Marshmallow Dreams

by Halira

Chapter 75: Last Day on Earth

"So, this will be your last questioning session before going to Equestria since we weren't planning on doing one tomorrow night," Phobia Remedy said. Right now, we were sitting in nothingness, and Phobia Remedy was a pegasus… and looked strangely younger, somehow, like she could be my roommate. "I want to do something a little different. I want to talk about family—very casually."

I perked my ears. With all the stuff going in with Russell and his parents, the idea of family had been in my mind too. "Okay, I feel great talking about the subject."

She smiled at me. "Good. Let me start by saying that, as you may have noticed, all Dreamwardens consider one another siblings. There is some disagreement over Luna's status among us since my younger siblings, Arbiter and Avtandil, feel like she is an outsider, and I wouldn't be surprised if you or whoever is chosen feels the same, but the rest of us feel like she is our mother."

"And whoever is chosen will be your younger siblings too," I said, confirming I had it right. "You and Miss Seapony and all the rest would be my big sisters and big brothers."

"That is correct," she said with a nod. "However, that status can get complicated."

I blinked. "Um, it seems straightforward enough."

"Arbiter happens to have been several months older than me when she was alive," Phobia Remedy replied.

I frowned. "Okay...but she is younger than you in terms of being a Dreamwarden, so she's your little sister because of that. I got it. Not complicated."

"She had also been married to my mother, which technically made her my stepmother," Phobia said, not looking an eye.

I frowned. "Alright… that sounds like something you need to take to a reality tv show or talk show. You could make a lot of money."

Phobia smirked. "And since all Dreamwardens consider themselves siblings, I would consider Yinyu's foals to be my nephews and niece. The colts have all been adopted by my mother."

"Who is also your sister-in-law…." I said slowly.

"Well, not legally, but unofficial, yes," Phobia replied.

"So your adopted brothers are also your nephews," I said, following the logic. Then I blinked. "Does that mean that if I become Dreamwarden, that Lántiān would be considered my niece?"

"Unofficially, yes," Phobia said with a nod.

I tried to see how tangled this web got. "And if Arbiter is your sister and is married to your mother, does that make you your own niece?"

Phobia chewed on her lip. "I suppose so."

I sat down. "My head hurts."

Phobia Remedy smirked. "And I would be both your sister and niece."

I gave her a flat look. "You're doing this on purpose!"

She chuckled. "People think I have no sense of humor, but it is merely an odd sense of humor. I enjoy watching people squirm when there is no fear involved. Something is amusing about that kind of discomfort."

"Everybody has to find a way to laugh, I guess," I replied, bemused. "Is that all the family stuff you wanted to talk about?"

She shook her head. "No, that was me taking an opportunity to get a laugh at your expense, which worked out rather well. I wanted to talk about seeing family for who they are and how important they are to us."

I pursed my lips. "I know about how you guard them so they can't be used against you, but what do you mean by who they are?"

Phobia raised a wing, and a picture of Sunset Blessing appeared. "Let me start by discussing my own, beginning with my most infamous family member, my mother."

The Dreamwarden got up and walked across the nothingness to inspect the image more closely. "My mother is a good mare, but that has not always been the case, and even now, she has some major failings—primarily her inability to keep her nose out of things. At no point did I stop loving and valuing my mother, even when she could not be rightfully called a good person, but I have never let my love for her cloud my ability to see who she was—even if some people believe that I did. I love my mother. I want to keep my mother safe. I want my kids and future grandkids to know her and love her as I do. Yet I am not so foolish as to fully trust my mother."

"Why would you not trust her if she is good?" I asked in confusion.

"Because she can't let go of being involved in things. It goes too much against her self-importance," Phobia said as she shook her head in exasperation. "She says she is retired and uninvolved. She is retired from leading, yes, uninvolved, no. She is always gathering information about everything she thinks is of any note, and she is pretty damn good at uncovering secrets. Even though she doesn't do much casting of spells, she still sits around designing spells. She sees a new spell, and it is like a shiny new toy for her, and she is eager to see what she can do with it when combining it with others. She hears things about people in elected office, about what different organizations are doing, and she also treats those things like new things to play with. She will nudge things, just a little bit, sometimes without even knowing what her end goal is, just because she wants to make an impact. She can't just sit on the sidelines and do nothing, and she is good enough at digging things up, monitoring, and reading situations that she becomes an unintentional threat to anything that is a sensitive operation. Although she keeps most things to herself, she does filter some information to her employer and others that I would rather they not know. Most concerning is that at other times she will inexplicably tell things to people to nudge a situation and stir up a hornets' nest."

