"BooOOooOOooOOooOOooks!!!"
"Pssst! Hey! Heyyyyyyy!"
"Mrrmfff..." I grumble into my sheets. I turn over in bed, stirring uncomfortably. The air of the room tingles with haunted magic yet again, and I feel like burrowing down into the earth's core, head-first. I slap a pillow over my cranium and wrap it around my ears in a desperate attempt to deafen the horse haunting.
I fail.
"Psssssst! Hey!" She speaks with the warm, bookwormish tones of a Canadian princess. By that, I mean that I really wish a moose would burst through the moonlit window and trample her into silence right now. "Are you awake?"
"Mrmmmm-no..." My voice grumbles. "I'm in a permanent comatose state."
"... ... ...if you were in a permanent comatose state, then how would you be able to respond to what I've been saying?"
"Grunnngh... Twilight Sparkle..." I spin around and sit up with a huff. My eyes open... only to squint at a veritable asteroid field of floating books, pamphlets, books, magazines, books, notecards, and more books swirling above my bed. "Fitzgerald's pancreas..." I curse. "Twilight? Could you... uhhhh... maybe tone it down with the Linda Blair nonsense?"
"Nuh uh." She rubs-rubs-rubs her fuzzy muzzle, peering from one open tome to another. She flicks an ectoplasmic hoof, and I watch as pages upon pages flip before her muzzle. Ghostly violet eyes reflect a sea of words, information, and illustrations. "I can't sleep."
"Lemme guess..." I yawn and rub my eyes. "Because you're the ghost of a dead unicorn."
"Alicorn."
"Them too."
"Nah, it's all because of Genghis Khan," Twilight Sparkle says without taking her peepers off the books.
"... ... ..." I pause with my fists over my eyes. I lower my hands so I can scrunch my face at the quadrupedal spectre. "You can't sleep because of Genghis Khan."
"Did you know that he led a two year campaign that ended the lives of over twelve million people?!?" Twilight Sparkle stammers. "The entire Khwarazmian Empire!! Wiped out in a single generation!"
"Twilight, that was..." I grimace. Missing my pillows. Missing sleep. "...that was like eight hundred years ago..."
"You humans put too much stock in centuries!" she barks, flipping pages. "Where I come from, that's less than a single monarch's rule!"
"I guess your horse queens play 4D Space Chess."
"Princesses."
"What's the difference?"
"In Equestria, we resolve matters of major dispute through diplomacy and friendship!"
I cock my head slightly to the side. "You're... awfully keen on speaking in the present tense there..."
She goes on: "But humans?" She points her hooves at the myriad of books orbiting her in the center of the room. "Your history is a bombastic cavalcade of massacres, holocausts, and environmental destruction!"
"~All part of a balanced dystopia~"
"What I'm getting at..." She smiles goofily from ear to ghostly ear. "...is that it's an utter miracle your species has survived at all! Even without the wars and the social strife, you've endured a bevy of pandemics and cataclysmic geological events the entire time! I don't know whether to be flabbergasted or impressed!"
"Mrmffff..." I rub my temples, staring into the center of the bed. "You're implying that something won't finish us all off soon anyways." A stifled yawn. "We've only been doing this civilization schtick for the past one hundred millennia or so. If you ask me, we'd be better off climbing back into the trees and hurling feces at godzilla crocodiles down below."
"Yes, but the fact that you're still around..." She peers down from her floating field of textbooks. "...seems to suggest that a few good apples among the bunch have made it all worth while!"
"Mmmmm... I doubt it."
She giggles, her ectoplasm rippling off the walls with violet brilliance. "Would it kill you to have a little bit of faith in your kind? Humans are tenacious and awe-inspiring!" She flips a page and peers at the resulting words. "Even in their darkest hours." A snort. "And, sure, there are a lot of them."
"... ... ..." I gaze fixedly up at her. "Y'know, Twilight, nobody ever said you and your friends ended up in heaven."
She's already speaking, excitedly: "Did you know that the Russian detonation of Tsar Bomba created a shockwave that traveled the surface of the globe three times?" Her teeth glints in an excited smile. "With that kind of powerful science, who knows what awesome things humans could actually be capable of?"
