Methane, She Pinkie

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 3: the Flyer

Pinkie Pie skipped up the hill towards the copse of trees that hid the alien ship. She'd filled her saddlebags with various goodies- pies, cakes, cookies, fruit punch, lemonade, cider, and a variety selection box from Bon-Bon's shop. No matter what, she knew, she had something suitable for a little Welcome-To-My-Planet party, just the two of them.

Not that she wanted to keep it to two- Twilight Sparkle would go nuts over the alien, and Fluttershy would be fascinated by its weird body and want to ask all sorts of questions about the animals on its world, and Rainbow Dash would drool over that big cool shiny metal spaceship. But she'd Pinkie Promised, and if she couldn't keep a Pinkie Promise, who could?

Besides, she had two other parties that day, plus the lunch rush at Sugarcube Corner, so it was probably best that this one be kept small and short. Just the two-

"Hey, Pinkie, watcha doin'?"

Uh-oh. Alien plus Pinkie plus Rainbow Dash was more than two. Not good!

"Um, hi, Dashie!" she said, smiling and waving as Rainbow Dash swooped down to hover in front of her. "Nothing much! What about you?"

Rainbow Dash craned her neck to look on either side of Pinkie, giving each overstuffed saddlebag a long stare. "That's a lot of food for nothing much," she said. "And my birthday is next month, so I know it's not that. What's going on?"

Pinkie Pie thought frantically. She didn't want to lie to Dashie, but if she said the wrong thing she might go into those trees, and that would be just the same as if she'd spilled every last bean. It would count as breaking her promise. So she had to lie... but the thing was, she couldn't think of any lie that was either Pinkie-crazy or other-ponies-sane. All the ideas she had kind of fell in between, and Dash would know it, and-

"Is something wrong?" Dash asked. "Are you in some kind of trouble? You're not running away from Ponyville or something, are you?"

Okay, this was getting worse. Whatever Pinkie had, she had to go with it right now... and all she had was nothing. "No, I'm not running away," she said, dropping her smile and giving her friend her most seriously serious look. "And I'm not doing anything wrong, and I'm not in trouble. But I Pinkie Promised I wouldn't talk to anypony, anypony whatever, about a certain thing. So I really can't tell you what I'm doing, and no, before you ask, you can't come with me."

"Oh, really?" That didn't please Rainbow Dash at all. "That sounds like you really are in trouble. Got some suspicious pony threatening you? Just point me at 'em!" She slammed her forehooves together meaningfully.

"No, Rainbow Dash." Pinkie hated to be this blunt and serious- it was such a downer!- but her only hope was to shut this down at once. "I'm not in trouble or danger. Nopony is threatening me. But I really can't say anything more about it." She pointed to the trees. "Now I'm going in there by myself for the next hour or so."

"So they're hiding in those-"

"RAINBOW DASH!"

Dash actually flinched at Pinkie's shout, and that made her feel terrible. She absolutely hated to hurt anybody's feelings even a little bit, her friends most of all. But she promised.

"Dash, I want you to listen to me as a friend and hear what I'm saying," she said. "Nobody's making me do anything. Nobody's threatening me or anypony I know. Nothing bad will happen to anyone in Ponyville no matter what happens, but I Pinkie Promised not to talk about it. And if you go into those trees," she said, pointing at the top of the hill, "after I've said all this, it will be the same as if I broke my promise, because you'll have gone in there because of me. You will have made me break a Pinkie Promise, do you understand?"

To her credit, Rainbow Dash didn't blow her off or blow her top. Nor did she zip straight up into the trees, as she might have done a few years before. But Pinkie could see she still wasn't satisfied. After a long moment of drilling through her with her eyes, Dash said, "What's in those trees, Pinkie?"

Pinkie shook her head. "Nuh-uh. Pinkie Promise."

Rainbow Dash gave her a small nod. "But whatever it is, it's not putting you or anypony else in danger, right?"

