In Our Loving Memory

by Comma Typer

Chapter 2

"Hurry up, Keepie! You don't want to be late for the first day of school, do you?”

“Numph, Mrom’!”

It was hard to chow down the massive breakfast Mom had made: a bowl of cereal and a bowl of oatmeal along with enough orange juice to fill a car. He'd rather have coffee, but Dad had said it was an adult drink that wouldn’t be kind to his colt body—and, no, Dad wasn’t going to change his mind just because they're ponies. “But we have different stomachs now!” was an argument that hadn’t worked on Dad.

He did his best to finish everything though. It was two minutes until 6:50, and he didn't want to be late for the bus, especially on the first day. The early sunshine urged him on while Mom washed Dad’s dishes with her wings.

“Honey, I'm going!”

That was Dad, the gray Earth pony trotting down the stairs while wrapping a tie around his neck with a free hoof. A bit of a struggle but he managed. Dad had to look presentable for that fancy Filthy Rich from Ponyville. It’d been good to hear about a stallion from the other side wishing to help Earth recover with his business money.

The parents exchanged a hug and kiss, and after wishing his son well for the day, Dad was out of here. At least the couple were still adorable when they did lovey-dovey things as ponies. Too bad Keep himself couldn't say goodbye back; his mouth was full.

Seconds ticked by on the clock. Seeing that both of his huge bowls were only half empty, Keep stood up and abandoned his new favorite foods; he had to thank grain-loving pony tastes for his new love for cereal and oatmeal.

“Mom, I gotta go!” Keep yelled. “Sorry for the leftovers!”

Whatever she said back, he didn’t hear her response. His eyes were locked in on the school bag lying by the front door.

He picked them up with his horn, still getting the hang of unicorn magic. Pony Vlogs With Sunset on TackTube was a helping hoof over the extended vacation. It was good that she wasn’t just a unicorn but also born a unicorn over in the magic world. Constantly asking for tips on “how to pony” and “how to magic” from unicorns older than him helped too even when his parents kept apologizing to the strangers about their curious colt and his too many questions.

The bags were slung around his barrel. The native ponies called them saddle bags. It felt weird having lumped on his back like that, but this was no time to mull over item names.

A screeching honk blared outside.

“Yagh!” Keep scampered to the door, bag only half-zipped. “He’s too early!”

The colt the door and almost went out, but one thought stopped him: Mom. He galloped back over to her in the kitchen, bag bobbing about, and he jumped into her loving embrace.

“Love you, Ma’!” he chirped.

“Love you too, son!” she chirped back before sneaking a peck on the cheek. “Have a nice day in school, okay?”

“Okay, gotcha’, bye!”

Keep bolted through the door and into the outside, letting the morning breeze flow through his mane. The bus had parked on the road, noisy and rumbling with its clattering engine. Its doors slid open for the foal and he cantered inside, walking up the steps.

“There you go, kiddo!” bellowed the cat creature on the chair—an Abyssinian, if he remembered correctly. The voice told him it was Mister Munchkin. Keep had known the driver ever since first grade, and, apparently, the change hadn’t fazed the cat-loving busman—or, rather, buscat.

“And that’s the last one!” Munchkin hollered to all the children at the back. “We’re off to school, everybody!”

The bus got moving again, and Keep turned to the rest of the bus. Amid the roar of chatter, clatter, and the driver telling everyone for the hundredth time to stay on their seats, he saw all-new faces for busmates old and new.

Young creatures of all kinds sat on their seats. Over there at the back, a pair of griffon twins boasted to each other on who flew better. Closer to the middle, a yak calf played with some building blocks, making sure they wouldn’t fall apart with every road bump. Right behind Munchkin, a Crystal foal was literally shining with the sunlight outside, dazzling onlookers with his glassy gemstone coat.

“Hey, Keep! Over here!”

He whirled around to see Burnt Alloy waving at him. Embarrassing for poor Keep; she was right beside him the whole time. Maybe she’d been trying to catch his attention for the past ten seconds and he’d played deaf without knowing it.

