All roads lead to home
The school was a short distance away from the center of town, a mile or so along some dusty country roads. In the winter there were covered wagons pulled by a small team of stallions to keep all the little kiddies warm and safe. In the late fall, though, it was nice to just walk.
For some reason, Plum decided to walk it with me. This gave the two of us plenty of time to get acquainted. Or, I should say, for Plum Pudding to let me know about every single thought that ran through her head.
In short order, I learned that the filly’s favorite type of juice was grape, favorite color was purple, favorite ice cream was vanilla fudge ripple, favorite song was Sapphire Shore’s “Love on the Road”, and her favorite hoofball team was the Hoofington Ironhooves, along with a bunch of other things I can’t remember. To be fair to me, it was hard to follow her as she gabbled excitedly. All of that took about ten minutes. I don’t think she took a single breath in that entire time.
When she got done talking about herself, she started in on me.
“So, why be a police pony?” she asked, looking over at me as we walked in the late afternoon sun.
"My dad was a cop," I told her, but he was much more than that, to me. He was my hero. "Him being a cop made me want to be a cop," I continued on saying. I didn't mention how that decision almost broke my mother's heart.
“Neat,” she said, then stopped cold. “Hey, look at that bird!”
I looked where she pointed. “It’s blue,” I noted.
“A bluejay,” she said. “Those are pretty.”
She watched the blue bird hop around on a branch for a few seconds. I'm not sure why I decided to stay there with her, but I did. When the bird finally flew off she started walking, immediately starting with the questions again.
“So, how’d you run into that... what was it?”
“Poison joke?”
“Yeah, that stuff.”
I wasn’t sure how much she was listening to me. Her ears swiveled around constantly as she looked around. I shrugged and answered anyway.
“My partner and I chased an escaped mental patient into the Everfree forest. It’s a dangerous place. I ran into a patch of it.”
“And, ‘poof!’, you turned into a filly?” she asked.
“Not right away. Happened overnight. I woke up the next morning a lot shorter and pinker.”
She looked at me with the frank curiosity of the young, who hadn't learned yet that it's rude to stare. "What did you look like as a stallion, anyway?"
"Pretty ugly, kid." True enough. They say that mares love a stallion in uniform, but even in mine I'd never gotten much more than a passing glance.
She giggled. “Why did it turn you into a filly, though?”
“I was told it's got a really bad sense of humor. Probably decided that turning the big, ugly, gruff-voiced stallion into a little filly was a real hoot.”
“You don’t have a gruff voice,” she said with blatantly false innocence. “You have a cute little filly voice.”
I stopped walking to scowl at her. She grinned impishly back at me. "You wanna hear the story or not?" She gave an eager nod, so I continued.
“Turns out there’s a cure back in Ponyville. A certain herbal bubble bath, I hear. Problem is, I forgot that my mom was visiting me.”
“Why was that a problem?” she asked. She was looking at more birds, I noticed, but she was following the conversation well enough. I gave a mental shrug and kept on telling my story.
“My mom had shown up a couple of days before I left for the Everfree forest. She wanted me to quit the job, and I’d finally agreed to retire.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked. “I thought you liked being a police pony!”
“More than anything, kid.” I said, feeling a twinge in my chest as I said it. I'd gotten my mark when I'd decided to be a cop, after all. “But she wore me down. Said she’s already lost a husband to the force, didn’t want to lose a son, too.”
I took another three steps before I noticed that Plum had stopped walking. I looked back and saw her staring at me with big, watery eyes.
“Your daddy died?” she asked quietly.
“Uh. Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, then pressed her lips together in a quivering line. I felt a surge of alarm as I realized she was doing everything she could to stop from bawling.
“It was a long time ago, kid,” I said, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. “Before you were born, even.”
“Still, that must have made you sad,” she said, sniffling a little.
“Well, yeah.”
We walked together for a few minutes, not talking. Plum had her eyes on the ground in front of her hooves. I had my mind on a chocolate-colored stallion who’d been my entire world when I was a colt.
"Um. I bet you made a great police officer,” Plum offered eventually, breaking the silence.
There wasn't any sarcasm in her voice, at least not that I could hear. I felt a little glow of pride as I nodded. "I was. I'd been made a sergeant pretty fast after I'd gotten assigned. That wasn't good enough for my mom, though. She kept hounding me about it, and I finally agreed to give it up, find something else to do with my life."
