Spilled Ink

by Fiddlove Enfemme

5 - Wondering

The morning came too quickly for my liking. I was woken by the sun streaming through the open window directly into my eyes, and I couldn't get back to sleep. I couldn't remember what had happened in my dream, but I felt a distinct sense of longing and loss. Something was gone, and I didn't know what it was.

In the distance I heard a bell ringing. Probably from the campus, signalling the start of classes. I took that to mean Starlight was already at work and that I was left mostly to my own devices. There wasn't any food in my wing's kitchen, so I wandered over to Starlight's wing to make myself breakfast. Two slices of toast with some peanut butter and honey was good enough, but I could have done with some fried eggs. There wasn't much in the way of leftovers in Starlight's fridge, although the bowl of sliced cucumbers had seemingly doubled overnight.

I had a shower, I swished around some mouthwash, and tried to figure out what to do with my day.

Could go visit those local cutie mark experts. Could head back to the Speakeasy for some music and tea. Could spend some time reading up on my ideas from last night. Maybe I could continue wandering town hoping to run into someone friendly.

Rags had said something about Saturdays at the Senior's Hall. A quick look at a calendar told me that today was Thursday. Exactly a week from today would be the Festival of the Two Sisters. Those were the only events coming up that I had any reason to attend or even look forward to. In fact, there wasn't much of anything to look forward to. If I had a job I'd mold my schedule and free-time around that, but I had no job and thus indefinitely free-time. There was so much time I simply didn't know what to do with it, if anything.

Fow a little while I let my mind wander, which brought me to think about my cutie mark. Starlight had said that every Earth Pony, Unicorn, and Pegasus had them, and that they appeared when a pony figured out what their special talent was. But my cutie mark looked like a bunch of spilled ink. What kind of half-baked talent was that? What did it even mean? Did i mean I was clumsy?

I needed an answer. Any answer. The clock said it was currently 8:43 AM. Which meant I was going to have to sit on getting that answer for a while. So instead, I needed a distraction.

Friend making it was, then.

I left the castle and started walking. Thanks to my wandering yesterday, I rough idea of Ponyville's layout in my mind. There was a central "core" around the town hall where the majority of businesses were, bordered on one side by the river cutting through town. On the south-west were the majority of the farms, followed by miscellaneous wilderness. To the east was the old town, built up along the riverside in the early days of Ponyville and mostly disused by now. To the north was the castle as well as the School of Friendship. The town's overall layout was loose, with considerable public space for parks and streetside business, all of the buildings scattered about in clusters. Almost every street was wide enough for two dozen soldiers marching abreast.

Now that was an odd observation. Did Equestria have a military? Did it have soldiers who were willing to lay down their lives in the defense of others? Was Equestria well defended? Things around here were peaceful, and there was little to no crime that I could tell. Maybe their military did their work abroad so that citizens here could live in peace and comfort.

I heard an odd noise above me, like the creak of wheels and the hiss of pistons. Then I heard something sputter. I looked up, and saw something erupt in a cloud of smoke and fire. It sailed downward out of the sky, crashing to a halt in the middle of the street. A sprocket popped off and rolled towards me before falling over.

I barely had time to register what just happened before a cloud of white foam engulfed the flaming pile. Then, a slightly charred figure burst from the foam. The figure had the tail and hindquarters of a lion, but the head and foreclaws of an eagle. It also had wings. This figure was none other than a griffon. The griffon was wearing overalls, and though she was covered in foam and soot, I could tell that her coat was a dull, dark red, and her feathers were a faded grey.

"Well that's not right, the fire suppression foam works but activated after impact." she commented. She raised her dirtied goggles from her eyes, and pulled out a notepad from her front pocket. Then, she scribbled down some notes in a script that looked to me like chicken scratch, with a very stubby pencil.

"Excuse me," I said as I approached the crashsite.

The griffon either ignored me or didn't notice me. "Now, if instead of staying inside the craft until its inevitable conclusion, I designed a quick release ejection-mechanism in conjunction with a parachute..."

"Excuse me," I tried again, slightly frustrated.

"...that would result in a lot fewer burns and broken bones, and it would probably be useful if there were any other unforeseen problems."

"Are you okay?" I asked as I stopped directly in front of her, pushing down her notepad so she looked at me.

"Oh! Hello! Uh, yeah! Nothing I haven't been in before." the griffon brushed off my concern as she put her notepad away. Around the street, a few ponies were staring at the pile of foam and strange parts, unsure of what to do.

"What... exactly are you trying to do?"

"Fly, of course! Except right n-now I've just been crashing. And burning," she said, trying to wipe off some of the foam. "But hey, the fire suppression foam worked! Not as intended, but it still worked."

