Lightning in a Bottle
The two Twilight Sparkles and their unicorn friends ran out of the doors to see the incoming swarm of sparks and cracking lightning surrounding hundreds of little dots in the air.
“Twittermites!” screamed Lyra as she jolted past the princess and scrambled inside the castle.
Starlight rolled her eyes and turned to Sparkle. “What’s the plan this time? Do we befriend the twittermites to death?”
“This is no laughing matter!” the princess yelled, stomping her hoof on the ground.
“Says the pony who looked kinda’ tired of this whole ‘monster-of-the-week’ thing,” Sunset said with a knowing smirk.
Sci-Twi looked up, then back at her pony friends as the swarm in the sky slowly descended, forming a circle of lightning as they spread over town. “What are they?”
“Twittermites are electrical insects that mostly hail from the Frozen North,” Sparkle replied, sounding scholarly now and closing her eyes. “They generate electricity inside themselves, but they need to discharge that regularly or else—”
“Naturally,” Sci-Twi said fast, furrowing her brows and pacing on the dirt path, “that means we have to overcharge them to stop the infestation!”
Twilight blinked. “Usually, there’s pest control, but...” looking nervously at the bugs about to touchdown on the rooftops, “he’s quite old and—“
“Idea!”
“Wait, wha—“
Sci-Twi opened her saddle bag and levitated a few black blocks out of it with a little pipe connecting all of them.
“What’s that?!” Sparkle asked in a shout, mouth agape.
Sci-Twi cuddled the contrivance. “This was my first ever attempt at making a fuel cell and—“
“What’s a fuel cell?” Twilight asked.
Sunset smiled. “Good thinking, Twi!”|
Sci-Twi levitated it around, showing it off to her and Sparkle. “This one’s in the prototype stage; it’s a proton exchange membrane fuel cell or PEMFC for short, and—“
Zap!
A cottage disintegrated, left with black piles of ash and a stallion reading a newspaper on his couch. He looked around him and then screamed before the twittermites zapped him as well.
“Hold on!” Starlight yelled as she glowed her horn.
Poof!
They were gone, the dirt path now just a lonely dirt path.
The two Applejacks blasted into Sugarcube Corner, smelling the sugar scents again.
“We came ‘ere as fast as we could, Pinkie!” Applejack shouted, seeing her and Cotton Candy using their hoses to fill up water guns.
“That’s it!” yelled Mr. Cake as he shunted a huge cabinet in the door’s way, barricading them from the outside.
The Rarities levitated several balloons as they filled them with water, Rarity cringing as she held them preacriously in her feeble magical grip. The Fluttershies were listening to Angel—Flutters’s Angel, to be precise—and were shuddering at whatever he was saying. Meanwhile, they heard fwash!’s from outside; AJ trotted to a window and saw Rainbow and Dash in the sky, the former quickly coaching the latter on how to make a raincloud.
“Are ya’ sure this is gonna work?” Applejack asked as Mrs. Cake moved several cake boxes out of the way. “Last time we tried, the joke shop got burned down and nothin’ could be salvaged!”
“We’re living in modern times, Applejack!” Pinkie stated as she armed herself with a water balloon slingshot.
“That was last week,” Applejack replied deadpan.
“Nopony likes reading yesterday’s news, silly!” Then, Pinkie brought out a water bazooka—which was really a water balloon launcher. She jumped on the counter and declared, “We’re taking them down! We will fight wherever they’re gonna fight us, and if there will be sacrifices, there will be—“
Zap!
“Agh!”
Thud!
AJ galloped to the window, almost tripped outside. She rubbed her eyes at who was there: “Rainbow Dash!”
Fluttershy gasped, stretching a hoof out to signal Angel to stop speaking. “They got Dash?!”
Rare trotted out of her table and went to AJ’s side at the window. Turning to both pegasi inside: “They got your Dash, Fluttershy!”
And everyone gasped, including the Cakes.
Fluttershy jumped out of the table and to the window, wanting to see for herself.
