Tales from a Con

by Admiral Biscuit

194 Different Tastes

Different Tastes

Every year, beginning in the early spring, you start saving all your chores money and odd jobs money for a trip in the summer. Right after Winter Wrap-Up, you dig out your bit bank and start putting coins in it.

You’ve had it for years. It’s a clever clockwork and iron marvel that takes the coins one at a time and automatically drops them into its reservoir. Early in the year, each coin sounds hollow as it clangs to the bottom of the bank; later on they make a softer clunk as they land.

Shortly after you start saving money, you head down to the train station for a current timetable. Every year they expand the tracks further and the trains serve more exotic destinations. Last year, you’d gone all the way to Los Pegasus, and the year before that, Trottingham.

That trip hadn’t been entirely by train, since Trottingham was on an island.

It’s fun to look through the timetables, to get an idea where you could go, and then you can go to the library and research the location.

Judging by the rate at which tracks are being laid, it won’t be too long before the timetable is too large to understand. WIthout even comparing to last year’s options, there are entire new branches of the railroad that didn’t exist last Winter Wrap-Up.

One name keeps coming to mind—Mount Aris.

SIlverstream is cool, and every time she describes her homeland it sounds amazing, and completely different than anyplace a pony would live. Unlike Los Pegasus and Trottingham, which were different but also kind of the same.

The library doesn’t have much information. There are some sketches in an old book which predates the Storm King. You know enough Equestrian history to remember that Queen Novo used the Pearl of Transformation to turn all the hippogriffs into seaponies, and after the Storm King had been defeated, some of them had moved to land while others continued to live in the sea.

There’s no reason to look for another destination; now it’s just a matter of saving up your bits until the summer.

•••

You’ve packed a couple of books for the train ride—the first part of the journey is familiar, and not really worth watching the scenery. Not until the train starts heading south from Horseshoe Bay—at that point you’re in new territory. Plains, woodlands, a jungle, and then a long stretch of desert, the longest you’ve ever traveled through.

You watch the sun set over the distant dunes, and as the moon rises the temperature drops to more bearable levels.

Morning finds you still in the desert, but now it’s not as barren—there are scrub brushes and even occasional stunted trees poking up above the sand. As you continue southbound, the plants reestablish themselves as you creep up into a mountain pass.

The train finally finds itself along a rocky outcropping, the ocean to your west. You know you’re getting close as the train starts island-hopping. Mount Aris is technically an island, but there are enough shallow, rocky waters near it that a railroad bridge could be constructed.

•••

By the time you arrive at Mount Aris, what had been an almost exclusively pony train is now mostly hippogriffs—they’d boarded at previous stops.

You clear the station platform before you start gawking around at the mountain, at the architecture, and most of all at a village of hippogriffs. You can already see changes that have been made for visitors—a couple buildings have stairs leading up to an entrance several floors up. There’d be no reason to build them otherwise.

“Hey!”

You turn your head to see a white hippogriff with a cyan and turquoise mane. He’s wearing a familiar-looking necklace.

“I’m Terramar—Silverstream said you were coming.”

“She did?” She hadn’t said anything to you.

He nodded. “Wrote me a postcard and told me to show you around.”

Huh. That was an opportunity you hadn’t expected. You usually went around on your own, or sometimes booked a tour with a local group. “She never mentioned anything to me about that.”

Your senses are on high alert. Some cities, unfortunately, have scammers who prey on tourists. While you’ve got some street sense, you certainly can’t blend in to a city filled with hippogriffs. Sure, you do actually know Silverstream, but that could be a lucky guess on his part. How many hippogriffs are there in Equestria proper, anyway?

Still, she’s the kind of girl to get enthusiastic about somepony visiting her homeland, and to tell her brother about it (if he really is her brother). Train service isn’t frequent, you had told her when you were intending to leave, so it’s not impossible that he’d be there waiting for you.

You decide to stay wary until he proves himself one way or another.

“Do you have a room? Do you want something to eat?”

“Yes and yes.” Train food wasn’t the best, although you had to give them credit where it was due: preparing a proper meal in the confines of a moving railcar couldn’t be easy.