The embarrassment disappeared, however, when he saw all his closest friends seated together. Thistle the deer that was blonde, Spring Bud the buffalo that still wore his sport headband, and Burnt Alloy the pegasus with her orange curls intact in her mane—all of them scooted themselves and their bags aside to give Keep space.

“How’s things, Keeps?” Thistle asked as the colt sat down beside him. “We missed you at Zoom’s house last night!”

“Forgot to tell you about Mom dragging me to the bookstore,” Keep replied with a cross of his hooves. “Buying school supplies at the last minute? Ugh.”

“Yeah, go tell your mother to do better than that!” chimed in Bud before checking his own bag in case he’d missed anything. “Anywho, ready for today?”

Keep chuckled nervously before gazing upon the floor.

“I… don’t know.”

It had only been a few months since The Change happened, but checking the neighborhood out to people watch—or, now, creature watch—had never tired him. Now, it was exciting too since the world was new again. He saw pegasi pushing and pulling clouds around in the sky like cargo. Earth ponies were tending to their flowery lawns or busying themselves in opening their businesses for the morning. Unicorns just like him, with their glowing horns, using their magic to levitate stuff or to cast spells on things. There was the sun and the uncanny knowledge that the high school on the other side of town housed the sun-mover herself.

“I guess I’m more ready than not,” finished Keep, brandishing a smile for the new day.

Talk carried on to other stuff as he caught up with his friends and their lives after the Change. After she got over her strange new form, Alloy had turned to excitement over her ability to fly. She’d flown around with her fresh pair of wings too many times to count despite her parents being afraid she might fall and hurt herself. Now, she was planning to ask around what her anvil cutie mark meant. The filly still hadn’t figured it out after a few months, but so did a lot of other foals like her and like him.

Bud, unsure about what being a buffalo meant to him, kept alive his dream to be an athlete, preferably a long-distance runner. He also had another, cooler, option: he could be a professional parkour artist. Checking up awesome parkour videos online had goaded him there.

As for Thistle, he was also unsure like Bud, pondering about what to do as some kind of nature-magic deer. He said his aunt and uncle were going to accompany him to Equestria. There, he would meet the native deer in the forest and discover what his deer potential could be.

A couple minutes later, school was in view. Many gawked out the window to see the place sparkling under the morning light. A couple workponies were putting the finishing touches on the gloss-over, giving the place a shiny new look for a shiny new school year. Students and teachers alike would be coming here in shiny new forms complete with shiny new magic running amok.

Everyone filed out of the bus, rushing out on their hooves and feet and paws and wings and other new appendages to the front yard. The playground teemed with kids testing out the Equestrian-friendly equipment. Already, pegasi and other flying creatures were testing how fast a merry-go-round can go with wingpower on their side.

Others entered the school immediately, and Keep and company decided to join them.

The halls were still the same as before, so it was the students and teachers crowding the corridors that lulled Keep and gave him fuzzy wonder. Most of them were ponies, with other species popping in and out of sight every few seconds. Unicorn teachers were floating their notes around and comparing them with each other’s, and a pegasus guard stood by in the corner, entertaining foals with his speech about what his armor was made of—that got Alloy’s attention for sure. Several students also gathered around another unicorn teacher, this one exuding a different sort of aura with her young white mane. Keep couldn’t exactly tell what made her just feel different, but he shrugged it off.

“You guys got the same homeroom?” Bud asked. “Still got old Miss Petunia from the past four years.”

“Got her too,” said Thistle.

The two exchanged hoofbumps, knowing they’d be in the same classes for most of the day. Thistle then turned to Keep and Alloy beside him. “And I guess both of you too, right?”

“Yeah.” Keep nodded to Alloy, heading the conversation to her. “Makes the four of us, right?”

“Yup!” cheeped Alloy, bouncing with a flap of her wings. “I want it to stay that way forever!”