Amid the buzzes of bugs and the blows of thunder and the rumbling hoofsteps of fleeing ponies, Dash’s blackened body laid there—limp. Rainbow swooped down from the sky, dodging the twittermites’ lightning bolts, and landed by her other self. She gazed upon her, seeing that her eyes were closed but hearing a little moan from her mouth.
“What happened?!” Rare yelled from inside, eyes in a wild state of shock.
“She got too close to the swarm!,” Rainbow shouted, checking her pulse and opening her friend’s eyes to check on them. “She’ll be fine, but I need to bring her to the hospital pronto!” and she shot away, carrying her other self with her as she left behind a rainbow trail.
With that, AJ slammed the window panes shut, forcing Rare and Fluttershy to trot back to their tables.
“I told ya’ this won’t work!” Applejack yelled at Pinkie while shaking a balled up hoof at her. “They got RD last time before she could set up the stormclouds, and now they got the other RD on ‘er first day in Equestria!”
“Hey!” Pinkie shouted back, pointing at the farmpony from behind the counter. “My plan’s foolproof!”
“Foolproof if it went perfectly!” Applejack quipped.
“Can we stop arguing?” Flutters suggested, raising her voice. “I don’t think we’re going a-anywhere.”
“Let’s follow through with the plan,” Mr. Cake said as he stepped in between the baker and the farmer, making everyone look at him by taking his own baker’s hat off. “If we can’t stop the swarm, we can at least make them leave sooner; that’s what we were able to do back on Monday, and I’m sure we can do that today!”
Zap!
And the Fluttershies let out their “Eep!”’s and huddled under the table, much to Angel’s chagrin as he slapped himself on the head.
“But we better do it quickly!” Mrs. Cake said, frightened as she moved boxes of pies and cupcakes into a drawer.
Then, Pinkie and Cotton got their weapons out, their water guns filled to the brim.
“I say let’s get this show on the road!” Cotton said, putting on a pair of shades and hoofing another to Pinkie.
“Ooh, shades!” Pinkie blathered, wiping them clean and clear with a rag.
The Rarities clenched their jaws and levitated their arsenal of water balloons, forming a floating array of frail colors around them. “We’re ready for them!” Rare shouted.
Fluttershy raised her hoof as she and Flutters got up from the table, catching most ponies’ attention. “Angel said she’s going to go outside and distract the twittermites while we prepare.”
And Angel leaped out of the table and bounced out an open window.
Which Mr. Cake promptly closed. “Thanks! Forgot about that one!”
Pinkie stood up on the counter. “Everypony!”
“Pinkie,” Applejack began with a shake of her head, “this is no time for a rousin’ spee—“
“Last week, we’ve merely deflected the enemy!” Pinkie pumped a hoof to the air. “Today, we will make the enemy cry ‘Mommy!’ until it comes running home back where it belongs!”
“Pinkie,” rang an irritated Applejack.
“Today, we will show those twittermites that we’re not pushovers! We’re not weak! We’re not going to fall!”
Cotton Candy jumped up to the counter, standing beside Pinkie. Facing her audience of ten, “We will show them that the ponies of Ponville will live in this ‘ville!”
“Wow,” Rarity commented, whispering to Rare’s ear. “She’s so into this pony thing, I think it’s getting scary.”
“We’ll all assemble at Pinkie’s bedroom!” Cotton proclaimed, raising both water guns into the air. “There, we shall commence a battle that will end in sure victory! On the count to three—“
Zap!
And another thud! AJ peeked out the window. “W-Wait...Derpy?”
“Derpy?!” everyone else shouted, turning their heads there.
“Three!” screamed Pinkie.
And those two pink ponies raced up the stairs.
As more ponies screamed outside, galloping everywhere.
Applejack took out her rope with her mouth. “Let’s rustle up these critters!”
Rare lowered her brow, on the way to the stairs with her floating balloons. “And how are you going to catch those flying electrical bugs with that?”
AJ took out her rope as well. “Guess we’ll find out!”
Zap!