"So when she talked to us in Walgreens, she was nudging us?" I asked, trying to follow.

Phobia nodded. "Yes, and I don't think it even had an intended goal, other than she impacted the process for selecting a Dreamwarden. I don't think she arranged for all of you to meet there like that. That was a random chance, but she still capitalized on it. She is also very good at capitalizing on whatever opportunity might drop in her lap. It is her nature; she gets a puzzle piece, and she has to do something with it. She can't leave it alone."

Phobia paced slightly. "Don't get me wrong. I want my mother to be somewhat involved with the world. She is extremely talented, and it would be a travesty to have that talent sitting around doing nothing, but I prefer that talent to be called upon and directed in need, not one that I have to be constantly on guard about what it is doing."

"I guess you can't have it both ways," I replied. "She'll either sit and do nothing or do what she's doing. You have to pick which is worse."

"I don't have a choice in the matter," Phobia huffed. "However, you are right. I know if she is going to be out helping, she's going to be pulling this stuff, and not having her available for use would be the less desirable outcome. She still frustrates me, and I still don't trust her with any information I don't have to—and even sometimes when I do have to. I feel empathy for Celestia dealing with Discord. My mother may not be an agent of chaos, but the balance between needing to be able to utilize her and dealing with what she may do in the meantime is just as present."

"So… is this just your chance to vent about your mom?" I asked, unsure why we were talking about Sunset Blessing, although it was interesting seeing the Warden of Fear this animated.

Phobia chuckled. "I have other reasons, but it is good to get a chance. Let's discuss someone else now." She waved a grey feathery wing, and an image of my mother replaced the image of her mother. "I briefly touched upon the nature of my mother. It's time to discuss yours."

"My mom is great, even if she isn't a famous super-mage like yours," I said with confidence.

"Super-mage?" Phobia asked with a raised eyebrow. "Not a term I have heard applied to her before. No, your mother is no great mage, nor is she responsible for shaping recent history as much as my mother, but it is still worth examining her nature and seeing her strengths, her weaknesses, and where she can be troublesome."

"Troublesome? My mom?" I asked. "My mom might be a big executive, but in the big scheme of things that isn't that big a deal, and she's a good person."

"Good people can be troublesome," Phobia replied. "More troublesome than bad people, to tell the truth. A theoretical true villain you can punish and lock away without feeling bad about it. A good person will often have you stuck with a situation like I have with my mother. It is also best to avoid applying a straight good or evil paradigm to people. Everyone is shades of grey, and it is only a matter of how dark or light that grey is. My mother is a lighter grey than she once was, so I call her good, but she is still grey."

I couldn't help noting to myself that Phobia Remedy was literally a grey pony because of her fur. I wondered if our fur colors that we ended up with after ETS said something about us just as much as our cutie marks. Not so much those born after ETS, but for those who transformed.

She looked at me, maybe reading my thoughts. "Fear is grey by nature. You should fear for your family's safety so you can keep them safe, but you should also fear your family because they are beings of grey like the rest of us, and you can become blind to what they do if you don't fear their darker natures. It is also something you must always balance—never to allow yourself to descend into paranoia but also never to allow complacency. Most of all, you should always fear your own grey nature, so you don't find yourself the villain of your story."

---

I don't have much to say about my trip to Atlanta, plane trip to New York, or my overnight stay in the hotel there. I don't have much to say about getting up in the morning or the doctor's visit to ensure I didn't have any scary viruses to keep out of Equestria.

I do have a lot to say about the portal agents.

"But I need that for my laptop!" I shouted as the human agent set my battery pack aside. I had been standing in line forever in order to get to where he would check it.

"Sorry, it is on the list of contraband objects we can't allow through," he said, not sounding very sorry at all. He proceeded to put my laptop on the scale. He had already weighed my alarm clock and my leg phone. "You are over your weight limit on electronics without that. You will have to choose something else to leave behind. The phone is fine, but one of either the clock or the computer needs to stay. Don't worry; you'll get your possessions back. We will store them away until you return."

I stared. "If I can't take my battery, you might as well take both of them, unless Equestria has power outlets. Somebody told me there weren't any."

He shrugged. "Not exactly true. Electrical outlets are rare in Equestria, and you need converters to use most chargers and plugs from Earth when you find one. I'm told there is a shop in the Crystal Empire that sells nothing but converters. It's a pretty lucrative business—especially since you still aren't promised to find an outlet. It's almost like a scam."