As if on cue, the bell rang. Everyone scrambled to their schedule-described starting places. The four friends kept close through the pony crowds clogging the hallways, snaking through whatever openings they found in the herd.

A few minutes' trot landed them in their designated homeroom. It was a typical classroom with the standard fare of student desks, teacher's table, and chalkboard. But, while they could've been bored with just the same boring classroom, they instead joined the gatherings of friends and new arrivals, They were conducted by ponies and other creatures; they recognized their friends’ voices and names, impressed with what their peers had turned into, and caught up with each other’s lives since the Change, getting to know their new classmates and hoping to become friends with them too. Keep laughed with Cherry Cake who he learned had a pony cherry farmer come over from the other side and offered her family free cherry pastries, and he warmed up to Doldina, a changeling transfer from Manehattan who'd been scared to death at her shapeshifting abilities at first but now was quite comfortable with it. The changeling even showed her transforming powers off by turning herself into Alloy, much to the filly's surprise.

As always, the teacher came in just as the bell rang again. Holding her books on her head and ambling to the desk, rose-maned Miss Tulip had a calm presence that many respected. Everyone had gone quiet upon her arrival; only a few stubborn foals in the back continuing their noise in low whispers.

Tulip put her stuff down and huffed a sigh. It usually didn’t take this long for her to get things started in the morning. She shut her eyes too and kept them closed for good while, taking extra breaths.

Then she put on a good smile and declared, “Good morning class!” Her voice had the same cheerfulness it'd had since kindergarten; at least that hadn’t changed too. “How was your vacation over the summer?” she went on.

What she got was silence. There was an elephant in the room and no one wanted to talk about it.

Or almost everyone. A flighty pegasus shot his hoof to the air and his wings flared in glee. “All the fairy tales are true now!”

The teacher managed a smile, warding off the strange stares the excited pegasus got. “Yes, Nimble, there’s that!”

She cleared her throat and leaned her head to the side, looking down on him cutely. “However, even though those fairy tales are now true and what not, it’s still important to continue learning the wonderful things that this world has to offer.”

Nimble's grin faltered as his classmates giggled.

Miss Tulip stepped forward, getting closer to the class she was going to be with for the next nine months.

“So, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cottage Tulip—you can call me Miss Tulip—and I’ll be your homeroom teacher for you dear fourth-graders! I’ll talk a little about myself, and then we can have everyone introduce themselves to the whole class one by one. And in song, no less!...”

Everyone groaned at that. They didn’t feel up to singing this morning.

~ ~ ~

Plenty were disappointed that school was the same old same old. Classes like math and physics were old stallions that refused to die even though there’s literal magic everywhere. Who cared about how the sun orbited the Earth these days? That Celestia pony is doing it all by herself with magic. None of those fancy-schmancy equations, please!

The morning subjects came and went. There was geometry, physics, and fun home economics where everyone learned how to bake pies, cakes, and other pastries. At least that one was fun.

By recess, Keep was recovering from the hard work by eating with his friends in the cafeteria. Thistle was still griping from having a bowl of wet cookie dough spilled on his antlers, and Bud was still laughing at the deer's misfortunes. Alloy was sloppily slurping her bowl of salad like it was the leaves and dressing of legends.

“It’s your fault anyway!” Thistle growled, pointing hooves at the buffalo.

“Nah, that was all on you!” Bud barked back. “You deserve it for pranking Rain Check like that!”

“Nuh-uh! It's your fault for distracting me!”

“No, it’s your fault for thinking I was distracting you!”

With everyone on the table occupied, Keep turned his attention elsewhere. Most of the tables here were full of schoolmates eating their snacks and lunches. The food station had a short line with servers levitating food from display to tray. The portions were mostly vegetables; a few servings of meat were set aside for the carnivores among the kids. Keep didn’t care for meat, however, as the heavenly scent of freshly grilled hay filled the air. Although he gobbled up two hayburgers already, the irresistible hay scent drove him to wanting more.

