5. Danny Grooms Pinkie Pie
A Mighty Demon Slayer Grooms Some Ponies
by D. G. D. Davidson
V. Danny Grooms Pinkie Pie
Megan believed she had kept it a secret from her family, but she often slept in the barn. She preferred the company of horses to that of people, and she was soothed by the animals’ warmth and by the sounds of their swishing tails, shifting feet, and soft nickers. Covered by a few blankets, she often lay in the hay in the dark, listening to her heart thud slowly in her ears, feeling her own chest rise and fall, and hearing the horses softly blowing air through their nostrils while the crickets chirruped rhythmically in the fields.
For several months after the closing of the Rainbow Bridge, she had spent as much time as she could with the horses, trying to get them to talk to her, much as Gulliver had done after returning to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms. One day, Danny had found her while she was petting T.J., her gelding Dales Pony, and slowly pronouncing vowels in the hopes that he would repeat them back.
Danny had ridiculed her. After that, she had stopped the futile language lessons, but every once in a while, she still carried her bedding out to the barn.
A few nights before the horse show, her stomach had ached from anxiety as she wondered what would happen when the ponies presented themselves to the world. She tossed and turned in bed for a few hours before she finally got up, tugged on some sneakers, pulled up her blankets, and slipped outside.
The sight of Princess Twilight Sparkle and the other ambassadors had rubbed her nerves raw. On the one hand, she feared for them. On the other hand, they brought with them sharp pangs of loss: years ago, Megan had reconciled herself, or so she thought, to being unable ever again to see Sundance, Fizzy, Buttons, or her other little pony friends. When Rainbow Dash had brought Twilight over the rainbow and Twilight had blithely said that five thousand years had passed since Megan was in Ponyland, it had been like a sledgehammer to the stomach.
When she stepped outside, the band of the Milky Way was bright and clear overhead. The Rainbow Bridge, faintly twinkling with its own embedded stars, cut a defiant arc across it. With the pile of blankets rolled on her shoulder and her breath frosting white in the air, Megan crunched through the grass toward the barn in the hopes that the sound of T.J.’s snorts and whinnies could lull her to sleep.
She heard voices and stopped. As she always did when encountering the unexpected, she assumed danger: dropping the blankets, she went into a crouch, stealthily crept to the barn wall, flattened herself against it, and listened.
From inside the barn she heard a squeaky voice say, “She musta been a whole lotta fun, huh?”
She frowned. That sounded like Ambassador Pinkie Pie, but Megan had thought all the ponies were back across the rainbow.
“Yeah. She was. Always pulling pranks, always trying to startle everybody. I guess she was kind of annoying, really, but so was I when I was younger.” That voice was definitely Danny’s.
“You’re a lot like her,” Danny continued. “I mean, I don’t mean you’re annoying, but I mean you—”
Megan heard Pinkie release a loud giggle ending with a snort.
“Well,” Danny said, “I just couldn’t believe it when I saw your symbol. It’s just like hers.”
“My cutie mark? It means I love to throw parties and have fun and make everypony smile!”
Danny chuckled. “Yeah. Exactly like her. I think that must be what her mark meant, too.”
Pinkie made an exaggerated “Hmm” sound, ending with the noise of air being blown from between closed lips. “Maybe . . . maybe she could be my great-great-great-great-super-duper-really-great-great-gran-granny Pie.”
“Maybe. She was a pegasus, though.”
“Oh, I’m sure I got some pegasi in the ol’ family tree, silly.”
“Really? I didn’t know you could—eh, never mind. When I knew her, she didn’t have a foal . . . well, I mean, she sort of did, but it wasn’t really hers. If you know what I mean—”
“Was she your P.F.F.?”
“My what?”
“Your pony friend forever!”
Danny gave a low, melancholy laugh. “She was my friend for sure. But I guess not forever.”
“Don’t say that! Just because she’s not around anymore doesn’t mean she’s not your friend.”
“But—”
“Don’cha know, silly? She’s right there!” Megan heard a tap, as if Pinkie had lightly slapped her hoof against something.
Danny laughed again. “I should have known a pony would say something like that.”
“Ooh, I love making new friends! Do you wanna be my friend?”
Danny’s voice grew quiet. “Yes, Pinkie. Yes, I’d like to be your friend.”
A sharp pang of annoyance spiked through Megan’s insides. She wanted to march into the barn, grab Danny by the ear, tell him it was past his bedtime, and drag him back to the house. He had no business making a rendezvous like this so late at night, especially when it interfered with Megan’s own eccentric sleep habits.