It would be hard to work on my schoolwork over the trip without my laptop. It was fully charged right now and had a pretty good battery. If I used it for just an hour a night, I could get about three days of use out of it—maybe four, before it ran out of power. That was only half the trip, and that would leave me with a lot of work to get done in a hurry when I got back.

"Where would I find an outlet in Equestria?" I asked.

He kept inspecting my luggage. "Some fancier hotels have them, but I'm told you are going to be spending most of your time on an airship. Most businesses and houses have at least one, but more often than not, they're already being used for something. Fans are most common, but sometimes electric stoves, other small appliances, or phonographs—that's those old record players. Most households have a phonograph. Ponies like their music, and they don't have radio towers anywhere but the largest cities."

"Fans? Really?" I asked.

He struggled again. "Central AC doesn't exist in most places in Equestria."

"Don't they regulate their weather?" I asked. "I was always told they regulate their weather completely there."

He looked at me like I was stupid. "They don't micromanage the entire country. Sure, if the place you go has lots of pegasi, they probably have a weather team that does that with the local weather, but most places are tribal towns, and they're mostly earth pony towns with some unicorn towns here and there. Cloudsdale makes sure they keep the overall weather systems under control and makes sure no major weather disasters or droughts hit anywhere. Still, they don't sit there and personally supervise every town's weather to say what days will be hot, windy, or rainy. They don't have enough pegasi to keep up with all that. We don't even have enough to do that here, and we have nearly three times as many pegasi as Equestria living in the US with a similarly sized country."

Well, that was disappointing to learn for some reason. "No internet either, huh?"

He shook his head. "No internet. Those few radio towers are for just that, radio. Equestria does not have Wi-Fi. However, that might change in a few years. Companies from Earth have been competing with each other for years to get contracts to build them, but the Equestrian nobility has been fighting back and is only open to Equestrian-run businesses building any. Of which there hasn't been a business yet with the resources to do that. Some places in Equestria do have computers now, like rich families, some journalists, executives in businesses, and libraries—but those do not connect to the internet. I don't think they even have the hardware for it."

He found my bag of snacks and set it aside in the contraband section. My ears wilted. I wasn't going to make a fuss about my snacks. I could buy more in Equestria. They had to have plenty of places that sold food since that was the most essential thing anyone could sell. I guess it was silly of me to think I would be able to work on my schoolwork while away. I still had the book I was supposed to read for English literature in my bag, so that would have to do.

"I'll leave them both behind, I guess. I don't think I'll get much use out of them anyway," I replied with resignation. At least it freed up more space in my luggage for stuff I might buy during the trip. "Thank you; you've been very informative."

"It's part of my job to brief people on Equestria," he replied. "People going over for the first time usually have no idea what they are walking into." He paused and put a pamphlet in my bags. "That will give you a guide on what you are and are not allowed to bring back with you. That way, you don't spend money on something that will have to be left behind at the portal when you return—with no compensation. No one wants to feel like they wasted their money. It also gives a general guide for customs when dealing with ponies over there, so you don't make any social faux pas. For instance, if the price of an item isn't posted, expect to haggle, and expect some vendors to be ruthless in how they haggle. That's not the most important thing to remember, though."

"What's the most important thing?" I asked.

He got close to me and whispered. "Equestrians can be very easily spooked and prone to mass panic and know very little about Earth. Be careful how you phrase things because they can and will take things out of context and in the worst possible way. I have heard of Earthlings causing mass panic by innocently describing what they had for breakfast without thinking about how an Equestrian would take it out of context. Isn't the only reason tourism is limited, but it is one of the reasons."

I blinked, and watched him close up my remaining luggage. "Um… I don't want to do that. I can't think of anything I could say that would cause massive panic, but I'll be careful. Am I good to go into Equestria now?"

He shook his head and pointed to another line. "No, now you get to stand in that line to get the spell cast on you to be able to understand and speak Equestrian Ponish."

My ears sagged again.

Author's Note:

Extra content was reincorporated into the chapter at popular request. I basically took part of the unused chapter and part of the following chapter and fused them. Next up, Equestrian vacation begins.

Comments

[Chrome Masquerade]

I have one thing to say to that first part.

[RMWarPony]

next chapter cue Holiday road

[harts fire]

10904496
you beat me to it.

[harts fire]

wow this chapter is amazing.