• Published 19th May 2022
  • 471 Views, 12 Comments

It Ur Flt Trixie (It's Your Fault Trixie) - SparklingTwilight



Trixie gets her friend and frenemy stuck with her in a miniature poem containing very few available letters. A/K/A "Trixie Ruins Haycartes Method"

  • ...
1
 12
 471

_ _ / t _ / T _ r t _ r u _ / Trixie. (E, I, U, R, T, X, F, L, [~], [?], [.], [!], [,])

1. Haycartes Method. A particularly difficult method of inserting oneself magically into a book's text to learn it rapidly.
2. Starlight Glimmer. An accomplished mage attempting to teach her easily-distracted friend Trixie a useful spell for studying. Becoming more agitated by the minute at Trixie's antics and failures, she was preparing to stop for the day on good terms before her patience was exceeded.
3. Twilight Sparkle. Modern master of the Haycartes Method spell, meddling in Starlight's instruction while misguidedly attempting to befriend Trixie--Twilight's onetime rival. Oblivious to Starlight's gentle nudges and coded "ixnay" warning whisper to Trixie and oblivious also to Trixie's menacing shouldercuffs, Twilight provided unwanted pointers.
4. Trixie Lulamoon. Incensed by know-it-all Twilight barging in all bushy-tailed and sparkling teeth into the midst of a grueling three-hour instruction session with a wink and a nod and a presumptuous foreleg draped over Trixie's shoulder, Trixie grabbed a thin poetry book understanding that the simpler the source, the easier to successfully demonstrate that Twilight's assistance was most assuredly NOT needed. Neglecting Starlight's warnings, to make the casting extra-simple she rips out a single page... and succeeds.

"... Trixie!" Starlight's inside-the-book avatar shouted.

"Terlite!" The blue unicorn responded.

"..." Twilight Sparkle cogitated.

"Fie!"

"..."Twilight continued cogitating.

"Fux."

"Ret xeffefet?"1

"Trixie reit i fixtixe."2 Twilight pointed her two-dimensional avatar's foreleg at Trixie, and shook her head right to left in disappointment.

Trixie knew not quite what Twilight had said, but the lavender unicorn's body language was informative enough. "TxiLLeite, fuxx U!"3

"It UR FULT Trixie." Starlight sadly shook her head. "I tuller u~ uile i xif tuux."4

Twilight had an insight, reflecting on her studies of Old Ponish. "Fee ufe letter f,x,l,t,r,u,i,e...f? F!" She brightened. "F!F!F!" She danced.5

"?" Starlight tilted her head.

"Fux F," Trixie glared.6

Twilight continued, gaining confidence. "Ufe F fur F."7

"?"

"F fur F, ufe it. "

"!" Starlight nodded. "I Xet it!" She herself had started speaking louder when stating letters that were dissimilar.8

"U fee?"9

"I Fee!" Starlight nodded, enthusiastically.

Trixie rolled her eyes. "Fo fut? Xe lutf lf letter letx."10 Trixie followed no discernible rules to better interpret her gobbledygook.

Twilight shook her head. With a sigh, she postulated a solution to the rule-less madness of lexical development--one garnered from experience with crosswords and word jumbles. "Ufe _ fur letter _." She crossed her eyes, then brightened. "_! Fe ufe _!"11

"?" Starlight raised an eyebrow.

"Fee ufe letter _?" Starlight nodded long and slow. "Fee _,_,_!" Her eyes twinkled.12

"Tif _,_it fifx Trixie i fifExit", Trixie muttered.13

"U _,_,t it!" Twilight smiled.14

Trixie rolled her eyes.

Twilight pondered, then she brightened. "_e i_ u _. _,_,_,_, e f _. If e if E~ E,e,i_,u,_. E,_,_,_,e,f_."15

"E _ ,_ E!" Starlight nodded, also noting that Twilight had picked up on her idea of uttering replacement letters louder than standard nomenclature.16

"_,ut t_Et_, _,_t, g_,_,_ , e_,_u,_,_," Trixie's barely comprehensible blank-filled phrase demonstrated her point.17

"Trixie ri_,_t," Starlight nodded, eyes losing their luster.18

Twilight tapped her hoof: "!!!!_~~~_!~~, !~_~!!!_~~~_~~!!_! !_!!!!_!!_!!!?"19

Trixie frowned. And so did Starlight until she realized and responded in like, thrusting the hoof bangs and clicks of HoofCode.