Pinkie started answering immediately, because she knew any hesitation would get taken the wrong way. But she spoke slowly, choosing her words as carefully as she could without actually stopping mid-sentence. "Nobody in Ponyville is being threatened, or put in danger, in any way whatever, nor anybody either of us knows who isn't in Ponyville." She took a breath and added, a bit more softly, "Trust me, Dashie."

Dash took a deep breath herself, closed her eyes for a moment, then nodded. "Okay," she said. "I'll be hovering out here waiting for you. If you're not out in an hour and a half, I'm coming in, Pinkie Promise or no Pinkie Promise."

Pinkie Pie relaxed. That probably was as good as she was going to get. "Thanks, Dashie," she said quietly. "I'll see you in about an hour."

---

Tinat watched the pink one and the flying blue one talking via a probe hidden in the tree closest to them. The probe's microphones couldn't quite pick up their voices, which concerned him greatly, but he didn't dare send it out into the open. The flying natives tended to be quick, and the blue one in particular could outfly his drones with ease. If he didn't want to be outed to the locals at large, he had to keep the probes hidden- which meant this was one conversation that had to remain unrecorded.

He half-hoped that the pink one would lead the blue one away from his ship's hiding place. That would keep both of them away, which was more in line with his orders than allowing the pink one to continue her direct interaction. Not that she hadn't been useful- she certainly had- but the more she came, the more likely she'd bring others with her. Case in point, the blue one, who was now watching the pink one come up the hill, giving the occasional intense stare right at the camouflage projections.

But more important, he had news for the pink one, and Tinat was pretty sure she wouldn't take it well.

Sigh. At least he was fairly sure she'd understand it clearly. The combination of the books she'd brought and an additional day of observing the native village had massively improved the computer translation. He could now understand most of the native conversations, and he expected the computer would do an equally good job rendering his own reverberations into her language.

So the bad news would ring through her with zero loss. Hooray.

"Hi-hi!" the pink one called up, bouncing up onto the hull next to his observation window. "Toldja I'd be back! And I brought all sorts of stuff!"

Tinat settled his resonator, forcing himself to speak as clearly as he could. "Good brightening," he said. "My computer has learned how to speak your language better. My name is Tinat. I am an autrenkt. I come from the planet Konsor. It orbits another star, a long way from your sun. Could you please tell me if you understand me clearly?"

"Yeah, that is better!" Pinkie Pie called up. "I'm Pinkie Pie! I'm a pony from Ponyville! That's not a planet, it's just a town! Our country is called Equestria, and our world is called Equus!" She tapped her chin for a moment, then added, "But that's just what we ponies call it! I think the griffons call it Erde, and the dragons call it-"

"Thank you, Pinkie Pie," Tinat interrupted. "That's good enough for now. But I wanted to talk about that foodstuff you brought yesterday."

"Oh, yeah!" Pinkie grinned, shrugging the strange bags off her body. "This time I brought all sorts of stuff with me! So I'm sure that if you found something you can't eat in that cupcake, I've got something that-"

"I can't eat any of it, Pinkie Pie."

Pinkie froze in the act of opening one of the bags. "Come again?" she asked.

Tinat sighed. "I don't know if you know anything about chemistry," he began. "But I'll try to explain. I come from a planet that is very, very cold by your standards. It's actually a moon of a really big planet, a long way from our star. My homeworld is about twice as large in diameter- larger across- than your world, but your world is a lot denser. And your world is so, so much hotter. So much hotter... well, you know the river that runs through your village?"

"Um... yeah, but what does-"

"The substance that flows through it is dihydrogen monoxide. You call it water, yes?" He reproduced the resonance the translator had used, which was close to, but not the same as, his people's word for ice.

"Um, yeah? What else would it be?"

"On my world dihydrogen monoxide is one of our most common rocks. It's what my species' bones are mostly made of. That is how different my body is from yours, how different my world is from yours. I tell you that to prepare you for the rest of it. Do you understand so far?"

Pinkie Pie blinked. "Your bones are ice? Really?"

"Solid water, yes. You have different names for water in different states?"

"Yeah. Water is water when it's water. When it's frozen and hard, it's ice. And when it's in the air it's gas or vaporwater."