She groaned. “What now?!” and she looked out the window.
The farmpony bent her head up and saw a couple unicorns and the princess standing on a house, set on the hay roof.
Sci-Twi was levitating her jumbled up fuel cell blocks closer to the swarm.
“Just a little closer!” she cried, floating the device around as it guzzled down its stored fuel, collided with the air, and emitted both sparks of electricity and splashes of water, overloading the twittermites pack by pack as they got knocked out and fell.
Yet, the remaining bugs converged closer to her.
Starlight glowed her horn and surrounded everyone with a magical force field, tinting everything outside blue.
“How long can you hold this up?!” Sunset asked, not taking her eyes away from the sinking twittermites, hearing their sparks and zaps, seeing their cute eyes and their lightning-shaped stingers approaching.
“As long as they don’t zap us all at once,” Starlight replied as she sweated, “we’ll be totally fine!”. Then, looking at the princess and growing agitated, “Why aren’t you doing anything?!”
Sparkle did not look at her. Instead, her eyes were on Sci-Twi as her knees buckled, head giving way as her horn grew brighter and brighter, fuel cells whizzing around and taking out more twittermites.
“I don’t know what she’s doing,” Sparkle said, then, breaking out into a smile, “but it’s working!”
Sci-Twi felt a hoof slipping, then planted her hoof on the hay surface. Grunting through bared teeth, her horn glowing brighter still and her nerves straining, closing her eyes under earing pain, focusing as she levitated her contraption around, hearing less buzzing and less lightning though they were all closing in on the force field, and—
“Where are my pancakes?!”
Sci-Twi shot out of her bed, inhaling and exhaling fast after shouting that. She tried to check the pulse on her neck, but then realized she did not have the fingers to do so.
And saw that she was on a medical bed, wearing a patient’s drab green shirt.
All her friends in the room roared in applause, stomping and clapping their hooves.
Sci-Twi blinked at them, then rubbed her eyes behind her glasses. “What happened? D-Did we win?”
“Why’d ya’ think we’re cheerin’, sugarcube?” AJ said, trotting up to her bedside and rustling her mane. “I don’t know how you did it, but ya’ did it!”
“And to think I got bored halfway through your lecture!” Sunset added, tugging her striped mane. “Maybe if we sell your fuel cell as a pesticide, people would actually start listening to you!”
Sci-Twi frowned. “Hey!”
Sparkle trotted to her side as well, placing a hoof on her shoulder and seeing her other self mellow down. “I...I honestly have no idea what a fuel cell is, but you saved Ponyville with it!” Trying to contain her curiosity: “What does it do? Is it like a battery but better?”
“Don’t make her talk about it!” came Dash’s voice.
And they all looked at the adjacent bed and saw Dash lying there, lightly patched up with bandages.
Dash smiled and made a nervous laugh at her crowd of friends. “Learning weather control the hard way, am I right, girls?
Rainbow flew out and and landed beside her, giving her other self a hoofbump. “You and me? We’ll go a long way together!” and she spread one of her wings and wrapped Dash’s head with it.
Dash bumped her hoof again. “Can’t deny it!”
Rainbow raised a brow and smirked. “You’re getting with the culture! Keep this up, you’ll be a full-fledged member of the weather team in no time!”
Then, the door opened and a nurse arrived, rolling a food cart into view. “Here ya’ go, dearies! Greens and cranberry jelly with carrot juice!” She glowed her horn and levitated the trays to both patients, complete with spoons, forks, and knives.
Dash dispensed with the utensils, opting to eat with her hooves.
“Thank you, nurse!” Sci-Twi said, smiling as she received it on her hindlegs, sitting up.
“You’re welcome!” Having fixed her hat, the nurse eyed the patients and their friends strangely as she headed out. She mumbled, “The things I go through in Ponyville….”