I frowned. "But you have wings. Can't you fly on your own?"

"Yes, but can you fly? I did the math, and only about half of all species known to Griffonkind can fly on their own. And what if a griffon or a pegasus was too tired, or just didn't feel like flying on their own? Sure, there are airships and hot air balloons, big ones, but any decent flier can outpace an airship." the griffon explained with enthusiasm.

"Oh, so how's that going for you?" I asked.

"I've figured out how to get things off the ground! But not for very long. And they tend to have a hard time when they come back to the ground." she said.

"That seems pretty interesting." I commented. "What's your name?"

"Gyro! My mom called me that because when I hatched all I wanted to do was look up at the sky." she smiled and stuttered and held out her claw in greeting.

"Well, I'm Ink Blot. Nice to meet you." I extended my own hoof, which she eagerly shook.

"Wanna come see my workshop?" asked Gyro.

I looked around at the wreckage in the middle of the street. "Shouldn't you do something about all this first?"

"Oh, I almost forgot!" Gyro exclaimed. She dug into the receding foam and brought out four tripods that were painted orange. She placed them around the main wreck, then connected them with rope. "Now that's that dealt with. Follow me!"

She lead me to a building in the Old Town. It was a stout, stone building, with an attached forge on the left side. The second floor - or what used to be the second floor - had been converted into a sort of runway. A series of tools and implements were lying around rather haphazardly, even though there was more than adequate hanging and shelving space for them. From the forge a ladder went up to the converted runway. On the runway was a strange contraption with a dining chair strapped to a wooden frame with two outstretched canvas wings.

What surprised me was the amount of material she had. Stacks of wooden planks, stacks of metals and alloys, buckets of uncut gemstones, bolts of cloth and a pile of miscellaneous household objects. I could pick out a few different kinds of pots and pans, at least three bread boxes, as well as a single bathroom scale.

"Welcome to my workshop! Here I'm exploring all things "Flying Machine"!" Gyro said excitedly. She stretched her claws out wide and twirled. She pointed out everything as she named them. "There's my forge, there's all my tools, that up there is the runway with the glider, here's all of my materials I'm working with. Sorry everything's so messy, I just get so wrapped up in my work sometimes."

"Oh, that's alright. A bit of mess is fine as long as you can find things when you need them." I replied.

"I always mean to tidy up, but there's always something else that gets my attention, you know? The only time I can really focus is when I'm working on something, and if I start tidying than I'm not working." she sighed.

"Maybe you should look into getting an assistant to help clean? Someone else to bounce ideas off of?" I suggested.

"Perfect, you're hired!"

"Wait, what?"

Gyro smiled sheepishly. "Sorry, just a joke. I don't have enough money to pay someone to be my assistant. Besides, I don't really know anyone around here that's interested... don't really know anyone around here at all, actually."

"Then we've got something in common, at least. I only got here a few days ago, myself." I smiled back.

"Oh, wow! I moved here from Griffonstone a few months back, I used to be a smith there but all anybody ever wanted was some sort of weapon or some piece of armour so they could go off on an adventure or start a fight with someone. Like, why would I even bother trying to make a flying machine if everygriff could already fly, maybe I could make myself useful and make a sword or a spear or an axe or a big halberd for them to poke things with?" she vented her frustrations.

"Must have gotten pretty boring." I commented.

"I'll say. It's not even that I don't like making weapons! Halberds are pretty dang cool, but when day in day out every single customer wants a custom made halberd to their exact specifications I can't help but start to hate making so many halberds. It takes me a few days straight to make one anyway, so then they come in and start squawking "Brawk, where's my halberd I neeeeeed my halberd right now, screeeeeeeeeeeee!" and it's just aye-yai-yai, I barely even started on the halberd for the guy who came in before you let alone yours!"

I couldn't help but chuckle a little bit. "Watch out, you're making me want to order a halberd."

Gyro scoffed and said "Yeah right, like you could use a halberd. Can't even hold a halberd properly with those hooves of yours."

"Well, what if I grabbed it with my teeth?" I asked.

"Then you'd have to swing your head around, and then you'd get motion sick before you even managed to hit something!"

"What if I sort of braced it on the ground and propped it up with my leg?"

"That would work, but you may as well get a spear instead of a halberd if you're just gonna do that. Less weight up at the tip and less work I need to do on it." Gyro rolled her eyes. "Besides, any doofus can make a spear."

"Could you show me some of the stuff you're working on?" I asked her.

"Absolutely, come inside." she said.