"Mrmmmfff..." I sigh, rubbing my head again. "...well, I suppose we did land an introverted Buckeye on the moon." Another yawn. "And we invented grilled cheese sandwiches."
"I'm glad you have so many books to peruse! What were you doing with them all this time?"
"I hear that if you smell like a library, it keeps the Australian emu gangs away."
"I could spend eternity reading all of these pages! I mean..." Twilight Sparkle winks aside, suppressing a snicker. "I kinda sorta always had that opportunity, only now it's a whole new world's archive!"
"... ... ...what do you mean you always had that opportunity?"
"Oh! Oh! A magazine about terran ornithology!" In a ghostly lavender blur, the horse harpy zooms out of the room. "I've got to share this one with Fluttershy! She'll love it!"
"Twilight..."
"Don't go asleep without me! Zoop!"
"Twilight!" I bark after her. "At least take the volumes of Alexandria with you!"
I am barely finished uttering this when every single book in the room, no longer haunted, falls heavily around me in hard-back percussion... like a hail of encyclopedias. I wince and shudder, feeling multiple almanacs scraping and bruising me. At last, I sit in bed, slumped back with a phonebook draped loosely over my crown.
From the other room: "... ... ...what was that?"
"Grnnngh..." I shut my eyes and grumble. "Toni Morrison's dreadlocks..."
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The protagonist may not be in a good place, but as this chapter was read, we are.
Am I weird for wishing we get to see more ghosts than just the mane 6? And ghosts of non-ponies too?
Why does he keep using the names of long dead famous people as swear words?
THERE IS A GOD
The bane of every person who ever sleeps in the same dwelling as any other person of any age. Ever.
10803690
Because it's fun?
10803679
Not at all. I'm waiting for Lyra to make her way in and obsess over anything that requires fingers.
10803719
In that case, I'll start hoping to see how Thorax anad Pharynx will mess with our unfortunate human. Oh, and maybe Zecora too?
Now, I won't have you bad-mouthing the Oceanic Khan like that. He killed half the population of the Khwarazmian Empire, tops.
Now, Flurry Heart, she killed everypone.
I rate this "SP" for silly ponies (especially since the first one is Applejack) :)
And Twilight's drowning herself in information to feed her denial. All-too-typical coping mechanism for her. I am enjoying the phantom fuzzies, don't get me wrong, but dealing with postmortem ponies raises questions about the "mortem" part.
10803749
celestia and luna trying to move the moon and sun and just end up looking dumb. also celestia sad cause she can no longer eat cake
10803811
I for one am intensely curious to know what exploded.
I mean, Twilight's not exactly wrong about humans.
10803842 Flurry sneezed
10803749
"Two-legged one, I shall say 'booOOoo', unless you give me potions to brew!"
10803895
That's probably startlingly accurate
10804073
Palpy: And you changed my HOW MUCH to build the Death Star?
Stalin and Mao be like, "Pfft, amateur."
But it ATTRACTS the drop-bears.
10803895 Cozy Glow got a backstory and the crappy worldbuilding couldn't handle the strain.
You forgot a close tag here
Your
Bomba (may be Twilight messing up but it's strange)
You lie! Nothing keeps the emu gangs away. Nothing! *Shivers uncontrollably*
Twilight's ghost is the most annoying one so far.
Of COURSE.
Wait, since we have book-smart dead pony here, why don't just task her with the editing job? Free labor does not come often, you know? Not mention this one require no sleep or time-out.
Yeah humanity is based af how dare the protagonist not be based af in return.
10804253
Don't diss the Khan. He started a land war in Asia and actually managed to win!
10806793
People starting and winning land wars in Asia isn’t actually that uncommon throughout history. It’s just that most folk living in this one out-of-the-way corner of the world called “Europe” could never be bothered to pay attention to events happening in places that actually mattered.
10807087
But did anyone else ever manage to conquer Russia? The only thing that ever managed to stop him (besides his death, obviously) was blatant divine intervention in the form of two separate attempts on Japan repelled by freak storms before they got anywhere near the islands.
True. That’s why I like it here.