The Perils of Parchment Production

by Methylstate

So write a letter to your princess or something

Fluttershy had resumed a normal pace walking through town. She saw an adorable little squirrel, but the sight only brought thoughts of his comrades, skinned, bleached and pressed in the library, passed off as... bunnies. Dead baby bunnies. She sniffled again at the massacre of the innocents. Deep down, Fluttershy knew that Twilight wasn’t a bad person, but... how could she be party to this?

It was the fault, the pale yellow pegasus thought, of the system. The stationery-scribal complex
with its stranglehold on the Equestrian bureaucracy, mandating the use of parchment for royal communications and paperwork. Blame fell on the purveyors of this product, those merchants of death touting its smooth surface and archival quality! It wasn’t Twilight’s fault, she was a product of the evil system, Fluttershy said to herself, perhaps justifying her own association with the unicorn.

Fluttershy froze. There it was. The stationery store. It gave Fluttershy bad vibes, but she knew that she had to confront this menace at its source. You can do this, Fluttershy, she thought to herself as she approached it. She swung open the door...

... and found the shop almost empty. It was quiet except for some subdued industrial sounds coming from the adjoining room. The paper cutter sat quiescent. Boxes of paper products lined the walls. On the wall were a pair of bits in a jar, the first the shop had ever made, and beside them - a portrait of a smiling Twilight Sparkle. Our most valued customer, the plaque said. Product of the system, Fluttershy repeated to herself. Product of the system. A mantra. She didn’t notice the proprietor coming in from the other room.

“I’m sorry, miss, but we’re not open now,” the proprietor, a gray stallion, said. “The storefront closes at one in the afternoon on Wednesdays.”

“Oh, I’m... I’m here to talk to you about... something,” Fluttershy began. “You see, I’m a friend of Twilight Sparkle, and —”

“Twilight Sparkle? Why didn’t you say so sooner?” the proprietor said congenially. “For a friend of our biggest customer we are always open. Something to drink?”

“Um.” Product of the system. Product of the system. “No, thank you. I just wanted —”

“If this is about the weanling rabbit parchment, I can explain!” he pleaded. “I’m so sorry that squirrel parchment got in there, we had a new employee working here this morning, and it was chaos, ma’am, pure chaos, squirrel in with rabbit, canary onionskin confused with sheepskins! Please, please tell your friend that it was a sincere mistake, it will never happen again, and we would never, ever try to pass off factory seconds to such a discerning customer!”

Fluttershy finally got a word in.

“No you don’t understand, I... I’m wondering if there’s anything Twilight could use besides... the skins of baby bunnies... for writing,” she said.

“Oh, I know, I know, she wants vellum; I’m sorry we had to substitute to make up today’s order, if only the first shipment hadn’t gotten lost in the mail. But we’re a small shop, you understand. Don’t worry, we’re working double shifts; we’ll have proper vellum by tomorrow morning!”

“That isn’t going to —”

“Please, please,” the proprietor said, melodramatically bowing, “please don’t take your business elsewhere. Please. It was one mistake! I... we can’t go on without your business! I... I just made the down-payment on a yacht! I have named it the Splendid Sparkle in honor of your friend!”

“Um, that’s really sweet but —”

“An hour, please, give us an hour and we can have the vellum finished! I promise you, we are working as hard as we can, even as we speak, look!”

At that, the proprietor threw open the door to the workshop. Fluttershy saw terrible things, things such as no one should ever have to see, least of all a mild-mannered pale yellow flying pony. For the second time today, she ran from a building in shocked horror, but for variety, she screamed. Tears would come later.

---

The afternoon moved on into night. Twilight Sparkle worked diligently on finding a solution to the parchment problem in the basement of the library. She looked at strips of ersatz-parchment materials in test tubes disappointedly.

“J-7 though J-19 have all deteriorated under simulated dragon digestive tract conditions,” she complained. “You got that?”

Spike, who was dressed in an adorable little lab coat because “adorable and safe” was the dress code, dutifully marked down the results in the laboratory notebook.

“Good. I need more dragon saliva,” Twilight said, presenting Spike with a watchglass. “Spit.”

“I’m tired, Twilight, and I want to go to sleep.”

“Think of the baby sheep, Spike. Think of Fluttershy.”

It didn’t produce the expected results.

Twilight sighed. “Rarity likes baby sheep, Spike,” she offered.

Sschplorch.

“Thanks.”

There was a ring at the doorbell. Spike left Twilight alone to answer the door, while she titrated the new batch against her standardized solution of three molar dragon saliva.

A few minutes later, Spike returned.

“The stationery shop just sent you flowers and a really nice fruit basket,” Spike said, munching an item from the basket.