"Yes. We don't have that. For us there's a short word for ice, and dihydrogen monoxide for the chemical, because we have a lot of ice which isn't... er... water. For example, carbon dioxide- you know what that is, right?"

"Sure! We breathe it out, and the plants breathe it in to make oxygen so we can breathe that in!"

According to his samples and analysis it was a lot more complicated than that. Tinat felt less confident that this was going to work, but he was already simplifying this as much as he could. He was also dragging it out a lot more than he should, but... well, those big colorful eyes, so unlike his own solid black ones, just... well, he hated doing this, that was all there was to it. "More or less. Anyway, carbon dioxide is also an ice on our world."

"What? You mean dry ice?" Pinkie blinked. "They make that at the ice cream shop in town! They need a really big machine, and it makes lots of fog, and then it's all gone! They use it for when ponies need to keep stuff super-duper cold! Or when they want to make fog, but you have to be careful-"

"Pinkie Pie, please," Tinat said. "There is a substance that my people have three words for, like you do for water. We call it lifeice when it's frozen and rainpool when it's liquid. You probably heard those words as something funny, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Life ice? Rain pool?"

"The translator is doing its best with words your language doesn't have," Tinat said. "But when I say our name for when it's a gas, it should give you the word in your language. Methane."

Pinkie blinked again. "Methane? You mean gas, like in gas foodforges?"

"In oxygen methane is an extremely flammable substance, yes. And the atmosphere inside my ship is about one-third methane. That's what I breathe. A large portion of my body mass is methane. Methane for us on our world is like water on your world."

Pinkie's eyes widened. "Wooooow."

"So you understand that, right?" Tinat said. "My people's metabolism- that's the chemistry that keeps us alive- is all based on methane and other hydrocarbons. Do you know what hydrocarbons are?"

Pinkie nodded. "Sure!" she said. "Sweet sugary snacks are full of 'em! That's why you can't eat too many unless you do a lot of exercising, or else-"

"No, Pinkie Pie," Tinat said firmly. "What your snacks are full of are carbohydrates. They're a lot different. Hydrocarbons are compounds made of hydrogen and carbon. Carbohydrates are compounds made of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. And that oxygen is the problem." After a moment he added, "Well, that and the fact that your snacks have so much ice in them that they'd be almost as hard as the metal of my ship at the temperatures I need to survive."

"Oxygen is the problem?" Pinkie asked. "That can't be right. Everything needs oxygen to survive, right? Even plants, but they get their oxygen from carbon dioxide and water."

"Well, yes and no," Tinat said. "Life on my world does use a little oxygen. We need small amounts to make the proteins in our bodies, and to build our bones. But that's all we can endure, is a little oxygen. We mainly get that from simple alcohols and ketones. But more than a little oxygen is very, very bad for us. It breaks down the chemistry in our bodies, rips our cells apart, boils our blood.

"That food you gave me yesterday, Pinkie? It had sucrose in it. The blue soft stuff was about half sucrose. There was more in the protein-based part. Sucrose is about half oxygen by mass. And there was enough sucrose in the blue soft stuff to kill dozens of my people."

"Kill?" Tinat realized he could identify what appalled looked on a native face, now. "But sucrose? That's just table sugar! It's perfectly harmless!"

"Not to us," Tinat said. "To us any sugar is deadly, sucrose or anything else. And that was one of the less deadly substances in that food. Those complex carbohydrates I mentioned would cause our blood to congeal- assuming we didn't spontaneously combust first."

The change in expression on Pinkie's face caused Tinat to change his evaluation. What he'd seen before was merely shocked. This was appalled. "Spontaneously combust??" Pinkie shouted. "Are you saying ordinary pony food might make you blow up??"

"To be fair," Tinat said, "under the right conditions merely stepping out of the ship into your air might do that. But yes, my people have been known to die by having flames burst from them after eating something with too much oxygen in it."