Her hands trembled. She stood there for a minute, clenching and unclenching her chilled fists, watching her misty breath glisten with faint light reflected from the Rainbow Bridge, feeling the cold air around her jaw like a clamp. In her chest, the spike of anger and irritation gradually dissolved into melancholy.
Danny wasn’t a little kid anymore. He was sixteen, and he was too old for her to mother and watch over. She knew that. And she knew that she had failed at the job of mothering him anyway.
She wrapped her arms around her stomach, tried to push back the pain of the knots in it, and wondered at her own rage. She had just been thinking that her pony friends were all dead, only to find her brother making friends with these new ponies, ponies to whom Megan couldn’t relate, with whom she somehow couldn’t connect.
At the age of twelve, she had entered Dream Valley shortly after the death of Queen Majesty. Directionless and confused, the ponies she had met had spent their lives playing and dancing in the sun, even as danger threatened to engulf them. They were like children who laughed and returned to their toys immediately after learning that their parents were dead: they had lived as they had when Majesty was still alive, for that was all they knew how to do.
So Megan had tried to take the place of their queen. She had become for them the same thing she already was for her brother and sister—a second mother. As Majesty had before her, she had instructed the ponies in friendship, kindness, and love, but she had also taught them sorrow and grief. She had taught them to confront death and pain in the hopes that, with her guidance, they might finally grow up.
And now they had come back to her with an empire. They had cities. They flew in airships. They had powerful princesses. Their population numbered in the millions. No longer at the mercy of every monster roving their land, they were the greatest force in their world. They had beaten back the darkness and brought even the heavens under their control.
She couldn’t mother the ponies anymore, and when she heard them tell their history, she couldn’t help but think it was in spite of her, rather than because of her, that they had grown up.
She leaned against the wall for several minutes as she tried to get her breathing and heartbeat to slow. She wiped a forearm across her face and was surprised to discover she was crying.
No more sounds came from the barn. She picked up her blankets and, as quietly as she could, trudged back to the house.
Megan had finished grooming Rarity. After walking once around the pony to view her handiwork, she looked about and said, “Where is Pinkie Pie? I’ve hardly seen her all morning.”
“I’ll see if I can find her,” Rarity replied. “She’s probably around back with the others.” She trotted off.
Only seconds later, Megan heard the pounding rhythm of hooves accompanied by high-pitched giggling and Danny’s nasal laughter. Pinkie, with Danny on her back, galloped up the gravel driveway, trailed by a cloud of dust. Danny was bent low over Pinkie’s neck, holding her frizzy mane with one hand and clutching his stomach with the other. Pinkie’s giggles, interrupted by occasional snorts, did nothing to slow her breakneck pace.
Pinkie skidded to a halt in front of the barn, scattering gravel with her hooves. Danny slid from her back and fell to the ground. Pinkie paused to catch her breath. The two turned silent for a moment, but then they looked at each other and started laughing again. Pinkie rolled over onto her back and kicked as she chortled.
With her arms crossed, Megan silently tapped a curry brush against her shoulder while she watched this spectacle.
“Did you see him?” Pinkie squealed, jumping to her feet. “He was all”—she dropped her jaw and contorted her face into an exaggerated expression of shock—“and then he was all”—she clenched her teeth and opened her eyes wide in a rictus of horror—“and then he was all”—she put a hoof to her forehead, swayed, and sank to the ground as if fainting away. She cycled her hind legs furiously as she burst into fresh giggles.
Danny sat up and wiped his eyes. “Oh, that was awesome! You’re the best, Pinkie.”
“Where have you been?” asked Megan quietly.
Danny stopped laughing, but his chest heaved up and down as he struggled to get his wind. “We went for a ride.” He started laughing again. “And what happened to your hair?”
“A ride?” Megan’s sharp tone stopped the laughter instantly.
“Yeah,” Danny said, his voice now serious and faintly defiant. “I went for a pony ride. Got a problem with that?”
“Where?”
“None of your business.”
“Where?”
Pinkie slowly rolled to her feet and, brow furrowing, looked back and forth between Megan and Danny.
Danny stood, pulled his cap low, and glared into Megan’s eyes. “Out to the road.”
Megan grabbed his collar. Through clenched teeth, she hissed, “And who saw you, Danny?”
