5. A Warmer Place To Sleep
The
CONVERSION
â–ºBureau
CODE MAJESTE
By Chatoyance
5. A Warmer Place To Sleep
"Nanobars! My lord, I haven't seen these... well, since I was a boy. They stopped making them, but I have fond memories of the damn things. They're in perfect condition - they could have been made yesterday!" Anderson Ruffin let out a loud laugh "But then again, that was the deal with 'em. Claimed they'd keep near forever - where ever did you find these?"
Lillian was standing at the counter of 'Ruffin's Requisitions', the trading store run by Simon's father. Amelie was here too; trotting about excitedly, occasionally nosing at Simon, who was trying his eight-year-old best to stand still and act like a proper store owner. His jiggling leg betrayed the conflict in him between wanting to impress his father and wanting to run around with Amelie.
"I... well I found them in a corporate plantation. There was a lunchroom there, filled with vending machines. I kicked one open and stuffed my pockets. After eating my fill, first. I was... really hungry." Lillian couldn't help lowering her head slightly and grinning a bit; she felt unsure here, and a little embarrassed remembering her desperate late-night Nanobar chow-down. After everything she had been through, Anderson's friendliness was a little unsettling.
"Well, damn. I know that place, hell, everybody knows S1 - that's Saskatchewan One, the first and biggest of the farming prisons. Everybody and their grandpa's been over that ruin with a fine-tooth comb. You must be one lucky unicorn, I gotta say." Anderson was turning one of the bars over in his hands, studying it as if it were a priceless treasure. "I sure have missed these things. Used to love 'em as a child. My daddy'd bring me home one now and again, and it was always a treat. After all these years."
Anderson seemed to drift off for a moment in a sweet memory. "So, 'Graycoat' was it? You say you need a place to stay for a while and food to eat. Room and board. I think we can arrange something - in exchange for these babies, of course."
"Of course!" Lillian looked up with utterly unhidden joy at the prospect. She looked so relieved that Anderson couldn't help but grin at her.
"We'll get you settled, then, come along miss 'Graycoat'."
It was a dumb name probably, Lillian reflected, but she had been put on the spot. Trying to come up with a proper pony name had been the very last thing on her mind, and in the moment, she had frozen even trying to think of another human name to use. All she could think of was her own name, 'Lillian', and she did not want to use that. Using her real name would just be foolish. She was wearing a gray trenchcoat. It was the only thing she could think of.
So now, she was 'Graycoat the unicorn'. Fantastic. Well, at least her actual coat was sort of gray. Maybe it worked. Then again, she had the feeling that Mr. Anderson Ruffin somehow knew that 'Graycoat' was an alias. He didn't seem to mind much if so, though. It was more like he found it humorous, somehow.
'Ruffin's Requisitions' was once a recharge station, where electric cars could get service, repairs and juiced up, back in the days near the Collapse. Now it had been rebuilt as Mr. Ruffin's store. Above the main building was a haphazard pile of ramshackle structures. At least two transport containers had been piled up there and turned into apartments. Several rounded structures reminiscent of water-towers made for turret-like homes, and clustered around these were a bizarre assortment of cobbled shacks, sheds and what looked like barns. All were supported by a fairly dangerous looking mass of beams and trusses holding the entire assemblage together. Winding through the ramshackle stack was a twisting staircase that occasionally branched off in odd directions; it mostly had a rail, or at least ropes, where it hung out over the street below.
Mr. Ruffin opened the door to what probably had been a boiler, once. The large cylinder had been outfitted with round porthole windows on three sides, and provided with a big round wooden door. The cylinder lay on its side, the door set into what had once been the top of the boiler. "Here's your new home, my good pony; as fine an apartment as anyone could hope for. Rainproof, solid, and with a marvelous view of the city. It's also got a nice flat floor - put that in myself. In the back, there, you got some nice shelves, a pillow, and two comforters. One 'a them comforters is double thick, works just fine as a bed if you lay it out on the floor."
The shelves were cobbled together from old crates. They looked light, but sturdy. The floor seemed poured out of plascrete, and then covered with thick synthetic carpet fragments sewn together. The pillow seemed soft enough.
"Oh! Almost forgot -" Mr. Ruffin ducked down and went into the boiler-apartment, and lifted up an object on the shelf. "Wind-up LED lamp. Just wind this baby for a few minutes, and you got light for half an hour, maybe longer. We call this the 'Royal Suite'. If we still had a king, I'd be proud to have 'im stay here!" Mr. Ruffin grinned and put the lamp back on the shelf.
Long ago, before the Collapse, when there had still been nations and countries, Lillian vaguely remembered that Canada had enjoyed some connection with England - the Eurozone - and that they had been ruled by a king. There were no more kings, queens or presidents anymore. Just CEOs.
