Surges. Just about every newborn foal goes through them: episodes where their magic is randomly finding its way into the world, effects appearing with no understanding or control. Sires and dams whose foal matches their own race can usually counter enough to keep the nursery in one piece. But if you're, just for example, the proud (and rather desperate) unicorn first-time parents of a pegasus foal and you really need a night out of the house -- preferably one where the house is still intact when you get back -- you call on the Surge Protectors! for assistance.
It's assumed that if you were second-time parents, you would have done something intelligent.
Welcome to Simoon Duster's first night on the job. It's probably going to be her last.
(A stand-alone, no-prior-reading necessary part of the Triptych Continuum, which has its own TVTropes page and FIMFiction group. New members and trope edits welcome.)
Now with author Patreon and Ko-Fi pages.
So which family group started this I wonder? The swirl noses or kink tails? Then again this type of scam seems to be common in Equestria because they are very nessary. Overall great one shot and I would enjoy more stories if qualified ponies could be found and their adventures in dealing with rambunctious foals. Now I had the image of somepony dealing with Flurry Heart.
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Was that Flim or Flam re-writing that manual? Marvelous story, I enjoyed every moment of it.
"Capitalism is God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor."
Can't imagine where the poverty line in Equestria is.
That was awsome. I would have loved to read the play by play of the battle. Or Luna chewing out the pony re-writing the manual.
Flurry Heart, a baby alicorn, would require at least one of each species or maybe auntie Twilight to help babysit. Maybe the Bearers too... That would look like WW3 after a few moon
WOW!
Estee, I love you. :D Your stories make me smile. All the damn time.
...Except during the sad parts. But there weren't any sad parts in this!
Your stories make me feel the appropriate emotion required for the situation, thus increasing my enjoyment of them. There. That works.
You have a highly developed knowledge of Equestrian magic.
Are you sure you aren't a pony?
Very nice (and true) story!
Whoo! Nice mixing of Simoom scenes with Manual Excerpts at the right points! ... Great that everything worked out, in the end!
That ending~! I hope Simmon got paid well, after all this...
I guess it's the mom who's the lawyer?
And what's the dad's occupation? *shrugs*
Are the Hoovmat segments building up to the government taking over Hoovmat, to protect the populace?? *shrugs*
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Typo:
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I’m a little surprised the first words that Simoon said to the parents when they returned wasn’t “Get this overpowered little humidity and static freak some wing sleeves!”
But “Please sue my boss” is a pretty good runner up.
(I am disappointed in myself that it took so long to figure that it was a subsidiary of Hoovmat Suits.)
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I'm guessing that the family got enough in the lawsuit to repair and infant-proof the house, and both Gale and Simoon now have at least a semester's worth of college tuition money banked.
"So as Simoon understand it"
"So as Simoon understood it"?
"which would led you to believe"
"which would lead you to believe"?
(I didn't bring in the color and underlining on that one.)
"Gale had foundsupport, and so the flaps"
"Gale had found support, and so the flaps"?
Hah. :D
This line set off alarm bells in my head that I didn't even know I had! Who looks at that line and doesn't immediately flee through the nearest window?
Great story!
What a cute and sweet story. The company's a joke, but I could tell it was the hoovemat scammers as soon as it started mentioning the main business this venture was accompanying. And the lawsuits. The lawsuits were a good giveaway. Ha, I love the implications that Dam was the clerk/lawyer on duty supervising Asshat Rewriter.
I like Simoon, what quick little glimpses we get of her. You always pack so much thought into your characters that I can't help but gain some investment in them even for a quick gag story like this. It helps that it's a part of the continuum, makes me excited to be able to spot her again in the future.
This makes me curious if ponies also have the Terrible Twos in addition to surges. They finally get the magic part calmed down only for the question flood to ensue.
Anyway, thanks for the story Estee. Always good to hear from you.
The whole idea of infant surges certainly explains why Cadence and Shining Armor looked so worn out when they came to visit Twilight.
Excellent story, as per usual. And I even learned a new word!
Saw the story in Featured (Congratulations by the way!), read the description, instantly thought of the Jack-jack attack short. I'm in for a treat, hopefully!
After reading this, I now believe that all the Electricians I have called to my family's house belong to a subsidiary owned by Surge Protectors!