The inside of the house was mostly made up of two rooms. The smaller one, I assumed, was her bedroom. Somewhere under those stacks of half-fabricated parts and piles of papers there was a bed. Somewhere. The only way you could even get around in there was a narrow path that circled the room. The bigger room looked similar, except the mess was more concentrated to edges, seemingly to make space for a prototype flying machine that sat in the centre of the room.

The prototype itself was... enigmatic to say the least. Part of it was wood, part of it was copper, part of it was brass. There was something that looked oddly like a boiler, which was rigged by pipe to a small compartment with pistons and a propeller. It had two long wings that were folded upward, made of wood and canvas like the glider up top was. I couldn't see any way to actually heat the boiler, and there were a bunch of bits that didn't make much sense to me.

"What's this?" I wondered.

"Oh, that's one of my older prototypes. I was building off of the glider frame and concept, but ran into troubles getting it off the ground. In theory the boiler runs the pistons which powers the propeller, but a big enough boiler was too heavy for the original glider. So, I tried making one with bigger wings that could hold the boiler. But then the propeller had to work harder, and everything just got worse in a big long loop. Basically the main problem with working off of a glider design is that a glider needs either a good wind or a lot of push to get off the ground for any length of time - once you're in the air all you need to do is ride the currents. If it's too heavy it can't ride the air so well, it just falls and crashes." Gyro explained happily.

I semi-understood what she was talking about. "Like the one earlier today?"

"No, that was a few different experiments all at once. I figured I could try doing something inspired by fireworks, with an ignition propellant, but then I ran into the trouble of trying to stay aloft. So I added pedals to turn a roof mounter rotor with a gear system to make that as easy as possible. But then the propellant had a tendency to light the entire frame on fire, so I added a fire suppressant system. But then adding the fire suppressant system meant that I had to activate it manually, which meant i took my paws off the pedals, which meant I started losing altitude. So I tried to make it trigger automatically. Hasn't quite worked as intended, yet."

"Do you crash a lot?" I asked.

"Do you ask a lot of questions?" Gyro countered. "I don't really mind that much, I actually like answering questions about my projects, but usually ponies like you get weirded out and ignore me."

"Well, I can see you're pretty passionate about this, so I wanna hear what you have to say." I answered.

"Oh. Thanks." said Gyro. I don't think she knew what to say. A silence began to grow between us. So I started thinking.

The idea of flying machines resonated with me, for some reason. I had a feeling that it was linked to some sort of memory, but one that was pretty deeply tangled in with the whole curse thing. Flight meant mobility, and mobility was key to responding effectively to threats. Flight also meant that you would have the combat advantage against anyone on the ground below you. I couldn't fly, but griffons like Gyro could. Pegasi could. A company of fliers could outmaneuvre the enemy and flank them, engage them away from fortified defensive positions. Having flying machines would allow higher mobility for any non-flight-capable troops.

Of course, this assumed that we'd be able to build a working machine. Then, ponies like me could rise to the skies.

"Wait, what do you mean "ponies like me"?"

Gyro began to sputter. "Oh, uh, you know... ponies with, uh, magic. Unicorns. Pegasi can fly, so they sometimes ask a few questions, and the Earth Ponies like to keep their hooves on the ground no matter what. But, um, Unicorns can do magic and all that kinda stuff. There's spells that give you wings, and like, a hundred other kinds of magic I don't really know about."

I blinked at her. "I... don't really know how to use magic. Like at all" I admitted.

"What? But I thought you could all turn apples into oranges and stuff like that!" Gyro said.

"I mean, there's probably a way to do that, but I have no idea how."

"What about telephonesis? Where you move stuff around with your mind?" she asked.

"I think that's called "telekinesis. And I don't know how to do it." I replied.

Gyro seemed confused. "...Not even a little?"

"No," I shook my head. "Not even a little. I've been doing everything with mouth and hooves and a little bit of balancing things on my knee. This pointy thing may as well be a dagger I strapped to my forehead." I said, and tapped my horn.

"And probably is as useful as a dagger strapped to your forehead. I can't imagine not having my claws."

I shrugged. "Earth Ponies seem to do it just fine, and they don't even have the benefit of having telekinesis. Though I do wonder what it'd be like to have claws like yours."

"Maybe you could..." she trailed off.

Gyro picked up a piece of paper that had some calculations on it, then flipped it and started sketching something out with the same stubby pencil she'd been using earlier. She also picked up a tape measure, then before I could say anything she took measurements of my front legs and hooves, which she scratched onto the paper as well.

"What are you doing?" I asked, slightly offended at her disregard for personal space.