Much of the crowd spread out, with the Rarities and the Fluttershies sitting down on the floor to chat about Angel though he was sleeping, the Pinkie Pies making balloon animals and having a competition to see who could make the wackier balloon, and the Applejacks went with Rainbow to take care of a healing Dash—they opted to play a game of Cloud Destroyer, setting up the board game and the pieces on their flat grids. As for Sunset and Starlight, they resumed their conversation by the door, talking about the former’s magical exploits in her world.
This left Sparkle taking up a chair to sit by Sci-Twi’s side.
“Since you’ve already tasted pony food the first time,” Sparkle started, “I’m sure there won’t be any problems this time!”
Sci-Twi rubbed her cheeks. “What’re you talking about?”
“You gagged at the thought of eating hay and I could sense it,” Sparkle noted. “I expected you to know that we ponies eat hay regularly; it’s pretty much an Equestrian staple!”
“Well,” Sci-Twi began, “I was counting on you having better cuisine since you’re a princess!”
Sparkle nickered, her ears folding back. “Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean I’ll stop eating hay. Even Princess Celestia eats hay all the time!”
Sci-Twi’s eyes went wide. “You just made a horse sound!”
“Because we’re horses,” Sparkle replied, chuckling after. “We snort, we blow, we squeal, we neigh!”
Sci-Twi covered her mouth. “And what will you do if I end up horsing around?”
“Oh, don’t be ashamed!” Sparkle said, throwing a hoof off. “You’re a pony. Might as well get used to everything being a pony entails.”
Sci-Twi looked to the side. Then, closing her eyes:
Neigh!
And everyone looked at her.
Sci-Twi blushed. “Heh-heh-heh...yay?”
“Good for you!” Starlight said. “You’re catching on!”
She and all her friends shared a turn of laughter, half-teasing and half-congratulatory.
Rarity’s ears drooped as she refrained from cheering Sci-Twi. “I hope I’ll never have to do that.”
Rare gave her a little push on her back. “Sooner or later, you will, darling.”
“I won’t.”
“Nope. You will.”
Then, turning to her food, Sci-Twi levitated her spoon to scoop up the jelly—
“Wait a minute,” she said, inspecting the spoon up close as it glowed her pink. “This spoon seems awfully familiar.”
Sunset’s ears perked up and she looked her way. “Did you say, ‘spoon’?” Totting over to her: “Could that be one of your missing spoons?”
Sci-Twi gulped, rotating it around. “It has the same shape, the same details, the same...everything!”
“Uh, Sunset?” Sparkle asked, looking at the two of them gathering around the spoon. “What’s going on?”
Sunset levtiated the spoon out of Sci-Twi’s magical grasp, turning the glow red. “Last Saturday, almost all of Twilight’s spoons went missing.”
“You sure you checked every nook and cranny?” Sparkle asked.
“We checked it before we went to Sunset’s for the night,” Sci-Twi replied. “It wasn’t there, not even in my bedroom!”
Starlight stood up and sighed. “I know where the nurses get their spoons. Wait right here.”
And then she glowed her horn and disappeared.
Sparkle tapped the bed, whispering, “One, two, three—“
And Starlight reappeared, levitating a lanky brown pegasus with a spoon and a fork as his cutie mark. His teeth were clattering, he looked left and right and up and down, and his hooves and wings shook vigorously.
Starlight put him down gently.
“Tomato Marmalade?” Sparkle asked in a quiet voice, getting out of her chair to bend to his level. “You sould your silverware to Ponyville General yesterday, right?”
“Th-Th-That’s c-c-c-correct, y-your H-Highness!” he stuttered, then bowed down before the princess.
Sparkle rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to that; now stand up.”
He did so, his legs still shaky, about to fall apart.
“Where did you get the spoons?” Sparkle inquired, having stood up with him.
With the eyes of everyone on him, he raised his forehooves and cried, “Alright, I admit it!”
Starlight lowered her brow and made an accusing smile. “So you’ve been crossing the portal and stealing spoons to make a quick buck?! I knew it!”
“Wh-What portal?” he asked, surprised.
Starlight grinned a fake grin. “Nevermind what I just said, but...what are you admitting?”