There are charlatans in every industry. And it hurts when they wreck your house... Sometimes the damage is from the inability of a babysitter to protect against the surges of a newborn pegasus foal. Other times, it is when an electrician has electrified your bathroom doorframe with mains voltage. Zap! Ow. Yes, I did survive the jolt.
Nice work as always, Estee !!
An enjoyable side story :)
The title made me think of a pony electrician, so this felt weird.
One thing I do notice is that nopony has any idea of what Earth Ponies are actually capable of......which is just what they want!
Nice to see some lawsuits in the Continuum can both be for a good cause and actually succeed in their goal.
I'd be surprised if the earth ponies ever got called in. Nopony's ever lonely when they have an earth foal. There's no debating it.
Yikes. What did she do to him to deserve that kind of reaction?
Oh. Well, now you can tell I'm commenting as I go.
I actually gasped at the Marey Pop-Ins. That one hurt.
And it was here where I realized just who we were dealing with.
Give her a few years; she's not quite in the target audience yet. (And I do have to wonder if she heard that after moving to Equestria or if the stories have spread as far as Saddle Arabia.)
At first I thought it was strangely generous of the court-appointed supervisor to let the typesetter put in that em dash before getting dragged off again. Then I got to the next part of the sentence. Brilliant work in tying it all together, and in serving a generous portion of just desserts. Parasitic exploitation only gets you so far once the host has noticed you. That company's management is about as intelligent as the average changeling queen when it comes to making wise decisions and respecting the intelligence and dignity of their prey.
And clearly, in order for ponies to survive long enough on this deathworld to develop sapience, they had to redefine the term "killer instinct." (Also, I'd say a high-profile lawsuit makes for one hell of a tip.)
Thank you for another great story.
I want to guess she's a reference to something, but I don't know what. She doesn't seem like a ponification of Kari McKeen, at any rate.
You are now hearing the manual in the voice of Cave Johnson. (Or at least, you are if you've played enough of Portal 2 or watched from among the right part of someone else's playthrough of Portal 2.) You're welcome.
So when life in Equestria shimmers and shines... that might be lightning.
Also, I'd like to see fanart of Simoon by someone. Maybe a before and after.
Plenty of people are posting Kari, so I'm going against the grain here.
If I have an issue with the corporations you write, along with quite a lot of your OC characters, it’s that they violate the prime, the BASIC, rule of the old city. “If you're incompetent you have to be honest, and if you're crooked you have to be clever”.
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Have you seen (insert well-known business here)?
9425902 Kari was my first thought too.
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ASML holdings? They make 67% of all the machines on the planet that make microchips, they almost singlehandedly uphold Moore’s Law through their research into making transistors smaller. They are enormously boring, their CEO may be the dullest man on earth in the way only a Dutchman can be, but he walks the floor, takes public transport to work, and looks after his employees. They are honest and clever, and I like them. Have faith in very dull men who spend all day working with machinery.
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Unfortunately in the modern era all of that can be overcome with good P.R. spin, and extensive government lobbying/political donations.
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Yeah, but Estee lives in the United States, Inc.
A very good story. And I should have picked up that it was Hoovmat when they mentioned their primary product, but I was a bit slow on the uptake.
Either way, another good piece of quality Estee comedy. I hope that this is a signal of some semblance of peace making its way into your life.
Naturally it'd be the Gala story that ponies know.
this reminded me of a story on a website called "the daily WTF" where a company tried to save expenses by hiring just-graduated students instead of programming experts, because "a code-monkey is a code-monkey is a code-monkey."
if ANY of the managers had had ANY programming experience they would have known that was a terrible idea.
if i remember, the resulting product was so bad that they went bankrupt before they could finish debugging it.
also, this scene:
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It also explains why as rulers of a nation with countless responsibilities they couldn't pass off the duties to nannies. It takes another alicorn and a unicorn whose special talent is shields strong enough to protect an entire city to handle her.
At least until Sunburst discovered Fledgling's Forbearance. But note that spell took both Twilight and Starlight working together to cast.*
So in theory any family in Equestria doesn't have too worry about infant surges anymore provided they have two of the most powerful and skilled spellcasters in generations on hoof to cast it for them.