"_,_Et?"20

"It lE_ _ uE_e"21

"_,_t _,_,Et I tEu_,_t u."22

"It _,_rx _ette_ _ere! I luX Ur TeE_,_."23

Trixie harrumphed.

Twilight ignored the two's excited chattering. Instead, she cast the spell she needed, completing missing letters with HoofCode.

They escaped the land of few letters, little the worse for wear despite their sojourn on the crumpled page.


"Now that we've put that in the past," Twilight reveled in the comforting real world. "Why did we lack so many letters? Even short poems often use an "A" or an "O"."

"It was an experimental piece..." Starlight picked up the scrap and read:

________
~?~
Fitful.
Flu!
Fell
Xir,
xxx.
~?~
________

"What's Xir?" Starlight asked.

Trixie rolled her eyes at the two powerful ponies who had just rescued her with their erudite linguistic knowledge. "Don't you know anything?"

Starlight arched an eyebrow.

Trixie blushed, but then grew bolder as she spoke. "It's a gender neutral term," she shrugged. "A performing pony must be aware of all xir audience and their various preferences." She shook her head. "Starlight and Twilight, sometimes you seem so smart and other times you're just cheugy. Get with the new generation."

"Generation Five?" Starlight suggested.

Trixie nodded.

"Wait," Twilight frowned as she descended a staircase. "You're not using that 'cheugy' neologism right--"

"TxiLLeite," Trixie huffed. "I don't need your help. Trixie will make xir... experiments... and find Trixie's own way." She gumboed up language and looked over her shoulder and, foreleg leading her friend Starlight from the room, met Twilight's eyes: "Trixie may not be a mistress of HoofCode or Old Ponish, but Trixie, who is well traveled and who has interacted with many cultures, has her own secret cunning linguistic knowledge." Smarmily, she grinned at Starlight, who swished her tail.

Twilight, with a great sigh, attempted a different approach to bond with the prickly showmare: "Trixie... I'm sorry. Instead of approaching as a friend and meeting you where you were, I forced instruction on you and pushed too hard."

Starlight, tail tucked tight between her hindquarters, nodded.

"And then you did something I didn't think was possible--you found your own way in! I may have been too arrogant. Perhaps you have something to teach me?"

Trixie inhaled deeply, and with a smirk, she let out her breath and winked. "Anklyfray ymay earday, iyay on'tday ivegay ayay amnday." Then she walked away. Starlight trotted afterwards and responded, Twilight thought, in a similar tongue. But, despite the expanded vocabulary set, Twilight couldn't quite grok what she was hearing.

Twilight blinked. "Some mysteries, I suppose, can never be completely understood... or appreciated." For about three seconds she accepted that ending... but then the meddlesome mare hurried to her library and pulled an all-nighter flitting across linguistic and cryptographic encyclopedias puzzling out what Trixie was using for her secret best-friends-code with Starlight. A few mornings later: Twilight was found, teeth chattering in binary.

Author's Note:

Chapter Title- "_ _ / t _ / T _ r t _ r u _ / Trixie." = "Go to Tartarus Trixie."
1- "Ret xeffefet?" = "What Happened?"
2- "Trixie reit i fixtixe" = "Trixie made a mistake"
3- "TxiLLeite, fuxx U" = "Twilight, f*** you."
4- "I tuller u~ uile i xif tuux." = "I told you: use a big book."
5- "Fee ufe letter f,x,l,t,r,u,i,e...f? F!" = "We use letter f,x,l,t,r,u,i,e...f? F!"
6- "Fux F," = "Fu:fluttershbad::yay: F" :pinkiegasp:
7- "Ufe F fur F." = "Use F for S" (History)
8- "Xet" = "Get"
9- "U fee?" = "You see?"
10- "Fo fut? Xe lutf lf letter letx." = "So what? We lots of letter lack."
11- "Ufe _ fur letter _." / "_! Fe ufe _!" = "Use _ for letter _." "_! We [can] use _!"
12- "Fee ufe letter _?" / "Fee _ _ _!" = "We use letter _" / "We can!"
13- "Tif _ _ it fifx Trixie i fifExit" = "This sh** gives Trixie a headache."
14- "U _ _ t it!" = "You get it!"
15- "_ e i _ u _. _ _ _ _ e f _. If e if E~ E e i _ u _. E _ _ _ e f _." = aeiouy. abcdefg. If e is a, [then] aeiouy. abcdefg.
16- "E _ ,_ E!" = Ah, ha"
17- "_,ut t_Et_, _,_t, g_,_,_ , e_,_u,_,_," = "But that not good enough"
18- "Trixie ri_ _ t," = "Trixie's right,"
19- "!!!!_~~~_!~~, !~_~!!!_~~~_~~!!_! !_!!!!_!!_!!!?" = "How about this?"
20- "_,_Et?" = "What?"
21- "It lE_ _ uE_e" = "It language."
22- "_ _t _ _ Et I tEu_ _t u." = "Not what I taught you."
23- "It _ _rx _ette_ _ere. I luX Ur TeE_ _." = "It works better here. I love your teach."
LAST- "Anklyfray ymay earday, iyay on'tday ivegay ayay amnday " = "Frankly my dear, I don't give a d*mn)." And presaging that--Ixnay, from early in the story, is a pig latin neologism that has entered the English vernacular. The More You Know...
--
And the winner of Wheel of Fortune's final puzzle...is Trixie!

Trixie is Terrible Rating: :trixieshiftright: She didn't want it to happen, but she's not helping make things better (3 :trixieshiftright: Out of 10).

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

Comments ( 12 )

That was a fun read :twilightsmile:

Very strange but compelling.

the cover image made me laugh lol

Delightfully bizarre, though I'd probably use a different adverb if it weren't for the footnotes. Still, most entertaining stuff, and you worked in a friendship lesson. Thank you for it and best of luck in the judging.

1. Haycartes Method. A particularly difficult method of inserting oneself magically into a book's text to learn it rapidly.
2. Starlight Glimmer. An accomplished mage attempting to teach her easily-distracted friend Trixie a useful spell for studying. Becoming more agitated by the minute at Trixie's antics and failures, she was preparing to stop for the day on good terms before her patience was exceeded.

aww, love how the juxtaposition of these two sets up characters, motives, conflict, and setting all in one!

3. Twilight Sparkle. Modern master of the Haycartes Method spell, meddling in Starlight's instruction while misguidedly attempting to befriend Trixie--Twilight's onetime rival. Oblivious to Starlight's gentle nudges and coded "ixnay" warning whisper to Trixie and oblivious also to Trixie's menacing shouldercuffs, Twilight provided unwanted pointers.

hehehe, Twilight is quite oblivious to such signals, isn't she?

4. Trixie Lulamoon. Incensed by know-it-all Twilight barging in all bushy-tailed and sparkling teeth into the midst of a grueling three-hour instruction session with a wink and a nod and a presumptuous foreleg draped over Trixie's shoulder,

augh, i can just picture Twilight doing this, as well as just how incensed Trixie would be at Twilight of all ponies giving her unwanted pointers like this!

Trixie grabbed a thin poetry book understanding that the simpler the source, the easier to successfully demonstrate that Twilight's assistance was most assuredly NOT needed. Neglecting Starlight's warnings, to make the casting extra-simple she rips out a single page... and succeeds.

hahaha, just how many times is Trixie going to Create Problems by rushing into spells she doesn't quite understand in a pique of needing to prove herself, while ignoring the warnings of all the ponies around her? well, that was a very strong character trait in "All Bottled Up", so that makes sense!

"..." Twilight Sparkle cogitated.

hehe, yeah, "..." would be what i would be cogitating too

"Fux."

gasp!

