• Published 4th Sep 2012
  • 1,951 Views, 47 Comments

Foals - Regidar



What happened to you as you grew older?

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Act II

“You picked the insects off plants... no time to think of consequences...”
- MGMT

“Oh, grow up! You’ll never go anywhere if you stare up into the clouds, wishing you were up there!”
-Anon

Time slipped on. Funny, how it works, spinning its way all around you, always making more of itself to make sure you’re never left behind from its consequences and rewards.

So was it that six years later, Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake were walking home from Ponyville Elementary when the following events occurred.

“Ever since Cheerilee got together with Big Macintosh, she’s seemed... distant,” Pumpkin Cake remarked. Pound Cake preferred not to busy himself with things that his sister was worried in. They seemed trivial.

He knew he was something special, something different. Ever since he was a little baby, ever since he could remember, something about the clouds always struck him as... fascinating. He was very artistic, and showed much wisdom, insight, and creativity than most seven year olds. His parents were proud of this, until his “creativity” began to affect his grades. He wasn't learning as fast as the other fillies and colts, and he was very spacey, as if his head were elsewhere.

“Well, he has certainly changed much since he was a baby, hasn't he?” was Mrs. Cake’s only remark to her child. Pound Cake always managed to keep up with the group, academically, at least, sometimes if only just barely.

However, during art is when he true colors shined. Sugarcube Corner was covered in various drawings and paintings of his, made during art and class time alike. Some were abstract colors, blended together to make an aesthetically pleasing piece, and other more concrete, and real. There was always one thing that they had in common. They had to deal with the clouds in some way. Sometimes simply a cloudy sunrise, other times a world of clouds, a whole city, like Cloudsdale.

When Cheerilee was telling her students about the other towns of Equestria, and Cloudsdale was brought up, Pound Cake immediately started paying more attention than he ever had in class. Cheerilee had noted his talk of “a city in the clouds” before, so she knew this would catch his attention.

When shown a picture of what Cloudsdale looked like, Pound Cake did something out of the ordinary. He simply shook his head and told his teacher “I feel like I always needed to go there... but that’s not what it’s supposed to look like at all!” After this, Cheerilee and the Cakes wrote off the colts obsession with clouds as a part of his pegasi instincts to go to the hometown of most pegasi. Pound Cake knew there was something else to this.

So now we return to the afternoon in which the Cake twins traveled home from school. Pound Cake had been recently given a blank journal to him from Twilight Sparkle.

“I know how much you like to draw and paint, so why not give writing a try?” Pound Cake had been scribbling in the thing all day. When Cheerilee took it away from him during math, she noticed it was all either drawings of cloud cities that were drastically different looking than Cloudsdale, or poems about clouds. Short, little lines about their fluffiness, or their ever-present allure.

“Anyway, Cheerilee seems... happier than before! I guess Big Mac was really her very special somepony after all, how romantic.” Pumpkin Cake sighed dreamily, and Pound Cake knew she was recalling the story that Scootaloo, Applebloom, and Sweetie Belle, some of their older friends, told every Hearts and Hooves Day. Indeed, it had become sort of a town legend, amongst other things Pinkie Pie, Twilight Sparkle, and several other mares that frequented Sugarcube Corner were involved in.

Pound Cake ignored Pumpkin's dreamy wanderings, even though he often had many a day himself, and examined a long flower that grew aberrantly from the side of the path. It was a sunflower, Celestia’s own favored plant, and it stretched its petals upward, soaking in every ray of solar energy it could.

A butterfly alighted the center of the flower, and Pound Cake stared into the glorious sight. For he did not see a simple butterfly on a sunflower. He saw a faerie warrior, resting on a Flowered Castle, simply taking a breather while waiting to push onward in his quest. Pound Cake was so enamored by this, that he had to write it down in his journal. He sketched the warrior, complete with a sword and bark-and-acorn armour. he drew the organic castle, giving it its own staff to attend to it. He wrote small details about how the castle came to be, and about the faerie warrior’s personality.

The faerie warrior took flight as a colossus decimated the castle. Pound Cake glared at his sister, who was now covered in dirt from falling into the patch of soil where the sunflower used to grow.

“Oops. I slipped. Now the sunflower’s gone...” Pumpkin grinned sheepishly. “Oh well. Another one will grow!”

Pound Cake gritted his teeth in frustration and annoyance, his eyes narrowing as he followed his sister. Did she not have any respect for the history of the place she had just ruined? Three generations of Ladybug nobility alone were lost due to her actions!

Pound Cake recorded this tragedy on a new page in his journal, and trotted off after his sister back to their home.