"That... that's horrible," Pinkie Pie said. Tinat could see dihydrogen monoxide, or something similar, building up under her eyes. "You mean any sweet treat could-"

"I mean exactly that, Pinkie Pie," Tinat said. "The fact is this. If I took your food into my ship, it would freeze so hard I couldn't eat it." He pointed to his proboscis. "Even if I had mouthparts like yours I couldn't eat it. But if I could, it would kill me in minutes, and it would be a very bad way to die. So far as I could tell, there was almost nothing in that food that I could safely ingest."

The fibrous substance on Pinkie's head and neck and near the rear of her body slumped. Tinat's observations of the natives had only gone on a little while, but he was fairly certain the pink one's fibers were abnormal by any standards. This sudden change, though apparently a reversion towards the species norm, was so quick and abnormal compared to everything he'd seen of Pinkie Pie up to now that he was split between the desire to give her a comforting back-tap or to jump into the pilot cabin and begin emergency pre-flight procedures.

Then, to his mixed shock and relief, the fibers regained a bit of their buoyancy. "Does your food have to be liquid?" she asked quietly.

"By our standards, no," Tinat said. "But you'd find what we call solid food very soft and oozy. We can't eat anything hard or sharp."

"Okay. You can't have sugars, starches or carbohydrates. Proteins okay?"

"In small amounts. Mostly they get passed as waste matter. Our bodies make almost all our proteins from base elements."

"Alcohols?"

"Simple ones, yes, in small quantities. No more than a couple of oxygen atoms. But we mostly consume hydrocarbons. We break down chain hydrocarbons into acetylene, and then our cells use that for our metabolism."

"What's a ketone?"

Tinat sighed. He really didn't want to give a chemistry lesson through a computer translation to someone who had only a very rudimentary grasp on the science. "It's in that book," he said. "Otherwise my computer wouldn't give you the word. But your animals seem to give it off as a waste product. I suspect it's mildly toxic to you."

Pinkie Pie stroked the bottom of her face with one foot. "Huh," she said. "This is gonna be a challenge." She pointed the foot at the window. "But before you leave, I'm going to find something I can forge that you can eat! I'm not giving up!" She paused and then added, "Maybe you could give me a little sample of your food so I can figure it out?"

Tinat's patience reached its ragged edge, and he drummed his grips on his back in agitation. "Pinkie Pie, I shouldn't even be talking to you, remember??" he shrieked. "I don't have anything to put my food in that would keep it from decomposing in your environment! The rules say I'm not supposed to interact with you natives at all! Why would I have something to give you as a sample??" He sighed. "Please let it go and go home. It's impossible. You'll only give yourself more pain."

"Impossible?" Pinkie Pie's fibers had returned to their full physics-defying tangle, and she stomped a foot on his hull that sent the reverberations of doom ringing through his ship. "I am Pinkamena Diane Pie! I do the impossible twenty times every morning along with my situps! And whether you believe in me or not, I will throw you a party!" With that she spun, jumped off Tinat's ship, and began trotting away.

Tinat wanted to sigh with relief, but he didn't think it was justified.

The pink one proved him right a moment later as she spun on her feet again, galloped back up to the window, showed her mouthparts again, and chirped, "Have a nice day!" before turning again and trotting off for good this time.

Rocking his torso with chagrin, Tinat put aside worries for future interspecies disaster and turned his focus back to his biological experiments.

---

Pinkie Pie didn't break stride as Rainbow Dash swooped down to glide beside her. "That was a lot less than an hour," the pegasus said. "Did everything go well?"

"Can't talk now," Pinkie Pie said. "One: Pinkie Promise. Two: gotta think."

"Okay," Dash shrugged. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Nope," Pinkie said. "Not unless you know how to ask questions without explaining why you're asking the questions."

"Well...." Rainbow Dash rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Maybe I do. Depends on who you're asking."

"Twilight."

"Oh." Rainbow Dash dropped her hoof, then shrugged. "Yeah, can't help you there. She's gonna give you the third degree. You know that, right?"

"Sure do. But I gotta try anyway."

"Yeah, if you gotta, you gotta," Dash agreed. She smirked a little and asked, "Mind if I watch?"

"If I said no, would you go away?"