"Thank you very much, Mr. Ruffin! I really like it!" And she did, much to her surprise. It was strangely kicky, an eccentric little apartment that just looked cozy and friendly to her. In any case, it was wonderful just to have a dry place to sleep, and to feel that she was not being chased.
"I'll let you settle in; I need to tend my store. I'll send m'boy to call you for dinner. Come on, Simon, give our guest some peace!" The boy grumbled, but followed his father down the steps.
Amelie, as always, tagged after Simon. "Bye bye, Mrs. Coat!" and with that, Lillian was alone in her new home.
Lillian closed her door with her teeth. The handle was wide and easy to grasp. The room was quiet, all she could hear was a faint wind whistling at the edges of the door.
She turned carefully around in the narrow space and examined the shelves in the back - two comforters, one red and one blue. The red one seemed to be the thicker one. She tried to use the wind-up lamp. It was tricky to hold it with her hooves and turn the handle with her mouth, but she managed a few revolutions. In time she could probably get the hang of it. It was much harder to work the switch; that required biting and holding and was fairly tricky to do. She managed to switch the lamp off again and set it on the shelf with her hooves while resting on her elbows.
The porthole windows looked like they had been scavenged from a ship. They could be opened, but Lillian soon realized that she had no way to close them again. The porthole she had pushed open would require fingers to pull back from the inside; if she wanted it closed, she would have to exit the boiler and push the glass back in place from outside. Lillian was really missing her hands. She was missing being human. At the Bureau, they had claimed that not having thumbs would be no big deal, that newfoals would quickly adapt. They had lied.
Maybe, maybe in Equestria, where everything was designed and built for ponies to use, maybe having hooves was fine. But it wasn't at all easy for a pony on the run, trying to live among humans in the human world. At least it didn't seem very easy to her, right now.
Lillian was still damp, under her trenchcoat, and the rainwater soaking her coat made her back itch. She also found that her wings felt terrible; the weight of the coat made her bruised wing ache, and her feathers were still damp, and that made however they attached to her both sting and itch. She tried to fling the side of her coat up and over her back so that she could examine her bruised wing; after some effort she was able to expose it. Lillian carefully lay down to tend to herself.
The feathers were bedraggled and sodden; they seemed to have lost whatever had made them shine. A few small feathers had fallen out; they landed on her folded legs and then the floor. Lillian tried gingerly to extend her wing. It felt stiff in the joint where it attached to her shoulder blade, she could see that it was slightly swollen there.
Lillian used her teeth to gently nibble the most itchy spots on her wing. It felt so... damn... good. She spent quite some time just engaged in that alone; the self-grooming not only helped with the itchiness, but it also somehow was terribly comforting. After a while, she whipped her body to cover that side again, and struggled to expose her other wing. It too needed attention, and before long, in the middle of nibbling at the base of her longest feathers, she heard a knock at the door.
"Daddy said to come get you, Mrs Graycoat! It's dinner time!" The knocking came again, the insistent effort of an impatient child.
"Just a moment! I'm..." I'm what? Tending my wings? No. "Um... just a moment." Lillian struggled to flop her coat back down so that it covered both sides again. It took longer than she expected, so that when she finally opened the door, Simon was hopping from one foot to the other, upset at having to wait.
"I'm sorry, Simon." Lillian gave her coat a slight shake and a look over, just to make sure it truly covered everything. "I'm right behind you."
Dinner was served in the trading store itself. Shuttered for the day, the main counter of the store also served as a dining table. Chairs and crates had been arranged around it. The chairs were for Simon and his dad Anderson, the boxy crates lay on their longest sides and had pillows upon them; they were clearly for Lillian and... Amelie. Apparently Amelie lived with the Ruffin's, or at least she was having dinner with them tonight.
A wok full of stir-fry was carried out by Mr. Ruffin. From the smell the meal was vegetarian, which was a relief to Lillian. She understood from her Bureau education that all Equestrians were compulsory lacto-vegetarians. The stir-fry contained eggs. Ponies could digest eggs just like earthly horses could - back when earthly horses were commonplace. But anything actually made of animal flesh would only cause terrible gastric distress. Meat was no longer on the table for Lillian.
Simon was reaching into the wok to try to snag something red; possibly a bit of bell pepper. Mr. Ruffin grabbed the boy's hand and moved it away "What I tell you about reaching into the pot, huh? I don't want to see you doing that again, son, alright?" Anderson's face was stern but kindly; he just wanted his boy to learn some manners.
"Sorry, dad. I forgot." Simon looked down; his father's opinion mattered a great deal to him.
"Mrs Coat always wears her coat!" Amelie was rocking from side to side where she sat on her crate-and-pillow, giving a big pony smile to whoever might look her way.