It still felt weird though, the thought of eating hay straight from the plate, even more so eating without a fork or a knife or even a spoon. Just bend and eat with your mouth. No one was going to mind. This was how things were now.

“Hey! Get back here!”

Heads turned to the shouting teacher. It was Missis Step, galloping after a few foals flying away from her. She almost tripped on the floor in the chase, but caught herself right beside Keep, her figure looming over him while catching her breath. She muttered something—Keep didn't know what—and glanced at her own wings with a groan. The teacher then took off to the air, flying clumsily after the runaway fliers and shouting after them.

After recess were the special Equestrian classes tailored and suited for each species. Thistle and Bud went to their deer and buffalo classes, while Alloy's pegasus classes happened right beside Keep's classroom for unicorns.

Inside his designated room, Keep saw the teacher he was assigned to. It was that same mystical mare with the young white mane from before: Silver Lining, a native Equestrian just like Sunset, with more than ten years of teaching native-born colts and fillies from the other side of the portals. Just like from before the first bell, several students huddled around her in the classroom, listening to her speak about her home world.

“Good day to you, class!” Silver said when everyone was called for. Her voice sounded like shiny silver too.

It was fun to be under her tutelage. She was one of the cool teachers, the ones that can fit in with the foals and be their celebrity. Once the lecture was done, she started magic exercises and practice for the students, and that only made them pester her more with questions about herself and her home. They asked questions like, “What it's like to be a pony all your life?” or “How did you live in a world full of magic and legends?” She entertained them in between exercises, regaling them with tales of her life in Equestria: growing up and being taught how to use magic from her parents and her teachers, discovering her own cutie mark on her own fateful day, being fascinated in her professional study of magic, and also now training to become a mage on the side. Needless to say, she captivated everypony in class.

It was fun to think about becoming a unicorn wizard. Just a dozen weeks ago, neither of those two words made any real-life sense. Strange to imagine a wizard bringing a briefcase to work like a nine-to-five businesspony, but still.

Sadly, unicorn class had to end and give way to history.

Keep hesitated at that one. It wasn’t really the hardest class, but it was certainly the most boring. At least math sometimes felt like puzzle-solving, felt like extremely difficult and heart-breaking puzzle-solving. This? He was no stranger to drooling in history more than a hoofful of times last year and the year before that and all the years before that.

In came Mister Yore. He was ancient history himself thanks to his many wrinkles, his almost-gone gray strands of mane, and his dull round glasses. That big stack of books on his back was enough to kill somepony out of boredom. Overall, his appearance oozed yawn. Some already moaned in doom at his appearance.

Keep came prepared with heavy eyes, muddled brain, and light-headed feelings. It was going to be another hour of memorizing meaningless dates and years and places and names and other random things. Welcome to Dullsville.

True enough, when the lecture got going, it felt as bland and useless as expected. Keep and all the other poor students underwent the torture of tantalizing speech as Mister Yore gabbed on about the beginnings of human civilization with humans moving away from hunting and gathering, humans forming farms by the riversides and planting crops, humans interacting and gathering to form communities that would father nations and empires like that of Alexenophon the Great of Fleece...

Keep didn’t know it, but his ears stood up.

Sure, Yore sounded as fascinating as an empty cardboard box or a serving of nachos without the salsa. Mister sure sounded less excited to be a pony than to talk about what dead nameless humans did thousands of years away from now.

But maybe humans themselves were the rub. The illustrations and pictures on his textbook, grayscaled to save on costs, weren't unrelatable faces and names this time. They were exotic creatures, aliens even… and Keep used to be one of them.

Ditch the dates and the names to cram into the head. What did go on back then for this extinct species?