"Hmmm... nah, probably not." The smirk grew a little broader. "I still wanna know what you were doing. And I really wanna see you try to out-think our favorite egghead."

Pinkie sighed. "Yeah," she said. "Me too."

Pinkie Promise, Pinkie Promise, Pinkie Promise...

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

Pinkie's going to invent molecular gastronomy in the process of trying to make a methane-based cake or what have you.

[Moproblems Moharmoney]

...does this goo-boi eat feces? The description, plus proboscis, gives me fly vibes.

[River Babble]

This may truly be Pinkie's greatest challenge! But WE BELIEVE IN HER!!!

[Georg]

A reminder to the Chemically Challenged youth out there. Oxygen is a nasty monster in the universe. It combines explosively with the most common element (Hydrogen), binds to about everything in the periodic table, and is a generally greedy thing. Chlorine is probably the second-most terrifying element compared to it, while Silicon is more of a theoretical building block of life than practical.

[Kris Overstreet]

11542241 Fluorine is much scarier than any of those, but is pretty much never found in pure molecular form. For obvious reasons.

That said, there's more than ten times as much oxygen in the universe as there is any of that other stuff.

[mishun]

We break down chain hydrocarbons into acetylene, and then our cells use that for our metabolism.

Acetylene has positive enthalpy of formation (and also explosive)

[Always Breakfast]

Oh my god. Why do I get the sinking feeling Pinkie is going to make a cake out of fertilizer and the fuel can of a welding torch?

[Kris Overstreet]

11542466 Fortunately she didn't have to.

Incidentally, it's also fortunate that Tinat didn't give her any of his food, because odds are good it would contain quit a bit of one of the more common compounds on the surface of Titan (and, thence, also of his homeworld), namely HCN.

You might know it better as cyanide.

[mishun]

11542553

... namely HCN.

Awwwww but... but it's a gift gas!
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Zyklon_B_labels.jpg

[Black--Soul]

Highly entertaining and very sci-fi ♡

[Bugsydor]

I appreciate Pinkie taking the impossible as a challenge. And I appreciate Rainbow wanting to watch.

[darklight731]

What exactly will she even make? An alcoholic methane soup? That would be rad!

[Bicyclette]

Pinkie Pie skipped up the hill towards the copse of trees that hid the alien ship. She'd filled her saddlebags with various goodies- pies, cakes, cookies, fruit punch, lemonade, cider, and a variety selection box from Bon-Bon's shop.

yay, Bon Bon’s candy shop is in this!

"Oh, really?" That didn't please Rainbow Dash at all. "That sounds like you really are in trouble. Got some suspicious pony threatening you? Just point me at 'em!" She slammed her forehooves together meaningfully.

oh Rainbow Dash, you beautiful, lovable idiot

She tapped her chin for a moment, then added, "But that's just what we ponies call it! I think the griffons call it Erde, and the dragons call it-"

aww, love this! it did seem strange that the only word we had for the planet was so specific to ponies

Pinkie blinked again. "Methane? You mean gas, like in gas foodforges?"

hehe, love this word for ovens

This sudden change, though apparently a reversion towards the species norm, was so quick and abnormal compared to everything he'd seen of Pinkie Pie up to now that he was split between the desire to give her a comforting back-tap or to jump into the pilot cabin and begin emergency pre-flight procedures.

aww, the universality of the sad Pinkie

"Impossible?" Pinkie Pie's fibers had returned to their full physics-defying tangle, and she stomped a foot on his hull that sent the reverberations of doom ringing through his ship. "I am Pinkamena Diane Pie! I do the impossible twenty times every morning along with my situps! And whether you believe in me or not, I will throw you a party!" With that she spun, jumped off Tinat's ship, and began trotting away.

oh that is a very Pinkie defiant speech! love it

The pink one proved him right a moment later as she spun on her feet again, galloped back up to the window, showed her mouthparts again, and chirped, "Have a nice day!" before turning again and trotting off for good this time.

ahaha perfect

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

"...... And I really wanna see you try to out-think our favorite egghead."

Can't be done. Forget "smart". Go with "crazy". In that department you could beat anypony outside a mental institution.