Lillian was having trouble getting up onto her pillow-topped crate; the coat interfered with her legs, trapping them at the wrong moments.
"Looks like you're having a bit of trouble there, miss Graycoat. I can help you take off that coat, might make it a bit easier, dontcha' think?" Mr. Ruffin was already walking around the counter, ready to assist Lillian.
"NO! NO THANK YOU!" Lillian hadn't meant to shout the words, but the startled look on Mr. Ruffin's face made her feel bad. He was only trying to be nice. Lillian tried to think of what to say to make things better; she had to say something after such an outburst.
Briefly she considered just opening up to these nice folks. Mr. Ruffin surely wouldn't have any stake in her situation; he would probably be the kind of person who would be willing to help her. He just seemed ...nice. Then again, Lillian knew nothing about him. For all she knew, he could be a covert agent for the... what? The PER? Not likely; he'd be a pony if that were the case, certainly his son would be by now. The HLF? Not a chance; it was clear that Amelie was either part of the family or a very close friend.
Still, Olivia's words came back to her: "You can't trust anyone!" It would be so nice to have someone on her side, someone she could be open with. But it was too soon; she had just met the Ruffins... anything could be going on and she would have no way to know.
An excuse then. Some kind of excuse... but what? The truth, slightly bent. She didn't feel clever enough to fabricate anything decent. She's just have to bend the truth a little.
"Um... I'm really sorry for that, Mr. Ruffin. I'm sorry I yelled. I... I kind of have a reason for wearing this big coat." Lillian thought fast. She knew she wasn't the brightest of ponies, and she had never been good at telling lies; this was not easy for her. "I... had an accident when I was Converted." That much was certainly true.
"An accident?" Mr. Ruffin froze in place, in the middle of filling Simon's jam jar glass with water.
"Something went really wrong, and... I kind of came out sort of... deformed. I... I'm really embarrassed by it. It's kind of gross, too." Yeah, make it sound disgusting, that couldn't hurt "So... I guess I'm still kind of ashamed of being all messed up like that. I'd rather keep my coat on, if that's OK." It seemed to be working; Mr. Ruffin's eyes showed concern for her. "Besides, I don't want to upset anyone's appetite with... how I look." Surely that should do the job. Hammer home the grossness factor.
"Um... I'm very sorry to hear that, Miss Graycoat. Can I at least help you get seated?" A little help would be pretty useful; the damn coat kept trapping her legs.
"I don't know what you..." Lillian began, but already Mr. Ruffin was rummaging off in his store.
He brought out a short stepladder, just three steps, the kind of thing someone might use to get the cans on the upper shelf. He brought it over and set it down next to Lillian's crate. "This might help a bit." Mr. Ruffin gave Lillian a wink and went back to the counter and began dishing out the stir-fry.
"What's deformed?" Simon was as intellectually curious as he was uninformed about what counted as polite topics for dinner discussion.
"Heh, son..." Mr. Ruffin paused, tongs in hand and glanced in embarrassment at Lillian. Lillian had finally managed, thanks to the stepladder, to get seated, legs folded, on her crate. Mr. Ruffin put a bowl down in front of her. It smelled beyond wonderful.
"No need to stand on ceremony, dig in!" Mr. Ruffin began serving up his son and Amelie. Suddenly, Lillian didn't know how to act. How was she supposed to eat in this situation? Back at the Bureau, unicorns soon learned to levitate mouthfuls of food into their mouths, it was almost like eating as a human. Would they expect this of her? Should she just lower her head and start gobbling her meal? That's what her stomach was insisting on, and it was being quite adamant indeed.
Amelie was an earth pony, she was already wolfing down her dinner. To hell with it. Lillian lowered her head and began eating. After nothing but one meal of Nanobars, Mr. Ruffin's stir-fry was like heaven on a plate. Or in a bowl. Dinner must have been prepared from imported, Equestrian vegetables grown in the covered gardens and window-boxes that decorated every part of the city; everything was fresh and really tasty. There were definitely bell peppers, but also celery, carrots, onions and cabbage. There was also plenty of rice to eat. Mr. Ruffin had brought out a rice-cooker and had served them all up bowls of brown rice.
Rice was an especial treat - the Last Crop - or the 'Last Harvest' as the former Americans called it - had, in the end, exterminated all grains on the planet. Rye, buckwheat, oats, millet, and rice, of course, all were extinct on earth now. Lillian had tasted Equestrian rice and oats during her Bureau stay, the taste was familiar. Many cities grew crops from Equestria - a gift from the alien universe, turning a gray and brown world green again, one last time.
The rice was particularly wonderful, and Lillian loved every bite - ponies thrived on grains. They weren't called oat-burners for nothing.