"Ret xeffefet?"1

augh, if only FimFic had hover-over popup hoofnotes as a feature somehow!

"TxiLLeite, fuxx U!"3

well, didn't need hoofnotes to translate that one!

"F!F!F!" She danced.5

aww, 2-D Twilight shouting "F" repeatedly while dancing is just adorable to imagine

"Fux F," Trixie glared.6

wtf, Trixie! wow! i must say that she is being very mean in this story to Twilight and i do not like it :(

"F fur F, ufe it. "

hahaha, yeah, that is a referential paradox that can only be resolved with context!

"U fee?"9

"I Fee!" Starlight nodded, enthusiastically.

aww, im starting to get the hang of it, too! it's like hearing Ponish as spoken by a very specific and heavy accent

"Fo fut? Xe lutf lf letter letx."10 Trixie followed no discernible rules to better interpret her gobbledygook.

10- "Fo fut. Xe lutf lf letter letx." = "So what? We lots of letter lack."

way to not be a team player, Trixie! and reading the hoofnotes, is their grammar being affected as well?

With a sigh, she postulated a solution to the rule-less madness of lexical development--one garnered from experience with crosswords and word jumbles. "Ufe _ fur letter _." She crossed her eyes, then brightened. "_! Fe ufe _!"11

aww, of course Twilight would be able to use her crossword experience for this!

"U _,_,t it!" Twilight smiled.14

Trixie rolled her eyes.

why is Trixie so dang mean :(

i mean, i know that if you hastily cast a spell to show up a pony you're insecure about, and it causes trouble, needing said pony's help to get out of the trouble you caused must be double extra humiliating, but still!

"E _ ,_ E!" Starlight nodded, also noting that Twilight had picked up on her idea of uttering replacement letters louder than standard nomenclature.16

ooh, clever! doubles the bandwidth of a single bit

"Trixie ri_,_t," Starlight nodded, eyes losing their luster.18

aww

Trixie frowned. And so did Starlight until she realized and responded in like, thrusting the hoof bangs and clicks of HoofCode.

hehehe, not gonna call it "Horse Code"?

Twilight ignored the two's excited chattering. Instead, she cast the spell she needed, completing missing letters with HoofCode.

aww, that makes sense! Twilight needed the use of language back in order to get out of the spell. but dang, it's easy to imagine being able to trap a pony forever in the Haycartes Method that way!

~?~
Fitful.
Flu!
Fell
Xir,
xxx.
~?~

an experimental poem as the basis of an experimental fic, nice! and yes, that is a very constrained letterstock, all the more impressive that the poem manages to tell a story with it. neat!

"It's a gender neutral term," she shrugged. "A performing pony must be aware of all xir audience and their various preferences."

aww, so true! and aww, it's always so nice to see Trixie be able to draw on her own unique experiences to know something Starlight and Twilight do not, i imagine those moments mean a lot for her

"Starlight and Twilight, sometimes you seem so smart and other times you're just cheugy. Get with the new generation."

a delightfully meta experience that i had never heard of "cheugy" before and had to learn everything i know of it through the helpfully provided link. dangit, why do i feel the urge to dismiss the cultural output of everyone in the generation younger than me all of a sudden?

"Trixie may not be a mistress of HoofCode or Old Ponish, but Trixie, who is well traveled and who has interacted with many cultures, has her own secret cunning linguistic knowledge." Smarmily, she grinned at Starlight, who swished her tail.

lewd! and haha, it's funny that "Modern master" is used earlier to describe Twilight, but Trixie is using the distaff form to mean the same thing for herself, which unfortunately due the patriarchy comes with other connotations when used here (ugh, i hate this world!).

but that might have been intentional on Trixie's part, given her innuendo right after!

i've thought of using "marester" as a substitute for "master", but ugh, the latter is such a common word, and it also has a verb form so it's not a title like "Mare'm" which would be easier to twist. so i think i'll be satisfied with thinking of both "master" and "mistress" as being and having always been gender-neutral terms, maybe even with the latter carrying sexual connotations that are again applicable to all genders. there, solved it!