Twilight froze. A fruit basket in the middle of the night? Had they found out about her work so quickly? Was this a bribe? Or a veiled warning? Was she starting down a path that would inevitably end in tragedy? Would it be long before the thugs of the stationery industry would leave some pony’s head in her bed as a bold-faced threat? Would the next basket contain Applejack’s hat and a dead fish? Would she have to be eternally vigilant, every shadow and noise a real or imagined vellum-purveying assassin?

“You okay there?” Spike asked, snapping her back to reality.

“Oh, um, yes, I’m fine,” she replied, looking back to her work. I’m just being paranoid, she told herself.

“I’m gonna go to bed now,” Spike declared. “You need to start paying me overtime if you want me to pull all-nighters.”

---

Several hours ago, Fluttershy was walking home to her cottage, her head hung a little lower than normal.

“You look pretty sad,” said a familiar, happy voice. “Have a cookie.”

Pinkie trotted alongside Fluttershy and offered her a cookie.

“No thanks, Pinkie... I’m just a little upset that no one seems to take my concern seriously.”

“You should write a letter!” suggested the pink pastry pusher. “A pretty popular path to provide the particulars to the powers that be,” Pinkie Pie suggested, building on “pink pastry pusher” for a 504-point combo.

“Write a letter? To... the government? The princess?” Fluttershy asked hopefully.

“Yes!” Pinkie exclaimed excitedly, although excited exclamations were only worth points on the twenty-seventh of each month. “You should definitely write a letter. You know she’ll read it.”

“Oh, but I don’t want to use parchment, it would be... hypocritical,” Fluttershy said. “I’ll have to think of something else.”

“How ‘bout engraving it on stone tablets? If anything, that’s fancier than regular boring old parchment!” Pinkie suggested.

“That could work,” Fluttershy said. “I have some old paving stones I’m not using.”

“Perfect! Good luck!”

“You don’t want to stay and help me write it?”

“Oh, I’d love to, but I’ve got some reading to do! Bye!”

And Pinkie Pie was gone once again.

---

“Do you expect me to reveal my parchment replacement plans?” asked Twilight Sparkle, strapped to a cold steel table in the underground dungeon of the World Syndicate of Stationery Makers.

“No, professor Sparkle, I expect you to die!” said their leader, an overweight stallion in a white suit. He laughed evilly as he threw a switch on the wall. A laser cutter engaged, and began to slice the table to which Twilight was strapped. She tried to pull the switch back off with her telekinesis, but it wasn’t working, no matter how hard she tried. The burning laser advanced closer to her; a spark landed on one of her legs.

Twilight fought a rising panic as she again tried in vain to actuate the switch with her telekinesis, exerting powerful magical energies on it in every direction. “Twilight!!!” the switch screamed at her. “Twilight wake up! Stop it!”

Twilight woke up. She had fallen asleep at the lab bench. Suspended in a glistening cloud of magical energy was Spike, presently upside down and rotating gently.

“Oh I’m so sorry Spike! That’s never happened before!” Twilight apologized as she sat the slightly shaken Dragon down on the floor of the basement. “Are you okay? I didn’t give you a traumatic brain injury, did I? Oh no, what if I did? Quick, Spike, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Spike sighed. “Zero,” he replied unenthusiastically, without looking.

“Okay, now, who’s the current ruler of Equestria?”

“I’m gonna guess it’s still our beloved, immortal princess, Celestia.”

“Okay, right again. Wait, I forget what step of the neurological exam comes next — ”

“I’m fine, Twilight. I just came to bring you... this!” he produced a sword.

“Viva la revolucion!” the tiny dragon shouted as he charged Twilight. She dodged.

“What the hay, Spike?!” Twilight exclaimed.

“Today is the day we rise against our equine oppressors! No longer will we toil for sustenance in your gem mines with no overtime pay!” He thrust the sword again, narrowly missing his erstwhile employer. Spike had so very much cost himself that sapphire Twilight had been saving him for secretaries’ day.

Twilight tried to subdue Spike with her telekinesis, but it wasn’t working again. She dodged his next attack, but in so doing, tripped on a piece of laboratory equipment and fell backwards into a rat’s nest of wires.

Spike lept across the space separating them, and raised his weapon to administer a deathblow. Twilight winced and prepared for death. She regretted nothing in her life save forgetting to make an appropriate literary reference when faced by this murderous betrayal.

“Aha!” Sword clashed against sword as the blow was parried. Twilight cautiously opened an eye to see a dashing unicorn stallion in a tuxedo engaging in a ferocious sword-fight with Spike. She blinked in amazement as Spike held his own against her rescuer, but was then brought down by a stun-gas cufflink.