Mr. Ruffin didn't seem to raise an eyebrow at Lillian not using her horn; perhaps he just assumed that if she was deformed, she also wouldn't be able to use magic. Or perhaps he had seen the damping ring, and understood what it was for. In any case, nothing was said, and that was just fine with Lillian.
"So what brings you all the way out to Assiniboia, Miss Graycoat, and what possessed you to rummage through that old plantation complex?" Mr. Ruffin was just making conversation, though of course it was only reasonable to be curious.
"So you can tell I'm not from around here?" Lillian swallowed another bite of her rice; it was clear she was hungry, Mr. Ruffin kindly refilled her bowl.
"There isn't a Conversion Bureau in Saskatchewan. At least anymore. Folks pretty much have to go to BC if they want to get Converted. 'Course we do have the PER come through every few months with a wagon full of 'potion. That's a fun time; a lot a folks get converted, as long as the 'potion lasts." Mr. Ruffin nibbled on a bit of celery.
"The PER!?!" Lillian was shocked. "The PER? Ponification For The Earth's Rebirth? The terrorist group? Every few months?" The way Anderson had described them, it was as if they were a group of traveling doctors out helping the poor.
"Yeah, some think of them that way. I hear some folks don't approve of 'em, but the ones that come here never make any trouble. They just come through, set up their little clinic and do conversions. Mind you they go through the streets all day with loudspeakers announcing themselves; some folks find that annoying. But there's never been any trouble. From them." Mr. Ruffin took a little more rice for himself. "Most everyone is kind of glad for 'em. They break up the monotony, and they save folks a long troublesome trip to Vancouver." Ruffin took a mouthful of rice and savored it.
"Well... wow. Just... wow. In Surrey, where I come from, all we hear is how the PER are dangerous lunatics, running around potion-bombing people and blowing up anything they think belongs to the Human Liberation Front. Wow." Lillian had never heard a kind word about the PER pretty much... ever.
"Well, you have to admit that we humans have pretty much ruined the earth; most anybody around here can't think about it anyway else. We're the center of the Last Crop. It started right at S1. That's where they first planted that wheat. It all spread out from right here. Now, nothing grows in the ground, and wheat, well, there just isn't any wheat anymore." Mr. Ruffin wiped his finger around his bowl, then licked it. "There aren't any forests anymore, and the oceans are all dead. Maybe more folks oughta be listening to the PER, rather than getting upset at them. Ponies are better than humans! You gotta agree with that, right? Wouldn't it be better if everyone was a pony?"
This was an unusual attitude from a human with a human son. Lillian didn't know quite what to say. Finally she asked the obvious. "Mr. Ruffin, if you feel that way, why... why haven't you been converted then? Why are you still a..." Maybe this wasn't exactly the right thing to be asking the person feeding her.
"A human? Why am I still a human? And my son, too? Simple enough question, Miss Graycoat." Anderson briefly picked his teeth with a fingernail. "The fact is that there are ways I can be useful... to folks... staying human, at least for now. And as for my son, well, they ran out of 'potion last time they came through. But I've got a promise that they'll save him some next time they come. Then he can join his best friend, Amelie, isn't that right, sport?" Mr. Ruffin looked over at his son.
"I wanna be a pony!" Simon proudly stated. "But I gotta wait until next time." He looked sadly at Amelie. "Sorry Amelie."
"It's OK." Amelie shrugged with her ears. "Can we be excused?" She was getting antsy now that dinner was over.
"Yeah, sure. Go on the both of you." Anderson waved his son and Amelie off. "But no screaming your heads off - we got neighbors, remember?" Mr. Ruffin ran his hand through his hair. "Sometimes they get to roughhousing. Kids, you know?"
The young boy and the younger filly ran from the table, and headed somewhere upstairs. Sounds of laughter occasionally echoed from above after that.
"Um... does Amelie live here too?" Lillian had been curious about the little filly's situation since the beginning of dinner.
"Yeah, she has her own room upstairs. Simon and her have been best friends since... well since Simon could walk on his own. Amelie got converted last year, when the PER came through, but they ran outta serum right before they could do Simon. Broke his heart. It was my fault, really, he made a big mess, and I had him clean it up before he could go, and, well, they ran out." Mr. Ruffin looked ashamed. "That was a bad call on my part - exactly the wrong time to be disciplining the boy. I think he forgave me, mostly, but I should have taken him right beside Amelie. Especially with what happened to her parents and all."
"Her parents?"
"She lost them the next day; we had a group of Human Front bastards roll through, trying to get the drop on the PER. They shot up a lot of of the town before... before we dropped them. That's one of the reasons I stay human; ponies can't do what needs to be done against scum like that." Anderson looked away "If only I'd been faster, better." He looked back. "So I took Amelie in. Now she and Simon can be together all they want, and she has a family again. She's a brave filly, the way she acts, you'd never know she'd lost her mum and dad. But sometimes... sometimes she cries, late at night."
