell Pepper the Time-Traveling Cop really amusing, and considering having someone call her "Peps" in one of my things.
I'd have gone with going for Discord's perspective of ponies just popping up everywhere from those ball pit portals, but I see your dilemma there. And to be fair, I don't think anyone would have had the time to fully read Brotherly Bonding Time and write a good story from it during this contest. It's mainly present-time madness and world-building from outside the Sandwich family, though it does cover some things about their past that did affect them (mainly troubles in Tomato's adolescence that contributed to his attitude as an adult).
Neat! Weird Al references are a must in a Cheese Sandwich story (even though I prefer setting a line between voice actor and character, I still insert references for fun). All other references are optional.
And thus... a legend was born!
I love this, it really feels like an early episode in the life of Tommy and Cheese!
And I especially love the characterization of Bell Pepper.
You do not know how many times you made me say ‘ohhhhhh’ or ‘that makes so much sense!’ during this story. I tend to associate Cheese with Al in the first place, as in making Cheese the Equestrian version of Al. While this story does not exactly do that (aside from the parodies and the whole accordion thing), I kinda dislike associating Cheese with Al constantly. This story was well-punctuated and grammar was good.
Overall I give this story a 4.5/5, technically in range for my favorite stories of all time, however, it’s not as emotional or as well written as Tangled up in Blues, Bitter/Sweet, or On The Wing of Friendship, but you have gotten incredibly close.
Pros:
Makes plenty of sense
Enjoyable read all the way through
Cons:
The cop consistency thing that the author of the original stories brought up, but I didn’t know that, and it does not take away from the story.
Since I’m such a crazy Weird Al fanboy, and I mentioned it plenty of times. Al really got an accordion because a travelling door-to-door salesman came up to his parents and either offered Al accordion lessons or guitar lessons. Due to another great accordion player, Frankie Yankovic, the Polka King, his parents though it would be funny to have two Yankovics playing accordion, so Al got his accordion.
As for the song parodies, believe it or not, I actually like the description of the reason in this story more than real life. In real life, Al really just recorded parodies because he wanted to, in collage he constantly went by Weird Al because he was an on-campus DJ. One day he just walked into the men’s bathroom with his accordion and recorded ‘My Bologna’, a parody of The Knacks’ ‘My Sharona’ and that’s really it. I like the reasoning here more than the real life.
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