“Don’t you see?!” Marmalade yelled. “The knives I’ve been selling all this time? They were made by me!” and pointed a wing at himself.
Sparkle looked confused. “And why’s that bad?”
“I didn’t wanna say anything because if they knew I made knives—“ he looked at his cutie mark “—they’d be saying I’m a liar, a fraud! They sell more than the spoons and forks which I don’t make—I didn’t even buy the spoons from yesterday ‘cause they appeared in my basement—but I hide a forge and a grinder inside my basement, too! I keep it secret by a dozen locks straight from the Crystal Empire, a-and—“
He fell down to the floor and sobbed.
Starlight levitated him out of the floor. Facing her friends: “I’ll counsel him in private. I’m sure this spoon situation is another adventure you girls are gonna handle.”
“Finally!” Dash flapped her wings, hovering out of her bed. “I’m not gonna stay here lying around!”
“Me, too!” Sci-Twi said, jumping to the floor on her four hooves. “Looks like stray Equestrian magic’s on the loose in our world,” and groaned. “Again.”
“Uh, are we going?” Rainbow asked, pointing at the friends she was familiar with and not the other-worldly versions.
“We’ll see,” Sparkle replied, sounding sturdy. Glowing the door open, “For now, we need everyone just in case, but first: doctor’s permission to leave!”
And all but Starlight and Marmalade ran out of the hospital room, Marmalade being comforted by Starlight’s pats on the back.
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Looks like Twilight's Lecture Mode is universally scary no matter what world she come from.
Well, finally someone's figured out the 'stray Equestrian magic' bit. Now how long before it gets even worse?
She didn't, actually.
I hate to sound discouraging, but what am I even reading anymore? This story started out interesting, but it's beginning to get a little hard to follow honestly. It jumps around a little too much and some of the dialogue just flat out does not mesh well together. Also there seems to be an issue on keeping who said what and which version of each pony is actually saying or doing anything.
And just what in the hay do missing spoons have to do with anything? And why is this pony suddenly involved or even aware of things that are not common knowledge, unless I missed something in one of the previous chapters nopony in Ponyville aside from the Mane 6 and Starlight should even know about the portal to the human world.
I really hate to say this, but I think this story has jumped the shark. At this point I'm not enjoying it anymore, it just feels too disjointed with too many things happening for the sake of some odd line of dialogue or character meet-up situation. And weren't Twittermites only something in Apple Bloom's dream? Granted I could be wrong about that, but I don't recall them being referred to outside of a dream sequence bringing into question if they are an actual thing or if they're some fevered nightmare dreamt up by AB.
Either way... not sure if I'll continue with this. The premise was strong, but it feels as if it is suffering a little too much from events happening which make very little sense in the context of the story, and are a really oddball conflict generating decision. I mean missing spoons? That just feels far too silly even for MLP.
9091619
Don't worry. You didn't sound discouraging. You sound honest and sincere.
Aside from the twittermite question (because they've been featured, albeit by Discord, recently), I agree with everything you said. Kind of counter-intuitive to say that when I'm planning to see the story through, but even while I'm writing this one out, there's always a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that something's wrong; now that you've said it, those errors stand out more to me than before, which is always better than me being ignorant.
Yeah, going back-and-forth with switching between the worlds is too jarring or too fast, having something more conspicuous and context-fitting than missing spoons would have been better, some of the dialogue does sound dry or disconnected, and the scales are unbalanced in favor of characterization over the plotline which shouldn't be the case in a fanfic because most of us already have a sense of who these characters are.
While I could justify more ponies knowing about the portal because it's that weird contraption in the middle of the library, there are scenes post-Rainbow Rocks which don't have the portal (first episode that comes to mind is Made in Manehattan) so perhaps Twilight could just move or teleport the portal away into the storage room or something.
I'll do my best to "unjump the shark", so to speak, and I'm still committed to finishing the story, but I can see where you're coming from.
Anyway, thank you for your constructive criticism. I appreciate it!
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"The library" As if Twilight would have just one.
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