*I think if that spell ever turns up in Estee's canon it will turn out Flurry's sheer power was incidental. The spell is just that hard to cast normally.
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How was rhe foal spell hard to cast? All we saw was sunburst finding said spellbiom got them. Or am I missing something? Also I know nothing about this fic universe
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My memory got confused with the restoration of the Crystal Heart and forgot the casting of the spell to settle down Flurry's magic happened off screen.
That still leaves the spell to be as difficult to cast as Estee wants for her verse.
So I suppose it depends on what she finds funnier. More foal surge antics or Sunburst having to deal with practically being worshipped as a messiah by the parents of Equestria.
Reading through the story, I honestly expected the parent company to be Barneigh's. We haven't heard from Hoofmat in a while, after all.
Either way, I'm pretty sure I've worked for that company in the past.
Anyone else feel like its one pony that makes every single business/corporate decision in Equestria?
Magazine subscriptions, the slate, insurance, hotels, and this business.
Like is there one Pony every single business calls in to make their business plan and he makes the same plan over and over again, makes bank, and leaves. Because every single business/monetary story in this universe plays exactly the freaking same.
Excellent work, as per usual.
I have had enough exposure to babies over the years (sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces, family friends - I was basically the oldest child out of all the family and circle of friends - and Mum's brief stint as a child-minder) to have no illusions about babies. Evil little buggers, are babies.
Which is, incidently, why I get on with them so well.
(in relatively short doses, at least)
Everyponys dismisses Earth Ponies ability to grow crops. In a war I would bet on the people who had control of the food not the ones who could fly or shoot lasers/teleport/etc.
You know, if they ever get access to plastic, and it does what it does in your Monster Girl story, they'd actually have a cheap way of handling surges.
I terrify children.
I suspect it's the fact that I tend to experiment on them.
Oh come on, they heal MUCH faster than adults!
Sure sometimes you end up with a 'Mitty', but it's all for SCIENCE!!
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reminds me of a chapter in that crazy "MLP time loops" collab, where Applejack wound up in the world of "avatar the last air-bender" and became an "Earth-bender"!
I could have really enjoyed this, only I kept getting so *angry* at the business responsible for this, because I kept thinking 'And how many fucking companies actually think like this!'
My nine-month-old granddaughter is like this. She loves to dig her fingernails into you, then cackle...cackle as you yell. There's no freakin' way she didn't do that on purpose.
Don't let anyone tell you "babies don't know what they're doing."
Yes. Yes, they do.
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Have you ever taken a look at our own world?
Like how Nestlé is fighting a dirty war for the right to drain as much water from as many aquifers as they please and destroy water tables? Or the pharmaceutical companies that do things like raise the price on EpiPen from $2 to $600? Or dentists that recommend full drill clean and cap/fill when a tooth just needs a bit of sealant? Or Apple putting a third, $5 camera on the same phone and selling the "completely new model" for $500 over the price of the previous model which was already $700 over the price of an Android phone it's in fact inferior to?
You've never noticed how almost every company does extremely shady shit to get you to part with an extra dollar?
Some critique here: on black-and-white e-readers (which a lot of e-readers are) there is no discernable difference (if any at all) between the red bits and the normal text. I don't expect you to go back and change this one, but should you do a similar thing in the future, maybe you could use something that makes this difference more clear on screens like that (I'd suggest underlining, but that was already used). Could be in a separate chapter or something, since 99% of the readers will be on computer screens anyway.
So reading this again - is the manual author a pegasus? Clearly he's not an earth pony, and he seems to use the word "unicorn" about his overseer a bit more pejoratively than you'd expect if they were tribemates.
(Certainly, the earth ponies among the Surge Protectors would have a unique perspective... if there are any. I wonder if some entrepreneurial ones might buy it out? Given the way businesspony minds are often seen as working in the Continuum, I'm sure there are some ponies out there for whom the idea of reinforcing the Secret and turning a profit at the same time is such an obviously great idea they'd refuse to beleive they didn't think of it first.)
(Actually, to be honest, the competence of the average pony - or lack thereof - sometimes shown in your stories does make the Secret a bit more unbelievable. I guess it's cause a lot of the stories are less serious than Triptych... oh well, it can't be helped at this point. Both elements are part of the unmistakable Estee style.)