She didn't respond at first, focused on scrubbing a drawing off of her big chalkboard. She made a rough sketch of a pony's fetlock, then glanced at me before writing down something in letters that looked oddly like chickenscratch. "I've got an idea. Give me some time to work it out and fabricate some prototypes. Not 100% sure it'll work, but hey! A new project that doesn't involve me bursting into flames hundreds of metres in the air!"

"What's it going to be, exactly?"

"That's a surprise! At least until I show you the first design. Then I'll need you to come in regularly for fitting and sizing and all that jazz." Gyro quickly explained, practically pushing me out of the drafting room.

"Oh, um, well..." I sputtered trying to figure out what to say.

"Come check in on Saturday! I'll have something by then!" she shouted at me shortly before loudly slamming her front door, which caused several piles of stuff to collapse.

I was left on the front step, and more than a little confused.

---

Finding my way to the secluded treehouse wasn't very difficult. We'd actually passed by it while we were applebucking, but I didn't think much of it at the time.

Thinking of it now, "local experts" operating an office out of a treehouse didn't seem too professional. Assuming someone did try converting a treehouse into some sort of office, it would be novel but not terribly practical. Depending on the exact size of the treehouse there wouldn't be much room for more than two or three desks. I mulled that over while I popped by the Speakeasy and shared lunch and music with Rags and Ginger.

My suspicions were proven when I saw the treehouse with fresh eyes. It was nested within the branches of a large, stout apple tree, and was about half the size of my bedroom. It was a fairly simple house design, gabled roof with a bit of an overhand along the edges, made from old lumber that had been painted over once or twice. It was accessed by two ramps, which lead to a walkway with a railing that went all around the outside of the house, with a second set of ramps that lead higher into the tree, eventually to a sort of turret. The door, as well as the shutters, had these heart-shaped cutouts near the tops. From the turret peered a single telescope, pointed towards town.

Not having anything to lose, I walked up the ramps to the closed door, and knocked.

There was a pause, then I heard the excited clip-clopping of at least three sets of hooves. It stopped just at the door, and I could hear a bit of hushed discussion. Not well enough to make it out, but well enough to know that the "local experts" were quickly debating what to say or do.

Sooner than I'd expected, the door burst open to reveal three kids - or rather, three foals.

"Good mornin', and welcome to the Cutie Mark Crusaders clubhou--" began a familiar looking filly. She looked at me and furrowed her brow. "Wait, Ink Blot?"

"Applebloom, you know this guy?" asked her friend to my right. She was an orange pegasus, with a short and spiky purple mane and tail.

Applebloom nodded. "Sorta, he was helpin' with th' applebuckin' a few days ago. AJ let him stay in th' spare room."

"I was told that you three are the local experts on cutie marks?" I tentatively asked. They were just kids, and somehow I didn't have much faith in their abilities.

"Oh, then you'd better come in." said the other friend on my left. So I did come in. She had a white coat, though her curly mane and tail were two-toned light purple and pink.

The inside of the treehouse was cluttered, but it was the kind of cluttered that you got when a space was lived-in as opposed to just being a mess. It was much tidier than Gyro's place, is what I was trying to say. There was a nice set of mismatched curtains, a single old-style oil lantern that hung from the ceiling, and a dusty podium that had been shoved into one corner. There were several shelves with various arts and crafts supplies. Along the back wall was an assortment of papers and charts that had been drawn up, with various things crossed out on them. Most telling was a collage of various photos on a backing of three-toned construction paper, each picture having one or more of the three fillies in it.

Now as for the "office" part, that was made up of two crates laid out in the centre of the room, with one chair on the closest side and three arrayed on the opposite. There were a few miscellaneous papers laid out on the boxes, most of them with unintelligible scribblings on them. It more resembled the idea of an office than an actual one.

"Go on, take a seat." said the white and pink one. I did. The chair was just slightly too small for me to sit comfortably, but I made the best of it. "Tell us about your problem."

"Yeah, I was told you're the local experts on anything related to cutie marks. You are, right?" I asked.

The orange and purple one piped up. "Yep, we're the Cutie Mark Crusaders. I'm Scootaloo, that's Sweetie Belle, and you already know Applebloom."

"For awhile, we were just three blank flanks tryin' ta figure out what our cutie marks were. We did just about everythin' we could think of." Applebloom explained.

"Carpentry, journalism, dentistry, accounting, crochet." Sweetie Belle listed as she sat in the middle chair across from me.

"None of it really stuck, you know?" Scootaloo added, from the windowsill where she was leaning.

"Then we noticed that even though we were tryin' so hard to find our special talents, we ended up helpin' a whole lotta other folks find their marks instead." continued Applebloom, sitting down beside Sweetie Belle.