This was pretty devastating to hear. "I'm... I'm really sorry, gosh... I..." Lillian had nothing more she could think of to say to that.
"So you're from Surrey?" Suddenly Mr. Ruffin changed the subject. "That's a long way from here. You must have had quite an adventure, Miss Graycoat."
Crap. She'd made a slip earlier. To say Surrey was a long way away was an understatement. Anderson would probably be curious how she had managed to end up all the way out here, alone. "Um, can I help at all with the clean up? This was a delightful dinner by the way, really good! I especially liked, well, everything!" Lillian gave a big smile, hopefully it wasn't too nervous or fake.
Mr. Ruffin gave Lillian a strange look, then his demeanor suddenly changed. They worked together to clear the counter and clean up the mess of dinner. When it became clear that Lillian didn't know how to wash dishes as a pony, Mr. Ruffin took over the job. "It's nice of you to offer, miss Greycoat, but I do this every night anyway. Why don't you go get some rest; it must have taken you all day to get to town from S1, that's an exhausting distance even for a pony like yourself."
Lillian said goodnight and went up to her boiler-apartment. As she climbed the stairs, she passed by a boxy room where Simon and Amelie were playing a board game by the light of one of the wind-up electric lamps; they were so engrossed that they did not even notice her pass by.
Once in her room, with the door shut, Lillian realized she could no longer stand the painful itching and burning on her back and in her wings. It had only gotten worse with every hour. Her coat was still damp, her feathers still moist, everything stung and it was all beyond uncomfortable. The waterproof trenchcoat just wouldn't allow her body to dry completely. There was nothing for it. She had to take the damn thing off. She felt like she was developing a rash; her back not only itched now, but actually hurt.
Lillian used her left rear hoof to step on her left sleeve and tried to pull her foreleg out of the coat. That didn't work. The coat couldn't stretch, so there was nowhere to go. She looked around the room for something, anything, that she could hook one of her sleeves over, to try to pull her foreleg out. She tried catching the sleeve on the edge of the shelves, which only caused them to tumble forward with a crash. The fallen shelves, she found, were not heavy enough to hold any part of the trenchcoat, sadly. The handle on the door had nothing to catch a sleeve on.
She couldn't get out of the coat. She was trapped in a trenchcoat she had no means to remove, and her back was itching and stinging, her wings were in agony, and finally she was in tears.
"Miss Graycoat! Miss Graycoat! Are you alright?" It was Mr. Ruffin, of course; the crashing of the shelves and the noise of her efforts, not to mention her wailing in frustration, had naturally brought him to her door. Lillian was too miserable to respond coherently; she was beyond the ability to cope at the moment. "Miss Graycoat, I'm coming in, alright?"
Anderson found her hunched over, tears streaming down her muzzle, and it took some time to calm her down. By then Simon and Amelie were peeking around the edges of the door to the small apartment, with worried looks on their faces.
There was nothing for it. Lillian needed help, and that meant she had to take a risk.
"Listen... Mr. Ruffin... I need your help. I need you to keep a secret, too. Please, I have nowhere else to turn, and I really need your help." Lillian still had tears streaming down, even though she was trying to speak calmly. "And... could we keep this private, between just you and me?" She nodded at Simon and Amelie, who immediately tried to hide behind the edge of the doorway.
After a short fuss, Anderson was back. "Those two really wanted to know what was going on. I made them promise me they'd stay in their rooms. I'll close the door, too, though it's a bit cramped in here for two, as you can see. Here, let me put the shelf back up, that'll give us a little more room."
Lillian swallowed hard, and decided to try to trust Mr. Ruffin. "Mr. Ruffin, I need your help to take off this damn trenchcoat. I'm wet and I'm itchy underneath; I got caught in the rain before I put the thing on, and I have no way to take it off." Lillian felt her heart pounding as she spoke. "I only sort of told you the truth that my conversion left me deformed. I'm not right; that's a fact, but it's not like I'm all gross and awful like I made out. That's the secret part I need you to keep. Nobody can know what I look like... what I am. Nobody. Not any pony, not any human." Lillian thought for a moment. "Well, other than you, I guess. But you can't tell anyone. Promise me? Please?"
Mr. Ruffin scratched his head. "I'll tell you what; if it doesn't mean any danger to my boy, or to Amelie, then I will keep your secret, whatever it is. But you got to understand; my boy means the world to me, so does Amelie. So if you are all radioactive or contagious or you got little replicators eating you up under there, I'm gonna do whatever I have to, to protect my family. I'm just being honest here, understand?"
"I understand, completely! It isn't like that. I'm not dangerous, and I don't have a disease or anything. I'm just... well, you'll see, I guess. Help me get this damn coat off... I just can't stand it anymore!" The desperation in Lillian's eyes was palpable; Mr. Ruffin wouldn't wish whatever she was experiencing on anyone.