“Just old Sim Grimwood. He was drunk, like most mornings.” A grin split Danny’s face. “Probably thought I was riding a pink elephant—”
Megan let go of Danny’s shirt, set her jaw, made a half turn, and slugged him in the chin. Pinkie gasped and fell on her haunches.
Danny hit the ground with a thud. Only momentarily stunned, he gained his feet and ran for Megan. She prepared for another swing, but then a bright violet cloud, tingling like static electricity, enveloped her and jerked her into the air.
Megan quickly looked around until she spotted Twilight Sparkle, who, wings spread wide, now stood next to Pinkie with a frown on her face.
Aware that she couldn’t break out of the magical field, Megan relaxed. “I had guessed that your magic was telekinetic.”
“I have every magic.” Twilight lowered Megan to the ground and released her. “What are you doing? I never expected Magog and Danel to fight each other.”
“What are you talking about?” Danny said, rubbing his jaw. “We fight all the time.” He spat. “She doesn’t usually throw punches, though.”
Gingerly, Megan flexed her fingers. “And I think I hurt my hand.”
Danny took her hand, opened it, and tapped her wrist. “Don’t you remember how Dad taught us, sis? If you wanna hit a guy in the jaw, use your palm.”
She snatched her hand back. “I was never quite so keen as you at learning how to fistfight, Danny.”
“Says the girl who punched a dragon on her first trip to Ponyland.” He stuck his tongue in his cheek and rubbed it around. “That was a pretty good hit.”
“Thanks.”
“For a girl.”
“You want seconds?”
He held up his hands and backed away.
Megan jumped in surprise when a pair of pink hooves reached over her shoulders from behind and tugged at the corners of her mouth. “C’mon,” Pinkie said, “you don’ need to be such a big meanie meanpants. Turn that ol’ frown upside down an’ give us a smile!” Pinkie spun Megan around and wrapped her in a crushing hug.
Megan was both winded and dumbfounded. She had noticed, when they first arrived, that these ponies had shorter muzzles and more bulbous heads than the ones she had known in Dream Valley, and she had soon discovered that they also had double-jointed knees they could bend like elbows. They could move their bodies in eerily human-like ways of which the earlier ponies had been incapable: Megan had been nuzzled, licked, and leaned on by plenty of ponies, but this was the first time one had hugged her. Certain things they had said suggested that the new ponies aged the way humans did rather than the way horses did, too. A lot had changed in five thousand years.
“Ambassador,” Megan gasped, “you’re crushing my ribs.”
Pinkie squeezed her a little longer and rocked her back and forth before finally letting go.
“Well,” said Twilight, “if that’s all over, can we get back to business?”
“Yes,” said Megan. “Pinkie Pie, you’re next.”
“I wanna groom Pinkie,” said Danny.
Megan glared at him. “What?”
Danny raised his ball cap and scratched at his orange hair. “Hey, don’t you want some help? You still got a lot of ponies to get through.”
“I don’t need your help, Danny.”
“Ah, stop bein’ a jerk, sis. I know how to take care o’ horses.”
“You and Pinkie’ll just screw around.”
“No we won’t. C’mon. Why don’t you go groom Twilight instead or something?”
Megan glanced at Twilight. A large, forced grin formed on Twilight’s face as she slowly backed away. “Who, me? Oh, you can save me for later. Maybe Applejack—”
Megan threw up her hands. “Fine, Danny. Fine. Go groom Pinkie Pie. I can’t imagine you’ll make this day much worse.” She paused and watched Pinkie, who now bounced up and down like a Super Ball. “I think we’ll put her in the jumper class. Even you should be able to prepare her for that.”
Pinkie stuck her legs out straight, arresting her own momentum and landing softly on the ground. She raised a hoof, and Danny slapped a hand against it.
“Woohoo!” Pinkie cried.
“C’mon, Pinkie,” said Danny. “I’ll getcha ready.”
Five years earlier in one world, five thousand in another, under Megan’s close supervision, Dream Valley changed. The ponies had formerly spent almost all their time playing, but now they worked.
Because they had never needed to do any housework or upkeep when Queen Majesty ruled and they lived in Dream Castle, the ponies knew nothing of maintenance. Consequently, Paradise Estate had gone to seed: plaster was cracking from the ceilings, stucco was crumbling off the walls, and tiles were falling from the roof. Paradise and Cherries Jubilee were in charge of cleanup and repairs, for which they’d enlisted the help of the bushwoolies. They were also looking into the possibility of surrounding the house with a stone wall and a moat for added protection.