“Don’t worry, professor Sparkle,” the handsome stallion said in an upper-class accent, “the secret of your parchment formula will be safe for the free ponies of Equestria!”

“Who... are you?”

“Con Mane. Mane Con Mane,” he introduced himself as he helped Twilight out of the twisted tangle of wires.

“Now I know for sure I’m dreaming,” Twilight said, and smiled. “That being the case, you want to go upstairs for some... coffee?”

“I would be delighted, professor Sparkle,” he said congenially.

“Please,” Twilight replied, “Call me Twilight.” She batted her eyes, adding a third specular reflection for good measure, and quickly reviewed the genre conventions for a spy movie love scene in her head.

Con Mane kissed Twilight Sparkle as she closed her eyes...

... she tasted frosting. Twilight opened her eyes. She was kissing Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie Pie heard a surprising variety of unkind things as Twilight pulled away from her and fell back into the wires. She wasn’t really up on her Canterlot slang but she guessed she didn’t want to be any of those nouns.

Pinkie Pie laughed.

“You’re in my dreams now, Pinkie? Why? Why?”

“I’m Pinkie Pie, Fell Shieldmaiden of Chaos. This is what I do. And I thought maybe you’d like to borrow Con Mane.” A beat. “I didn’t know he was good in a swordfight.”

Pinkie walked in front of a window in the basement, inexplicably overlooking a Manehattan sunset, as Twilight had a mini-breakdown in the background. Pinkie cast a long shadow over the room, waiting with uncharacteristic patience for Twilight to finish incoherently sobbing something about being “a good pony who did nothing to deserve being in this thing.”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “I bring a message... foreshadowing DOooOOOoooOM!”

“... could the message have come after I had... coffee... with a dashing secret agent?”

“No, silly, then you’d have had icky coffee breath. And it’s a message of DOOM! Doom is a priority postal level!”

“Fine. What is it?”

Pinkie opened up a backpack - had she been wearing that a moment ago? - and produced a note.

“Oh, sorry, is my face ever red... This isn’t a message of doom at all.”

“That’s a relief.”

“It’s the choreography for a dance of doom!”

“Oh, why...” Twilight lamented as she wondered when this horrible nightmare would end. She looked up and was surrounded by a crowd of Pinkie Pies. She wanted to put her forelegs over her eyes and make it go away, but she knew better than to show weakness to the horde in its full strength.

“It’s an easy dance,” one of them said. “You just put one hoof on the next dancer, like so...”

The Pinkies linked up and began to... dance. Sort of.

“What does it mean, Pinkie?”

“Maybe if you knew more about dancing this would be a better interpretive dance,” one of them replied.

“I cannot make cake without flour!” protested another, wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a bubble-pipe. “Nor dreams without subconscious knowledge.”

“Dreams,” Frau Doktor Pinkiepei reminded Twilight from behind her, “are ze royal road to ze unconscious mind.” The pink pony puffed a candy cigar. “My, my, you are a really messed up pony. You need to take more pills.”

The Pinkies whirled around rhythmically. It made Twilight dizzy, and confused.

“Wait, can't I just read the instructions?” Twilight asked.

“Fine,” the original one - maybe - replied in a huff, handing the note over to Twilight. She looked at it, and the solution to artificial parchment production unfolded before her...

Comments

[i_am_the_jam]

Well, if you want to get technical, the hoof IS the finger. Equines, like all digitigrades, walk on their fingertips. The hart part of the hoof is the equivalent of the fingernail. Same material, too. So yes, equines have 1 finger on each foot.

[Methylstate]

1297059

If you want to get really technical, the horse hoof is homologous to the fingernail of the third digit.
I guess it is sort of a trick question, though. And honestly if one of these things appeared in real life I think biologists would argue over it was even a mammal. (Pegasus ponies have six limbs! SIX LIMBS!) They're certainly not in the genus Equus. :)

I suppose what's ultimately relevant, though, is if it would be funnier to have her correct him or not. I'm not sure.

[Reese]

Well, I've not spotted any problems so far. I look forward to reading more.

[Methylstate]

1309035

Thank you!

[legionbrony]

“You should write a letter!” suggested the pink pastry pusher. “A pretty popular path to provide the particulars to the powers that be,” Pinkie Pie suggested, building on “pink pastry pusher” for a 504-point combo.

Subtle fourth wall breakage.

Very good! The dream was pretty trippy, though.

[Slightly Dazed Bystander]

This is nuts. Gloriously, gloriously nuts. Could have been from the show itself.

[Methylstate]

I've got the next chapter mostly written, but need to finish it at get it proofread. I've been very busy these last two weeks.

[Disguised]

1396343 So, almost done by now?