"Ok, then. I'll help you."
Anderson Ruffin teased the trenchcoat up and off of Lillian's sodden back and over her head. She heard a soft whistle come from him, but beyond that outburst, he said nothing more. When the trenchcoat was over her head, he held both sleeves in his strong hands, while Lillian pulled her forelegs slowly out. In order to finish the job, Ruffin had to open the door and back out of the room, but in short order the coat was finally off.
Lillian's wings looked terrible; they were bedraggled and seemed ruined. This made her cry again. Anderson assured her that he had seen many pegasai soaked to the bone before; her feathers would dry out and with a little care, and a little oil, they would be good as new.
Lillian's back smelled just terrible; and after a short examination Mr. Ruffin confirmed that she indeed had a rash back there from the warmth and the wetness. In the end, Mr. Ruffin asked Lillian to trust him, and he drew a bath for her. The bathtub was the lower half of an oversize metal storage tank set in a room on the ground floor; she briefly was draped with the trenchcoat to get her downstairs unseen.
The tank was so built that Mr. Ruffin could heat it from below, as if it were a big metal pot on a stove. Soon Lillian was soaking in lovely warm water mixed with some kind of bath salts that Mr. Ruffin claimed would help heal the rash. It certainly felt wonderful, and it also seemed to stop the itch.
After the bath, Anderson vigorously dried her, taking special care around her wings. He draped a small blanket over her, and sent her back to her room; he wanted to deal with the trenchcoat - it smelled strongly of wet, unhappy pony. He said he would be up in a bit; Lillian was to stretch out her wings and try to let them dry as completely as possible.
When Mr. Ruffin returned, he carried with him a bottle filled with some kind of light oil, a cloth, and a brush-tipped applicator. With practiced ease, he applied oil to Lillian's feathers; first applying the oil to the shafts, then wiping it carefully along the feathers themselves. It felt heavenly, and the oil was lightly scented with a sweet smell.
The gentle attentions made Lillian cry again; by now she felt both exhausted and embarrassed at weeping so much.
"Thank you... Thank you so much, Mr. Ruffin. I... I just can't express how grateful I am. Just... Thank you." Lillian felt, for the first time since her conversion, that maybe being a pony wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Mr. Ruffin spoke in a quiet, almost reverent voice. "It's my great pleasure and honor, princess Graycoat. It's not every day that we get authentic Equestrian royalty in our little town."
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How long did it take you to write this?
129265
As far as I can calculate, about four hours. Maybe four and a half, depending on how much time I took for lunch. I then did the interior art for it later: I kind of felt inspired, and I wanted to see Lillian in a trenchcoat. Then I thought, maybe y'all might want to see my vision of the favela, so I did the quick sketch of the trading store. The art took another hour or so. I didn't do it all at one sitting, though; I had breaks and stuff.
Oh boy, this'll end well. I almost wish there'd been more on Anderson's reaction, but i suppose there'll be more coming with the next chapter
Oh boy!
And the art is wonderful. :)
Oh shit.
Now its getting real son.
So the situation with Amelie gets explained, poor filly... Interesting to hear about a less...extreme? version of the PER. This branch sounds more like a mobile conversion clinic. Just goes to show there can be all types in almost any group. Too bad that hasn't been seen in the HLF, at least in this CB universe.
And now someone else knows Lillian's secret. Not sure how this will work out for her. At first I thought Mr. Ruffin might have been joking by calling her royalty, but rereading the line makes me think he wasn't. No matter his intentions, I doubt being considered royalty by anyone is going to help her situation any... Wonder if Amelie will find out about this any time soon? It'll be interesting to see how normal ponies react to her.
Well shit! What a tweest!
Somehow I can't help but think that this Anderson got some strings attached to PER
...or maybe that's just me being crazy and all
I love this piece!
Last sentence: cue either car crash or record scratch sound effect.
As i thought while reading this my guess for the future is she'll end up ruling the earth.
129277 Sweet merry bejeezus. Four hours? There's been plenty of times I couldn't get a paragraph out in four hours, and you do all this?
If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go sit in that castle I built out of writers' blocks.
She shivered in the undifferentiated darkness. She'd been running so long and she finally found someplace Celestia wasn't chasing her. However, the featureless void was beginning to grate on her.
To fill the uncanny silence, she spoke. "L-let there be light?" And there was. And it was good.
All pseudo-biblical speculation aside; Another great chapter!
*nervous chuckle*
And THAT reaction is why she may end up a thorn in Celestia's side.
With any luck, she'll avoid Public Enemy #1 status after the Purification but.......yeah. Here's hoping it all turns out to be a learning/growing experience.
