Stories for Good Little Fillies and Colts Who Love Their Lives and Do Not Wish to Die

by Fiddlebottoms

Asked the Angel (FiM -- Other & Guards & Celestia)

It really is as stupid as you might fear to imagine and when the angel arrived in Equestria it was sadly mistaken.

Three of eleven wings touched the ground straining to hold it’s awkward body up, while its six legs flailed desperately from its six hexagonal sides formed of fungoscious flesh. Four of its twelve faces winced in pain, and the other five fell in disappointment.

“Hey,” shouted a gate gawker clad in gold armor, “you can’t leave those here.” He pointed with his spear at the faces lying on the street. “That’s littering!”

The angel flailed its legs aimlessly and screamed an apology, but it could do nothing to prevent this disgraceful, and apparently illegal, loss of face.

The lost faces, on the other hand, were ecstatic. Having fallen facial features toward the sky, things were finally looking up for them. They took root through the cobblestones and began shouting in their forgotten language which was conveniently and coincidentally identical to the lately emerged language of ponies in all the least important ways.

“At last we are free!”

“At last we may speak!”

“At last we may be--”

“--stepped on!”

“By their boots!”

“Forever!”

The gate gawkers were having none of this, and they fell upon the angel and its scattered visages with abandon. Spear butts puffed viciously into fungosicious flesh buffeting the poor creature about but no matter how many times they struck the angel, it did not fall over, nor did it seem to be in any particular pain.

Hours passed in this most fashionable manner, with more gate gawkers gathering uselessly to the scene and fumbling at the flesh with flails and fire axes. Around the display of non-carnage a host of malevolent bystanders gathered. Some of them threw bits at the street theater in progress.

“This violence is starting to seem pointless,” observed one of the gate gawkers, taking a break from the pointless violence.

“Hey,” hissed his fellow at arms who was actually named Gate Gawker, “you better put a stop to that language. We’ll be accused of slacking in our duties, and then they’ll be beating us.”

“Who?”

“Hu will beat us, yes.”

“Yes, who will beat us if we all stop beating other ponies,” the first gate gawker looked at the fungoscious fleshling reeling between blows, “and I guess stop beating things like that.”

“Hu will, unless he is one of the ones who stops, in which case I guess Starshot will beat us all.”

“Starshot is a jerk like that.”

“Yeah.”

“War is the moment when ponies forget why they're fighting and only carry on through their terrible boredom because they don't want to be accused of slacking,” screamed a face on the ground before a spear butt filled its maw.

“Civilization is the same moment, but for the absence of fighting,” added another face.

“And peanut butter really does go with everything.”

This caused the gate gawkers to stop.

“The screaming face embedded in the pavement is right, you know,” said Gate Gawker, “peanut butter really does go with everything.”

“Hey, shouted one of the rubberneckers, his head dragging along the ground,” one of the rubberneckers shouted, his head indeed dragging along the ground at the end of his flopping neck, “we didn’t pay you to stop!”

The gate gawkers, suddenly noticing the crowd of observers, donned pixelated facial blurs and floated directly up into the sky.

“We didn’t pay you to do that either!”

The gate gawkers armor gleamed as they disappeared into the sun.

“Whatever that was.”

---

The angel was left alone on the streets of Canterlot that night. It staggered down the lanes, unable to see clearly with most of its faces missing and unable to walk except on its few wings that could reach the ground.

It trod on dogs and thumped against walls and dislodged masonry. It was in this uniquely useless capacity that the angel stumbled across its next victim.

A diamond dog lay sprawled across the alley, the stumps where it’s legs had once been covered in papier-mache that almost resembled bandages. It looked up at the angel as if to ask what it was doing here.

The angel obligingly demonstrating by treading on the dog and then lurching into a wall, causing a decorative fixture to fall and decorate the ground in broken glass.

The dog nodded in understanding.

The angel stared as if to return to the question.

The dog rolled back and forth across the street as if to demonstrate that it, likewise, was existing in the world.

The angel immediately enrolled in a prestigious art academy; it spent the next six years mastering sculpture and architecture, though it learned most how to hate and how to hold its grudges close to its vest until it was finally unleashed upon the world where it began its career by decorating Canterlot with enormous iron statues, but it was never satisfied with the whirling violence of stationary steel and in time it learned to love automation and set the bladed legs of its works spinning only to see no one appreciate its true intention--yes, undeniably, they understood it as violence, but they never understood that they were the target--and so, the angel began to build bigger and uglier, and biggerer and uglierest, until it at last created its most triumphant creation, a vast cyclone of hurtling steel that reached as high as a mountain, but the work was not really completed until the angel pushed the structure over and crushed itself and everyone who attended the opening gala to death.

The dog nodded, existing was indeed a most dangerous, pointless, and time consuming art.

The angel didn't nod, only waited expectantly as if to ask why.

This would have given the diamond dog pause, if he’d had legs on which to receive them. Instead it could only continue existing until it finally died. Which it did. Promptly.

It was but the first of many.

Well, the angel thought, that was well and good for him and them, but the angel was beginning to realize it had no alternative.

---

The next morning, the angel encountered, again, Gate Gawker and his posse of gate gawkers. The morning sun shone off the armor of the mourning son--Gate Gawker’s adoptive father, a limbless diamond dog, having died the previous night of demonstrably demonstrative causes--as they lead the angel toward the palace. On the way they were met by another detachment carrying the angel’s lost faces.

“The colossal squid is a fearsome predator whose most prominent feature outside the ocean is a disconcerting uselessness,” the faces sang in harmony.

The angel was becoming quite glad it had gotten rid of those things.

At the gates of the palace they were met by Celestia, her entourage, and the sort of jeering crowd who always show up for these goings on.

“Creature from beyond our world, you stand accused of littering, destruction of property, inciting police violence upon yourself, embarrassing the law, hypothetical violence, and driving a poor, defenseless dog to suicide in order to prove a point.”

The angel was unsure who had just spoken, so it remained silent.

The silence lingered.

Celestia had just one question: “Why are you here?”

“It was just an accident.”

The assembled ponies laughed.

“Well, what was your reason for entering the world?” asked the angel draped in its fungoscious flesh.