Out the window he looked, and with the sky as his mental backdrop, he let his thoughts piece together a picture of ancient life, ancient human life, in his mind’s eye. In that painting, humans planted seeds and harvested the fruit of the fields. Square homes made of clay or mortar or something else rose in the distance, housing a tiny town or a considerable city. Big loud crowds assembled around the watering well, catching up with everybody else’s lives as they drew up water by the bucket. Marketplaces crawling with long-clothed citizens because it’s the ancient times and the ancient times liked their long robes. Kids gathered by the village elder to listen to nuggets and stories of wisdom. Wars between tribes and their alliances raged on as their leaders schemed behind the scenes with their spears and arrows.

Maybe just a bit of all that. A bit of reading ahead to satisfy his curiosity, make his mind pictures and paintings a bit more correct. Maybe pay attention a bit more to whatever piece of trivia he’d get. Maybe share it all to his friends—

Keep shuddered.

No.

It shouldn’t be that way. History shouldn’t be doing a 180 on him and suddenly become amazing. Yore was still the same stale teacher from last year and the year before and the year before that. It’s not like he was teaching anything completely different; just a few more big words because it’s the next grade. What did Yore do to earn his respect anyway?

What Keep had just imagined wasn’t all that bad, yet it was supposed to be boring.

The colt would trouble himself like that for the rest of the class.

~ ~ ~

The final bell rung and the first day of school ended by four o’ clock. Ponies and other creatures walked or flew their way out the front doors, itching to chat or frolic in the local playground. There, griffons walked on top of monkey bars, ponies dropped down the slides, and yaks and buffalo played on the sturdiest seesaws Canterlot had to offer.

After waving goodbye to his friends, Keep ran off to the sidewalk and, sure enough, Mom arrived just as he left school. From the sky too, having just landed and folded her wings.

“Huh, right on time!” Mom cried out before waving at him with her wings.

She opened a wing to take her son under—her cream-colored feathers shielding him—and so they traveled home. They trotted on the sidewalk and across the streets, drinking in the sights and sounds of an equine Canterlot City as it entered nightlife hours and the big lights turned out for the evening ahead.

They chatted about how school went. It was great, he said, meeting old friends and making new ones. Of course, Miss Silver Lining being from Equestria was pretty cool too, so he told Mom about that as well. She said she’d like to hear more about the new teacher over supper.

They were home half an hour later, sunset tinting all things orange. It turned out Dad was home early also, surprising Mom with his own dinner: canned beans. Lots and lots of canned beans. Mom, being the great cook she was, must’ve done her best not to smack him over the head about it.

Thus, they had heaps of steaming hot beans for supper as Keep related the events of his first school day as a pony. It’d been awesome, actually. Thistle and Bud and Alloy were back in action and doing fine with their new bodies and abilities, having Doldina as the cool changeling classmate was something great to look forward to, and sampling the amazing cafeteria food only made the beans he was eating tastier.

“We did have fun with classes too. We cooked a lot in HE and I made my own tarts! Then, we had unicorn classes with somepony from the other side—Miss Lining—and she’s awesome too! Thanks to her, I could levitate even bigger stuff now! Watch!”

The whole table glowed and floated at once, plates and glasses rattling in his wobbly grip. His parents yelped at the surprise magic, thankful the tableware didn’t fall off.

Keep gently put the table back down as quickly as he put it up, putting up a shamefaced smile for Mom and Dad. “Um... uh, whoops!”

While Mom told him to be more careful next time, Dad just shrugged it off. “So what else did you do there?” he asked, going on like nothing had happened.

The colt began, “Well... actually, I... um...”

Dad nudged him on the shoulder, an eager grin on his face. “What? Gotta spit it out sometime, sonny!”

A wave of embarrassment hit Keep, but he charged onward anyway. “Um... I was... you won't believe it but in history—”

Mentally slapped himself. If only he could take that word back. He’d said it, and those eyes were drilling into him. They begged for the truth about his history class, and they were going to have it whether he liked it or not.

“Uh… I… somehow—“

He gulped, stretched the hair on the neck, breathed a little slower. Anything to stall for time, but those expectant stares pressured him.

So he blurted out in a tiny whisper, lips puckered in pure distilled awkwardness, “I… I-I like history now.”