"Which is exactly what our special talents were all along!" Sweetie Belle finished happily. She and Applebloom both flashed their cutie marks at me, followed shortly by Scootaloo as she joined them at the desk. All of them had extremely similar cutie marks, that being a unique device displayed on a tricoloured shield. Applebloom had her apple with a heart inside, Sweetie Belle had a star with a music note inside of it, and Scootaloo had what looked to be a wing with a lightning bolt inside it.

"Since then, we've been doing our best to help out as many ponies as we can," Scootaloo said. "I'd say it's been turning out pretty well."

Sweetie Belle then turned to me. "Which of course must be why you're here. You need our help with something cutie mark related."

"I just have a few questions, is all. About cutie marks." I said.

"What, didn't you learn about cutie marks in school?" Scootaloo scoffed.

"That's the thing," I rubbed the back of my neck and grimaced. This whole memory loss thing wouldn't be that much of a secret much longer if I told everyone I met about it. But, if I didn't tell the Crusaders then my story would have a pretty big hole in it. "Apparently I have some sort of curse that's caused me to lose my memories. If I did know about cutie marks at some point, I can't remember it. Any of it."

"Curse?" asked Sweetie Belle.

"Yeah, yesterday Applejack took me to see Starlight Glimmer, who did some sort of memory magic and found out it's all blocked by a curse."

"You could go see Zecora. She knows all about curses and weird magic." Scootaloo suggested.

"Just watch out for th' Poison Joke. That stuff's rough." Applebloom also said.

I nodded. "Okay, first question. I know what a cutie mark is, but I'm not all that sure what they do."

"A cutie mark represents somepony's special talent, right? When you're born, you don't start out with one. As you grow up, you explore different things, and eventually you explore something that you really enjoy or are good at." Sweetie Belle explained.

"Usually it's a bit of both." Applebloom said.

"When you figure out your special talent, your cutie mark appears. Once you have your mark, you have a cute-ceañera to celebrate. It doesn't do anything on its own, but I'm pretty sure the three of us know how big of a wake-up call it is." Scootaloo added as she shared a knowing look with her fellow Crusaders.

"So, in some ways getting your cutie mark makes you happier?"

"Well, yeah!" Sweetie Belle affirmed.

"That all makes sense, I guess," I sighed. "I can't help but wonder though, what does my cutie mark mean? What exactly is my special talent?"

I turned my head to stare at my cutie mark. This bloody ink stain. What did it mean? What kind of so-called special talent was represented by some stupid spilled ink? Probably wasn't even good quality ink. Looking at it made me frustrated, but that frustration soon gave way for a sprouting seed of anger.

The Crusaders glanced at eachother. I don't think they knew how to react, or how to answer my question.

"Well, what do you think your cutie mark is?" Scootaloo asked.

"I don't know what I think. It looks like a bunch of ink got spilled on me, and I know it's not ink." I shook my head.

Sweetie Belle frowned. "Maybe it's a metaphor?"

"I don't follow."

"Well, what happens when you spill ink on paper?" Sweetie Belle asked.

"It gets stained." I replied.

Sweetie Belle floated over a fresh inkwell, as well as a blank sheet of paper. She wrote the words "Ink Blot's memories" on it, then immediately dumped the contents of the inkwell on the paper. The ink mostly splashed onto the paper, but a lot of it sprayed outward. There was ink all over the crates, over the paper, over the nearby floor, and all over the four of us.

"What the heck, Sweetie Belle?" Scootaloo angrily asked.

Sweetie Belle blinked, her white coat spattered with black ink. "I don't know what I expected." she replied.

"No, no, you've got a point," Applebloom said. "If th' curse is messin' with his memories, maybe as a side effect it's coverin' up his cutie mark."

I touched the ink that was now splattered across my front. "I just hope that the curse doesn't erase any of my memories permanently. Ink stains can be pretty hard to get out."

"You could have at least warned us before you dumped that out." Scootaloo shook her head as she went to fetch some rags.

"How else was I supposed to make the metaphor stick?" Sweetie Belle questioned.

While my uncertainty wasn't gone, what she'd said made sense. It even gave me a faint hope. Any hope, no matter how faint, was something to cherish. Hope could get you through the dark times when everything seemed bleak, and while these times were in no means bleak, that little bit of hope helped put me at ease.

"Thanks. It's not much, but I think it'll help me a little bit." I said while they started to bicker.

"I'm glad we could help!" Sweetie Belle responded with a smile, but was quickly distracted by a snide comment from Scootaloo.

I excused myself and went home for the day. My evening was quiet and uneventful, so I treated myself to a cucumber sandwich for my supper before shuffling myself off to bed.