A familiar surge of emotion almost overwhelmed me, then, but it was something I was used to. I stomped it back down like I always did and kept on talking.
"When I suddenly vanished, my mom assumed the worst. That I'd died, or that I was in the hospital. She spent two days trying to track me down before she ran into my partner Terrace and demanded to know what happened to me. The rookie spilled the beans. It was a dream come true for my mom. She'd always wanted a filly."
"Why?" Plum asked.
I hesitated. I almost told her the whole story. "She just did," I said instead.
I was actually shaken by how close I'd come to telling the filly everything. I hadn't told anypony that in... well, ever. It's nopony else's business.
"My mom found me while I was on my way to the spa. She dragged me back to my apartment, packed a few of my things, and hauled me off." I didn't tell Plum about the frilly dress she'd forced me into. I don't like to even think about the frilly dress. That's the first thing I went for when my mom and I came up with our Deal.
"And then what?" Plum asked. I shrugged.
“She took me home. Enrolled me in school. Treats me like her daughter instead of her son.” My sentences were coming clipped and short, now, my anger starting to rise. I wrestled it back down. None of my situation was this kid’s fault. I refused to blow my top at her. “If anypony ever bothered to check, they’d probably find the records from my first trip through the school, years ago.”
Plum skipped ahead of me, spun around, and started walking backwards while facing me. It was weird, to say the least. Made conversation a little easier, though.
“I’d ditch school, if I were you,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t ever even an adult, and I’d ditch, if I thought I could get away with it.
I let loose a short bark of laughter, even though I wasn’t feeling very funny. “My mom and me, we have a Deal,” I told her. The Deal. The only thing that kept the peace in our house, though it was a peace made out of crystal and ice. A good blow could shatter it.
“‘My mom and I’,” she corrected, still walking backwards. “Maybe you should stay in school after all. You seem to need it more than I do.”
This kid... I scowled into her fake-innocent grin, but I think she could tell that my heart wasn’t really in it. “Maybe.”
“What’s the deal about?”
"The Deal is, in exchange for certain considerations—” like, never having to wear a frilly dress again, at least in public, though I couldn’t tell her that “—I allow my mom to braid my hair and send me to school. Doesn’t stop me from trying to fix my problem, though.”
“I’d run away,” she said. “Run back to Ponyville and get the cure.”
I barked a humorless laugh. “Tried that. My mom reports me missing, and the policeponies drag me back before I get more than an hour away.”
Plum frowned, deep in thought as she stared at the dirt road between us, all the while walking backwards. I was actually kind of impressed. She didn’t veer off to the side or anything. She looked up suddenly, a glint in her eye.
“Sleepover!” she crowed happily.
“What?”
“You should come over to my house for a sleepover!”
“Uh... I don’t think...”
“Only, it won’t really be a sleepover. We’ll walk to Ponyville together! Your mom won’t know you’re missing. It’ll be fun!”
Hope and worry warred in my chest. I had to get to Ponyville, yes. But I didn’t want to get Plum in trouble, or drag her along. “I don’t know, kid. I’ll think about it.”
She pouted, then stepped aside, turning as I passed her to face the same way as me. She started walking by my side once again.
“I think it’s a good idea,” she muttered.
“It is,” I told her. “But it’s something we should think about. Plus, I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
“Pffft!” she said, waving a hoof. “I get in trouble all the time.”
I looked at her blankly. “I doubt that, kid.”
“It’s true! Just last night, my mom got mad at me because I refused to clean my room. She took my dessert away!”
“You’re a rebel, kid.”
I wasn't expecting the shoulder in my ribs. I stumbled halfway into the nearby ditch and looked back up at the filly who'd shoved me, my anger on a low boil. I opened my mouth to let her know exactly how I felt about that when she cut me off with an annoyed voice of her own.
“You could call me Plum, you know,” she said. “You know, if you ever get tired of saying the word ‘kid’, I mean.”
What can I say? She had a point. I nodded and got back up on the road.
“Or,” she continued, ”if you don’t like ‘Plum Pudding’, you can call me by my true name.”
“Which is?”
I stumbled to a halt, almost falling on my muzzle as she lept back in front of me. Sweeping a hoof out in front of her grandly, she intoned, “Her Royal Magnificence Princess Plumerina de Pudding-ah. The First,” she said, stomping her hoof down definitively. “Of Canterlot,” she added pompously, arching an eyebrow.