“Do you want to drop off your luggage, or—”

“I think there are restaurants and food stalls on the way to the hotel, aren’t there?”

Terramar nodded. “Maybe nothing that you would like, though. Silverstream says that ponies don’t like seafood.”

“It’s not something I’m used to,” you admit. “But the point of travel is to try new things. As long as it isn’t spicy.”

“I don’t think we have any spicy foods,” Terramar says.

“That’s a relief.” Los Pegasus did and not all the stores warned a pony what was in their food. They did at the hotel, but some of the smaller restaurants took the attitude of ‘if you don’t like hot food you shouldn’t eat here.’

Terramar leads you to a small food stand not that far away from the train station. It’s got some seats and tables scattered around outside, many of them made from improvised or scavenged materials—smooth rocks, tables using bleached driftwood for legs.

“Fish is an acquired taste,” Terramar tells you. “Or so Silverstream has told me. They sell noodle soup here.” He points to the menu. “Any of those would be good.”

You study the menu. The prices are reasonable, you do love noodles and soup. “What’s a Fatali pepper?”

“It’s a little red pepper,” he says. “There’s a lot of them in the noodles, they’ve got a really nice color and flavor.” He nods to the cook, who opens the lid on a pot and lets you look at the soup.

They are colorful, and the soup smells fantastic, even if it makes your nose tingly. That’s surely from the steam. “I’ll try that.”

The cook ladles out two bowls for you, and you take your place on a rock. You’re still a little skeptical of this Terramar character, but he seems like he can be trusted.

“You’re sure it’s not spicy?” Your nose is still tingling.

He shrugs and takes a spoonful, swallows it down like it’s nothing.

You do the same, and the soup is as delicious as promised, but just as you reach for your second spoonful, a burning sensation starts on your tongue and then rapidly works its way down to your throat.

You can feel your skin flushing and too late realize that this is the spiciest thing you’ve ever eaten. As your eyes blur with tears, you see Terramar looking at you intently.

---

[CHOICE]

>You were wrong to trust him (chaos)
>He made an innocent mistake (hero)

---

[CHOICE A: Chaos]
“I knew it!” You can barely talk through the burning. You swipe the noodle soup off the table, covering him with it.

You grab for your bags and start galloping for the hotel. You already know the glass of water you left on the table won’t provide any relief and no matter what you don’t want to be around him when you’re vulnerable.

“I didn’t know,” he protests, licking his beak clean. A moment later, he’s flying alongside you. “It’s just soup, it’s not too hot and it’s not spicy at all, Silverstream said ponies liked noodles and soup. Let me help.”

“No!” Tears are already streaming down your face and it’s getting harder to breathe. You know this will pass, but you’re going to be in pain for a while. “Go away! I never want to see you again!”

You push your way into the lobby and slam the doors shut in his face.

---

[CHOICE B: Hero]
“Milk,” you stammer out. “Or something.” You paw at your tongue and slam back the glass of water you have—it won’t do much, but it at least gives you a moment of relief.

Terramar takes flight, and you see him vanish inside a restaurant just down the block.

As the burning comes back, you take his glass and down it, too. Slowly, stretching out the minimal relief it provides as long as you can.

The chef comes out from around his counter with another glass of water and sets it down in front of you. “Are you okay?”

“Hot,” you say. You can feel sweat pouring down your forehead. “Spicy.”

He takes your spoon, samples your soup. “Tastes fine, everygriff likes it.”

Just then, Terramar lands and sets a milkshake on the table in front of you. You greedily suck at the straw, letting the cool relief of the ice cream and the magical properties of the milk do their work.

You should have remembered that birds can’t taste spice.

Comments

[Lurks-no-More]

Ooh, spicy!

[Walabio]

This is a MetaComment:

I like the saving. Although I am a godless atheist (¿are you gonna eat that baby?), If I had to write the moral code for society, I would tell them to follow the ethics of secular humanism, donate 10% of their income to charity, and save 10% of their income for retirement. Many people work until they cannot work any more years past 65 and then when they cannot work anymore spend what is left of their golden years living in a box under an overpass, waiting for the sweet release of death, because they do not save.