Equestrian Celestial Forge

by TheDriderPony

Chapter 32 - Morning Meditations

In. Out.

In. Out.

In. Out.

Applejack focused on her breathing as she slowly moved through her morning katas, bending her body in ways that'd make a contortionist wince and a chiropractor drool.

Left hoof back, right hoof braced. Shift the weight of an imagined enemy over her head.

In. Out.

It always left her feeling strangely disconnected. Her memories insisted that she’d been doing these stretches every morning for years (but also only for a few weeks). Her muscle memory swore that it knew each move in sequence as surely as she knew how to buck a tree or canter down the road.

And her body itself demanded to know what she was thinking trying to flex in ways the equine body was never meant to.

The feeling made her head swim, but not in a bad way. Doing her morning katas was a lot like poking at a bruise; testing the edges of memory to see what she could touch and what she couldn’t. Because the memories she’d been given (or found? Twilight still hadn’t solved that mystery) didn’t just fade or blur into hard-to-remember details. The edges were as crisp and clean as a jigsaw puzzle. For every memory of learning to leverage a throw, there was a neat hole cut out of who she was throwing. Despite walking into the gym hundreds of remembered times, she didn’t have a clue what the building looked like.

She wasn’t overly concerned about it. At least, not nearly as much as Twilight seemed to think she should be. It wasn’t like she had someone else’s memories and they were changing what she liked and who she was. At worst it felt like she’d taken a hit to the head and remembered a year of classes she’d just forgotten.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t curious, though.

Shift the weight to her front hoof, reverse-twist the other.

In. Out.

Thus, her katas. Going through the ingrained motions let her probe the edges of the memory and look for any patches where there might be something more memorable than sheer fighting skills.

But introspection aside, it was also a fine way to wake herself up and get her body all limbered up for the day ahead.

The self-defense classes had filled a similar role… for all the four sessions they’d lasted. As it turned out, Ponyville was just too peaceful a place for any of the locals to have any real commitment to the art of self-defense past their initial curiosity. By the fourth session only two other ponies showed up. Bon Bon, who was already so skilled it was almost pointless to try and teach her anything, and...

“Ooh!” came the sound of air rushing out of a small pair of lungs as their attached body fell over. Again.

”Wide stance, Ah said.”

“Ah was wide! Any wider and I'd be doing the splits!”

Applebloom was the surprising exception. Though maybe not that much of a surprise; the filly had stuck with her karate lessons long after the traveling tutor went on his way and even longer than anypony who knew the filly thought she’d have stuck with a hobby that failed to get her a cutie mark. And yet there she was, every morning insisting on joining in morning stretches, even when she was technically more or less on vacation.

Applejack opened one eye to check her sister’s form. “Forward-back wide, not side-to-side wide.”

“...Oh.” She watched her stand up and struggle once again to find her balance in the awkward two-legged pose. Applebloom winced as her legs failed to stretch beyond a certain point. “You sure this is right?”

“Just takes practice,” she answered as she bent over backward to shift into Warrior VII.

“Now that's just plain impossible!”

She didn’t bother to hide her grin. “Ah’m doing it, ain't I?”

Applejack had only a moment’s warning before her leg suddenly quivered beneath her and threw up its metaphorical hooves at her overbearing demands. She wobbled, she wibbled, she overbalanced, and she tumbled.

Applebloom failed to hold in her giggles, and Applejack was quick to join in.

“Alright. Let's do one more round of set three, then we'll call it a mornin’ and head in to help Goldie with breakfast.”

“Right!”

Meanwhile from inside a cottage that housed several times more cats than ponies (guests included), two elderly cousins looked on.

“You got some mighty peculiar young'uns, Smith.”

“Ayup, but they're good'uns, no doubt about it. Fixed up yer house good, didn’ they?”

Goldie Delicious nodded, dislodging two cats from her head. “I never thought y’could patch the place up jus’ by shufflin’ around the wood that’s already there, but fritters to fruitcakes if they didn’t go and do just that. I didn’t feel a draft all night.” Another cat used her as a platform as it jumped from one pile of ‘heirlooms’ to another. “You sure you don’t wanna stay a few extra days? I know Mimsy, Mr. Catterwall, and Whiskers the Fourteenth would love the company of some energetic fillies a mite longer."