She glared down her muzzle at me with a haughty eye, her neck and shoulders stiff. I couldn’t help it. I laughed. She had the look down and everything. She put on a mask of mock offense for a couple seconds but she couldn’t keep it going. The mask cracked when she snickered. We started walking again.
“Alright, Princess,” I said. “I’ll try to stop calling you ‘kid’ all the time.”
“That’s all I can ask, my most faithful knight,” she said generously.
“I’m a knight, now?” I asked, amused.
“Why not? It’s kind of like a police pony, isn’t it?”
With the way my emotions jumbled up when she said that, the best I could manage to say was, “I suppose so.”
We walked along in companionable silence for a few minutes longer. Plum seemed happy, humming a little tune that I recognized eventually as her favorite Sapphire Shores song. I was happy to just walk quietly along. It had been nicer than I liked to admit, just talking to another pony. I hadn’t had much of a chance for just casual conversation lately. Call it a side-effect to everypony thinking you’re crazy.
Downtown Hoofington loomed up a few minutes later and we walked into town. I noticed that Plum had gone quiet and glanced over. The filly seemed to be deep in thought about something or other, a look of intense concentration on her face as she stared at the ground in front of her. I considered asking what was on her mind but decided not to. She’d tell me if she wanted. It wasn’t my place to pry.
Soon enough, we walked up outside a picket fence that had once been white, the paint flaking off, and the fence itself leaning drunkenly over the front of the lawn. The gate on the fence had seen better days as well, hanging slightly crooked and missing several boards.
I stopped walking, and Plum kept going for a few distracted seconds before realizing that I wasn’t still with her. She stopped and looked back, frowning with that same look of concentration she’d shown before.
“This is me,” I told her, and I cringed a little as she looked at the old family home. It had seen better days, that’s for sure.
“This is your house?” she asked, walking back up to me. The frown on her face faded a little.
“Yeah. Welcome to Maison de Swirl,” I said, waving a hoof grandly at the ill-kept lawn, making a joke out of it so she would know how little the run-down state of the house bothered me.
“Can I come in?” Plum asked. For some reason, she sounded really eager about it.
“What? No. What?” I shook my head. “Why would you want to come in?” I asked the frowning filly. Her eyes widened, and that's when I noticed that her back legs were dancing a little. A very particular and recognizable type of dance.
“Please let me come in?” she asked, and I realized that what I’d taken for a look of intense concentration on the filly’s face was actually a result of too many juice boxes over lunch.
I wanted to tell her no. I was desperate not to let her in the house. But looking into her desperate eyes, I couldn’t be that cruel. The gate squealed angrily as I pushed it open.
“All right,” I said, and the filly zoomed ahead of me and resumed her dancing by the front door. “Just... Don’t... The house is kind of a mess,” I finished lamely, taking my keys out of my saddlebag.
“Don’t care if it’s on fire,” Plum said, still dancing. I got the door open, and the filly squeaked and ran into my house, stopping only to ask where the bathroom was.
“Follow the path,” I said flatly. “You can’t miss it. It’s on your right.”
Plum Pudding took off, using odd little mincing steps. She went between the boxes and stacks of newspapers piled up as high as an adult pony in the foyer and more boxes and various items packing the hallway. A few seconds later I heard the bathroom door close with a bang. I hope she made it in time. I didn’t feel like breaking out a mop.
I looked around at the cluttered and dusty interior of my family home, feeling a familiar tightness in my chest.
“I’m home,” I whispered into the gloom.
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At least Cinnamon's mother isn't a crazy cat lady, on top of being psycho enough to force one of her sons to stay as a filly, along with having apparent hoarding problems.
Oooo last part is dark lol. MOAR!
If there is one thing I hate its someone taking away an innocent persons ability to choose their path.
All in all so far its a really good story I love the characters or in his mothers case love to hate them.
Do I smell an epic quest looming on the horizon? The nose knows!
I hope it involves hobgoblins in one way or another. Don't know why, I just hope so for some reason. Probably because I'm ridiculously drunk... on sleeplessness. I should probably go get some sleep now.
I'm betting that the newspapers are about Swirl's career and his father's career.
You know even if Cinnamon does eventually get the cure, I have a feeeling his mom has a hidden stash of Poison Joke she would be more than willing to use.
Anyway whatever the case its good to see this story again! And great job as always!
Well, this place sounds nice. (Being facetious is cool.)
Extra dress there.
Well, fuck his mom.