I'd hate to learn our poor heroine ended up "disappeared" one fine morning...
First thing that popped into my head at the end of the chapter: ". . . this cannot end well." I actually laughed a bit.
Thanks for the update! (Yeah... I say this every time, because nobody ever says thank you =P)
129760
Why, you're welcome!
121360
ahem "why, can't you watch it like a pony?"
This is the absolute first Conversion Bureau fic that I've ever read that has ever kept me at all interested. In general, I sorta hold some ire for the Conversion Bureau, because I personally feel that people should come up with their own interesting stories about Ponies on Earth/Humans in Equestria (although people tend to make rather shoddy fics of those without CB's help anyway), but this fic... I felt that it was very well handled, and it's the first fic I've seen to put any sort of interesting spin on it.
Now that being said, I'm wondering if you can fill something in for me. I lost interest in the original Conversion Bureau fic very quickly (I found the original almost as lacking as all it's little spinoffs), and I only got about five pages in before clicking back and probably going to read Sweet Apple Capers again, so please bear with me if this is an obvious question but... The whole dystopian future thing, with the megacorporation running the world and the lack of any sustainable plant or animal life... that whole aspect of it... Is that part of the main Conversion Bureau storyline, or is it something you added yourself?
I ask because I feel it's a really major detractor from the story. See, I'm already interested enough in your story by the fact that Lillian is an Alicorn and shouldn't be and that Celestia is pissed at this notion (btw, congratulations on keeping me interested through shades of Tyrantlestia because that is my absolute most HATED trope in this fandom. Usually when I see even a hint of Tyrant Celestia I click the fic closed, so you've managed to write a story that I like that contains two things I generally dislike. That's just incredible writing right there). When I was reading the story, I found myself getting annoyed on occasion when it went and veered off path for several paragraphs to build a world that I honestly didn't care much about. I want to read about the alicorn on the run. I want to read about Lillian being basically pony Harrison Ford in the Fugitive. I want to see her solve puzzles and overcome problems and deal with them all and come out on top. I DON'T want to be pulled away from the story to read for three pages about how this new dystopian world world works., how food is made, how corporate structures work, how the whole world is basically China now, and all the factions that have sprung up. I frankly don't care. I want to read about the pony.
And it's not that it couldn't make a good story in and of itself, it's just that not only is it distracting, but it doesn't ADD anything either. I don't see what no plants growing or no animals being left helps to add to the story. I don't see why it can't just be regular old modern earth. I don't see anything she's doing or anything she might have to overcome that would be at all too horribly changed if it were just modern earth. If it was just to get a "Human Liberation" or "Anti-Ponification" movement in there, then the UN or the tyrants in places like China, North Korea, the Middle East, and Cuba would work just as well, if not better. It distracts from the story, and adds nothing in return. It's sorta like, again, if you were watching the fugitive, but every five minutes the movie cut away to give a lecture on the sociopolitical structure of Botswana. Dystopian Future stories can be great. I liked Blade Runner, for example. But in this case, I'd like to read something else. I'd like a different Harrison Ford movie.
So I guess the question is... did you add that, or was it in the original story? If you added that, then why? What did you think it would add to the story?
If it was the original story, well... I guess that's just one more reason for me to facehoof at the Conversion Bureau in general.
Anyway, great work nonetheless. While I found the dystopian future really detracting, it was still awesome enough work that it managed to get me through two themes I really don't like, so you're doing an excellent job. Four stars :)
129951 Dusty, the best way to answer your question is to read some of Chatoyance's other stories and comments on those stories. Chatoyance excels at building Conversion Bureau worlds and stories and is very good at making believable characters. It's part of the writing style Chatoyance (calling you chatty now your name is too long :P) employs, Chatty enjoys adding new and interesting elements to his universe, like Krass's PER & Dress Clubs(Pony strip clubs) or Midnight Shadows R63 prototype ponification potion, or Windchasers purification event from Last Man Standing.
In short if it seems logically possible in Chatty's universe then it happened, but stuff that would be too contradictory or out of place in his universe isn't added like TCB: Yellowstone. Or my Wildman story which had a guy living in the wilds fighting and hunting animals unless Chatty wants to claim that plants still grow in the wild? and not all the animals are extinct.
Wow. Can't wait for the next one.
129951
I write 20 minutes into the future.
I carefully describe my world because the world is what defines the choices the characters make. A character is driven by what they know, and where they live, and what they are free to do. The reader can't know the character without understanding the world that shaped them; anything less is poor writing. Anyone can write a story about a generic person making obvious choices based on what 'everyone' knows.