Granny Smith sidestepped a landslide of old records that yet another cat dislodged in her direction, once again reminded of why reunions always tended to end up hosted by her branch of the family tree. “Thank ya kindly, but—”

Her protests were cut short by the sound of breaking glass in the room above them. Followed by a muffled “oh no” and then a much less muffled “Sweet Celestia no!”

Then came the noise, though calling it just a noise was woefully unfair.

It started as a low, creeping cat’s yowl, quickly joined by ten, twenty, a hundred more voices in ear-grating cacophony. The noise stretched and flanged like the moaning of some demon from the pits of Tartarus, coming from everywhere at once as if the very walls were possessed.

“Run for your lives!” Pinkie Pie yelled as she ran downstairs in a blind panic, grabbing Granny Smith as she crossed paths and ferrying her out the door. “Head for the hills! Save yourselves!”

“Pinkie?!” Applejack exclaimed as the earth pony started throwing luggage onto the cart as fast as she could. “Slow down! What happened?”

“I made a terrible mistake! My creation turned against me! Curse my hubris and pride!” she wailed, not halting for a second as she lobbed Big Mac himself over her head and into the wagon’s harness, “I wanted to get all the kitties together in one place for a group picture for the scrapbook, but they just wouldn’t sit still! So I did a little science—a bit of chemistry, a bit of botany, had to make a few substitutions for missing ingredients—”

“Get to the point, Pinkie!” Applebloom cried as she was juggled into the backseat.

“I sneezed! I sneezed on the petri dish and the catalyst spread everywhere!”

The cottage, the ground, and the very bones of every pony present vibrated as the purring of countless cats hit some resonant frequency that put Vinyl Scratch’s best bass-boosted speakers to shame.

Applejack grabbed her by the shoulders. “Pinkie. What did you do? What does the catalyst do?”

“...It turns common dust into chemically pure catnip.”

Applejack’s wide eyes turned slowly back to the cottage. The cottage so filled with dust that it looked like an early snowfall. The same dust that (after spending the night) was so thoroughly ground into her family’s coats that she’d been considering extending their road trip to include a visit to the Ponyville spa.

A cat—one of the gross, hairless ones— poked its head out through the door, its eyes solid pearls of darkness.

She didn’t need a degree to come to the same conclusion Pinkie had.

“Step on it Mac!” she hollered as she flung both herself and Pinkie into the cart. “Before we’re up to our eyeballs in frisky felines!”

“Bye Great-Cousin Goldie!” Applebloom waved back as the cottage swiftly shrank behind them.

Goldie waved in ignorant bliss from the window before she was swept away and lost beneath a wave of cats.

And she was never seen nor heard from again.

(Until she showed up next Apple Family Reunion, as hale and inexplicably healthy as ever.)

Author's Note:

Behold!
The holidays are past us now and I've finished all the holiday story-exchange groups I was participating in, which means my time is free once again to work on this little hobby project.

Comments

[Crescent Glaive]

Catnip XD

[Comickook]

This chapter might have taken a while, but it was definitely well worth the wait. Definitely liked the work going into the exchanges, characterizations and future chapter set-up. Appreciated Applejack's reflection on her new combat skills as well as how only Bon Bon and Apple Bloom stuck with the self-defense classes for more than four lessons (though, given her desire to support her big sister AND how much bullying she and her friends have taken, it IS kind of understandable that Apple Bloom WOULD stick with it). Also appreciated Applejack's correcting Apple Bloom on her stance. The stuff about Pinkie's latest experiment creating THAT MUCH cat nip was pretty funny too (especially with that little Shout Out to the end of a Bugs Bunny short [albeit with "Martians" replaced by "frisky felines"] and the acknowledgement that Golden Delicious DID make it through that small mountain of cats).

Anyway, definitely looking forward to more of this.

[Greenhorn]

“...It turns common dust into chemically pure catnip.”

Can I have a sample? I want to try it on Rarity's cat and see what would happen.

[PonyFrost]

Ooo, lovely to see this story get back in action.

I’m sure this will be the last time Pinkie ever uses the power of science carelessly

[River Babble]

"its eyes solid pearls of darkness." I can not even BEGIN to describe how ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY this sets the mood, WELL DONE XDXDXD

Love seeing new chapters of this! Thanks!