Twilight, with a great sigh, attempted a different approach to bond with the prickly showmare: "Trixie... I'm sorry. Instead of approaching as a friend and meeting you where you were, I forced instruction on you and pushed too hard."

Starlight, tail tucked tight between her hindquarters, nodded.

"And then you did something I didn't think was possible--you found your own way in! I may have been too arrogant. Perhaps you have something to teach me?"

and augh, i love this! a friendship lesson for the Princess of Friendship herself! and that is so neat, the way this experimental madness is framed within a mini-story about interpersonal growth

Trixie inhaled deeply, and with a smirk, she let out her breath and winked. "Anklyfray ymay earday, iyay on'tday ivegay ayay amnday."

ahahaha that is so corny that it is absolutely perfect for Trixie, love it

Twilight blinked. "Some mysteries, I suppose, can never be completely understood... or appreciated." For about three seconds she accepted that ending... but then the meddlesome mare hurried to her library and pulled an all-nighter flitting across linguistic and cryptographic encyclopedias puzzling out what Trixie was using for her secret best-friends-code with Starlight. A few mornings later Twilight was found, teeth chattering in binary.

aww, and i can easily imagine this ending for Twilight! augh, Trixie winning against Twilight once more! and haha, i actually imagine that Twilight figured out how Pig Latin worked right away, but found Trixie's decrypted line so bizarre that she dismissed her initial solution as too simple, thus leading her on this goose-chase until going Twily-nanas

Trixie is Terrible Rating: :trixieshiftright: She didn't want it to happen, but she's not helping make things better (3 :trixieshiftright: Out of 10).

once more, i'm going to have to disagree with your rating here! a sub-5 rating, for almost trapping everypony forever within the confines of an experimental poem, then just being grouchy and mean to the one getting her out of her own mess? well, at least it was accidental, and what she did didn't threaten to actually end the world, so i guess i would personally rate this a 7, though i admit that i may be biased about this due to Trixie being so mean to Twilight here.

in any case, an excellent work of format-breaking, hoofnote-replete madness, thank you for it!

Linguistic madness.

Finely constructed li_xuifti_ _E_,_eff.

11303637
Thank you for such a well-applied comment! :pinkiegasp:

Re: Bicyclette- I look forward to responding to your insightful comment. Much appreciated! It may take a few weeks though as I am in the middle of attempting to write another tale on a short deadline--thank you!

Hello! Have a review. I hope I've explained in there why I've rated it as I did and made clear how impressive it is. My ratings go on personal enjoyment, and I found this really hard work, a bit like some of those Joycean pieces the clever folks around here occasionally produce. However I still think it's wonderfully original and I'm not surprised it won a Bronze Medal in the Experimental category (well done for that!). As such, I'm still upvoting this despite my personal struggles, as I think it's a piece that makes Fimfiction a better place by its presence, even if I'm a little too dumb to manage it.

At first I was a bit upset that the reduced-letter language space seemed explicitly inconsistent and without any actual key. Perhaps it was when "__ u__er__re"1 became the catch-all replacement for every letter they lacked, or maybe it was when a whole sentence became an incomprehensible mass of bangs and tildes. But then I wanted to investigate if there was a key I just didn't notice, so I transcribed the footnotes, and re-read the story with translation in mind, and then realized what was actually going on...

So more fool me, I suppose. Evidently this is a story that works better the more it frustrates someone, and there's an actual story beneath the gibberish, too, though it is teeny-tiny. Good stuff.

~_!!!!_!~_~!_~!~_!!! !!~!_~~~_!~! !~~_!~!_!!_~_!!_~!_~~! !!_~_~!~!~~2

  1. "an underscore"
  2. Figure this one out yourself.

11821125

Evidently this is a story that works better the more it frustrates someone, and there's an actual story...

Sort of like Trixie herself, :trixieshiftleft: heh-heh. :trixieshiftright:

Thank you for reading and puzzling it out. :derpytongue2:

Login or register to comment