Keep ended it with a sheepish smile and a pair of eyes shut tight, afraid of what his parents might say. He didn’t like breaking the status quo. He shouldn’t be liking history, but now he trapped himself between Mom and Dad. They’d probably be happy about it, but that would only make things even more awkward.

As for the parents themselves, they took a while to process that.

“So... that's a start,” muttered Mom, leaning back in thought. “At least you won't be getting an F with that attitude. What made you interested in it all of a sudden?”

He couldn’t believe he was sweating about history, but here he was, shivering after a confession like this. “Y-yeah... I'm not really sure. Maybe it's because we start history with... y-you know… the species that we, um—“

“Humans?” she suggested.

There it was. It left him a moment to contemplate, to look down on his plate half-full and let his mind brew over that vague, mysterious why which he didn’t know. His cheeks blushed; it was embarrassing to not know the why. Did Yore brainwash him? Wasn’t impossible. Yore was a unicorn, so it didn’t seem too far-fetched.

Later on, Mom and Dad would watch the news and invite him to join in and witness more developments about this strange new world. There’d be no mention of history class at all. He would be free from history’s clutches and things would go back to normal.

For now, though, it was just Keep, his food, and his self-pondering self, wondering where it’d all gone wrong.

---

In the present, soap and water coursed through the sink’s dishes when Keep heard his phone ring from across the living room. The ringtone was the boisterous tolling of an alarm clock waking up a million ponies.

He strode to the other side to pick it up, never looking at the caller’s name. “'Yello?”

“Morning, Keeps!”

He blushed. The heart fluttered and his ears straightened up.

“Same to you, Alloy!” Keep replied as lively as he could be. “Why’re you calling me so early? Oh, let me guess: you want to wish me good luck for the big day today, no?”

“Hey! Give this mare a chance to surprise you!”

”Ha! Not today, Alloy!”

“Oh, come on!… he-he.” Had to admit, her chuckle never got old.

“Alright, enough with trying to one-up me,” Keep said, leaning on the wall. “How’s the farrier business going?”

It’d turned out that a part of her talent was fashioning durable, sturdy horseshoes for all shapes, sizes, and ages. Those horseshoes were forged and hammered with only the best of metals and with only the best of blacksmith talent: hers. The job fit her cutie mark after some time in her fillyhood trying to find out what it meant.

“I’m expecting tons of foals to get shoed for the first time,” Alloy replied, her tone undeniably blithe. “It’s always like that around this time of the year, but I never get tired of seeing foals get the hoof care they need.”

And it was true. Keep could repeat the story in his head: During a lazy weekend, young Alloy tried making a horseshoe because it was a horse thing. However, after buying a horseshoe kit for cheap and tinkering with it, she discovered that she can help others like her get used to their newfound hooves by crafting more horseshoes and being a junior farrier over weekends. The rest was history.

“Yeah… it won’t hold back our Sweet Snacks dinner date though, right?” Keep then asked, already imagining him and her in the café like it was already sundown.

“Doesn’t look like it, so see you soon!… Oh, and show ‘em up out there, okay?”

“You already wished me good luck, but I’ll take it!”

“Wait, wha—oh, right! He-he-he!”

The call ended before he could say goodbye, but her chuckle reminded him again of elementary days. Fortunately, they’d stayed classmates up through high school, remained good neighbors and friends since then, and, with romance in the air, budding lovers too. It showed with the pony that adorned his phone’s home screen: Burnt Alloy, a beautiful mare laughing with him by a lake.

Keep looked at his phone’s clock. It was a few minutes until seven. Assembly proper would begin at ten to eight, so he still had lots of time to get everything else ready: finish the dishes, brush his teeth, lock up the house.

When the rest of his chores were done, he left home and breathed the fresh air outside, ready to take on the world.

Comments

[Emtu]

Already, pegasi and other flying creatures were testing how fast a merry-go-round can go with wingpower on their side.

Only one word comes to mind when I read this sentence.
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