His mom has is pretty delusional, projecting her desires on her son. Still funny though.
Ranma and the magical aging mushroomsCinnamon Swirl and the poison joke
Aw yeah, here comes the conflict! This is gonna be good!
Awesome update but still really frigging dark.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAUGH! Need more.
2204953
Here, have a flashlight
But in all seriousness I see what you did in this chapter, Hoopy McGee, using all the theories of 'why didn't he do this or that' from the comments before and stating the logical points of why it couldn't be done, making a simple extensor of the story at best.
You ingenious bastard.
And as I have said before, ANGER BOILS IN MY SOUL!!!!
God I love this story.
... I don't even know what else to say. Which is rare for me. I just really wanna know what's gonna happen next. :U
You know, if I were him, I'd probably end up murdering the bitch in the evening, then running for Ponyville all night and hoping to God that I get there before anybody found the body.
wow....his mom is way too controlling
kinda reminds me of someone i know *cough*my*cough*mom*COUGH*
what? i didn't say anything.
I wonder if this would make a homicide (equicide?) count as self-defense... I mean, it would be the defense of his "self"-- his true self, anyway.
Not saying it's a feasible solution, just amused by the hypothetical court case.
2204572 If that's true, the next thing to follow is it's their accomplishments only, nothing to do with set-backs or her father's death.
I have to wonder if anypony's wondering what happened to Swirl, since he disappeared off the face of Equis. If the cops are as tight in Equestria as they are here, somepony's going to wonder. Cops disappearing is not a good sign.
2204732 Hey! Some of us have standards!
I'm not looking forward to mom's reaction to Plum, not just the expected gushing about "You're making friends!", but the grilling to follow about what Plum might know, and threats along the lines of what will happen if Swirl doesn't "Keep our (dirty) little secret".
Creepy mom is creepy.
I wonder if the Element Bearers aren't wondering about him, just a little.
2205650 i don't think this story has anything to do with the main six.
Update, finaly a update!
What a lovely mare.
I dread to think what those newspapers are about. Or what his mother's reaction will be.
2206385 It happens to be a spinoff of one which definitely did have a lot of main six, known as "Why Am I Pinkie Pie?"
Oh mai. I can't wait to meet Mom. This is going to be entertaining.
2204844 Ranma's mom makes Cinnamon's look sane.
Meanwhile, I would send you treasure chests, but gameloft is glitching every time I try. You may just need to make do with nothing but my appreciation for a while.
You're missing an ending quote for this sentence.
Ryan Jacobson would applaud Cinnamon for not crazy like Ryan did. Ryan would applaud all the way from the psych ward ( cuz he murdered his murdered his parents and 2 girls, and assaulted another girl). All because his mom wanted a daughter not a son. Ryan Jacobson makes Norman Bates look sane.
yay
Five bucks says he breaks out the mop.
2205650
You got a point. Pinks and Twi said they'd try to help Swirl.
Well, she is not rich, that's sure.
Plum Pudding is very likeable. She's like a mix of Fluttershy kindness and Applebloom scheming. Speaking of AB, if the current sneak-into-Ponyville plan falls through (which it kind of has to, story-wise), maybe they could start a Hoofington chapter of the CMC and get the big guns on their side.
(I know I'm reading this more than a year late, but I like to speculate anyway)
Wait... Is Swirl's mom a hoarder or something?
5237557 Yep, prolly keeps a stack of cat bodies in the freezer too.
Cinnamon should report that 'she' was fillynapped from her real family by this insane old mare!
After all, the reports will show that she never had a daughter...
(Alondro would turn his mom over in a heartbeat... NO LOYALTY!! Only power.... mmmmm, delicious corrupting POWAH!!)
2211249 Or Chi Chi... Chi-Chi is craziest toon mama.
Krillin: Sooo, what would you do if someone told you your husband was dead and your son was taken by his worst enemy?
Chi-Chi: I'd castrate the messenger in his sleep with a rusty carving knife!
Krillin: Weeeeellll, it's a good thing I'm not telling you that!
*awkward laughter, Krillin flees during the night*
5202822
I feel ya. Exactly 2 years and a day since this came out.
5546713 Look up Chichi in Spanish-English word reference....
I dare you.
(What you will find is not safe.)
You have no idea how happy I am to have given this story a chance after going through dozens of fanfic messes over the past few days looking for something with characters that actually seem like they are interacting! This is going to be a fun read, I can just tell!