A good writer writes what a character would do if both the character, and the world that spawned that character, were real. A good writer may have their character make odd choices because they live in a world that demands them; and the best sort of writer will have you believe those odd choices because they have made their strange world as real as everyday life. That is my goal, ultimately; to give the reader a world different than their own, yet completely understandable, where the choices of the characters naturally flow from the fact that they are parts of the strange world they inhabit. You can't know that world, or feel those choices are valid, unless I describe that world. In enough detail that you can believe in it.
I am not writing about any person who has become a pony; I am writing about a specific person, from a specific world, who believes and things specific things because of how they grew up, making choices based on what they know, rather than what we know, or what we might do ourselves.
To sell that, I have to describe their world so that the reader can see -literally - where they are coming from. Why they act the way they do. How they became desperate, or lonely, or misanthropic, or angry, or slightly insane or whatever. Anything less, and I am just writing meaningless, pointless crap about some generic person doing obvious things because the idea of having wings is wicked cool. And that is bad, bad, terrible writing.
I honestly think that if a writer creates a detailed, self-consistent world, and then characters that are the natural, logical result of living in that world, the story will tell itself because the characters will do what they must based on what they know.
"If a writer knows their world, and knows their characters, then they need not fear even a thousand pages of story." - Sun Tscriptwriter
good lord. everyone writes long reviews to this story.
130464
I can't help but respect, and in fact agree with this position. But it's not the question I asked.
But the question I asked really was "why a dystopia?" not "why do you world build?" Because believe me, I understand the importance of world building, the effect it has on the characters, the atmosphere it brings to the table and the way that the environment shapes the story. Believe me that I get all of that. In fact, I never criticized the quality of your world building at all. It's actually very well done world building. It's why I said that it would be a good story on its own. In fact, on it's own, this would make a great dystopian future story by itself. And yes, in this case, all of the political structure, backstory, and social structure would be required to make the story work. Don't get me wrong, the world building is done superbly.
But why a dystopia? Personally I would think that simply a world that is our earth but with one really big thing changed (say, a bunch of colorful ponies springing up from a magical land off the west coast), is enough fargone from our own that it would deserve plenty of world building itself. And I would think it would deserve world building on a much closer-to-home level than we would get from a dystopia, because it would deal with the personal lives of citizens in very specific ways and the small but incredibly noticeable way things are changing or different. It would be much closer to the reader than the grand-scale-far-reaching "everything has gone to hell" situation in a dystopia, in my opinion anyway.
But the dystopia setting seems to add too much to the story, thereby becoming distracting if you ask me. While you'd have plenty of world to build in just modern earth + equestria's influence, you seem to have too much on your hands here. And while in another context I would be more than happy to read about your dystopian story, my focus is somewhere else when I came to read about ponies. It makes the story feel bloated.
It would sorta be like if I were reading the Dresden Files, but instead of having it be a wizard in Chicago, pointing out all of the little magical things that regular guys don't notice and explaining how magic works every now and then... it'd be a wizard in Chicago, pointing out all of the little magical things that regular guys don't notice and explaining how magic works every now and then... and taking place in a Jetsons-style future. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to add it.
So my question wasn't "why do you world build" because that's obvious. And a stupid question. My question was "Why a dystopia?" Why of all the worlds you could have built, did you choose to build this one? Because right now, so far, I haven't seen her do anything that couldn't be similarly achieved in modern earth with ponies, and all it seems to be doing is causing distraction.
130464 YOURE DIANNE WYNNE JONES ARENT YOU!!!!!!!
130775
I'm sorry I misunderstood.
I use a dystopia partly because it is cannon for CB stories, and partly because I favor the contrast between the heaven of Equestria and the Hell of Earth. It's purely a heaven-hell thing. Lush greenery contrasting with grey and black desolation. Human pride -despite the ugliness, versus a total and abject submission to beauty and wonder and joy.
That's why. And no, I am not religious here - It's just a really cool contrast.
130890
Ahhh, I see. True, that does make for something of an interesting contrast. Not sure if I personally agree with the interpretation of 'Earth is Hell' or that 'Equestria is submission' myself, but yes, that is an interesting aspect. I hadn't considered that.
128929
That's an hour before midnight for me. Gaaaargh I can't wait so long!
Well, ok, yes I can, BUT I WANT IT NOW!
129277
Damn you write fast. That'd take me at least a week of writing every day. Depends on how much I get done.
129343
Why wouldn't he?
And I lied on my last comment. I ended up reading this chapter right after the fourth.
Hnnnnnnnnnnnngh.
Too bad she didn't give herself the time to think of the obvious answer to why she keeps the coat on: that unlike most ponies she still feels really really weird being naked.
It is nice that she seems to have found a friend, but given his response at the end there maybe this is already going south. I wonder why they don't have a Bureau anymore?
I think you mean 'everybody' and 'here'?
There has been a miscommunication.
This is really not going to end well.
A princess? Somebody knows about alicorns. Does Ruffin think he's found a third sister?