The ponies had visited the human, gnome, and elf villages outside the valley and traded some of Majesty’s gold for seeds. Under the direction of Chancellor Magic Star and with a lot of advice and encouragement from Posey, the earth ponies had cleared trees to make room for fields, and they now pulled plows through the ground, struggling hard to make up for lost time and plant the corn.
The unicorns made regular early-morning treks to the Mushromp where the mysterious and powerful Moochick kept his hermitage. The Moochick had agreed to help the unicorn ponies hone their magical skills, though it was unclear if the absent-minded little elf was even aware that he’d done so: he reacted with surprise each morning when he opened his door to find several unicorns awaiting their lessons. So far, Galaxy, Buttons, and Ribbon had learned several new spells, but Fizzy could still produce nothing but bubbles.
Megan had sent pegasi to contact the troggles, bipedal warthog-like creatures who had formerly served Grogar the demon ram, ruler of the black city of Tambelon. Megan had cast Grogar and his city back into the Realm of Darkness, but the troggles now roamed free in Ponyland, mostly working as mercenaries and protecting villages from the dragons that ravaged them for food. Being, as they were, on good terms with the ponies who had freed them from their former servitude, the troggles agreed to return to Dream Valley and teach the pegasi the art of fighting with the spear. Under the troggles’ command, the pegasus ponies now stood in rows in front of Paradise Estate and practiced thrusts. Heart Throb complained that the exertion was bad for her complexion, and Whizzer fought with enthusiasm but without discipline. Commander Wind Whistler, to everyone’s surprise, showed a great deal of skill: she insisted that it was the easiest thing in the world, merely a matter of directing the spear tip at the correct velocity.
Meanwhile, Danny spent most of his time in a weirdly shaped, cobbled-together building on the far end of the valley. Formerly, the gizmonks, a pair of troublesome inventor monkeys, had worked in this lab before Danny and Surprise had driven them out.
Danny claimed he was trying to figure out the gizmonks’ security system so he could build something similar for Paradise Estate, but that was only a pretense; he really just wanted to tinker with the gizmonks’ machines and get away from his sisters. Some of the big brother ponies, restless by nature and just as eager as Danny to escape Megan’s disapproving glare, frequently joined him: Steamer, who had a keen interest in trains, and 4-Speed, who loved trucks, knew everything there was to know about engines, and they soon had the gizmonks’ power generators up and running again.
Upon visiting the grundles who had taken up residence in Dream Castle after the ponies had moved to Paradise Estate, Steamer had discovered that his model train sets were in storage there, untouched. He set them up in the gizmonks’ lab, so now a miniature track snaked its way around the floor and wound its way up walls to the ceiling. It passed through every part of the shop, so Danny and the stallions used the train to send tools or messages to each other when they were working in different rooms.
Danny was alone at the lab today, though he had started the model train running as usual. Out on the back porch with a mask over his face and heavy gloves on his hands, he was in the process of stick welding a cracked boiler that had formerly been part of a steam engine. The gizmonks had left behind a sizable supply of coal in the basement, and if Danny could get the engine running properly again, he could generate more electricity for the lab and stop using the smaller naphtha-powered generators that had originally, presumably, been the gizmonks’ backup source.
Sparks bounced onto Danny’s mask and apron as he focused on his weld. The acrid smell of ozone filled his nose, and sweat ran freely down his face and stung his eyes, but he fought the urge to shake his head or blink. He knew only the little of arc welding he had learned from his father, but he knew he had to focus.
For several tense seconds, the weld was his world, but then something coarse like sandpaper slid up the back of his neck. Afraid he was being probed by some giant insect, he snapped off the electrode, leapt up, and swatted wildly at the air.
He heard a wild, high-pitched laugh behind him. Yanking off his mask, he spun around to find the pegasus Surprise rolling on her back and giggling.
“Surprise!” he yelled.
She stopped laughing and gazed up at him. “Did I surprise you?”
“Yes! Don’t you know that’s dangerous? I could have burned myself, or you could’ve got sparks in your eyes!”
She blinked a few times. “But you were surprised.”
Danny shut down the diesel motor for the welding electrode, pulled off his gloves, and slung off his apron. In vain, he mopped at his forehead. “Man, it’s a hot one today. I wish Megan would let me use the Rainbow of Light to make some clouds for this.”
Surprise sat up and smacked her lips. “You’re all sweaty. You taste like salt.”
Danny sat down and touched the back of his neck. The rough thing he’d felt there had apparently been her tongue.
Surprise stood, walked to him, and licked his cheek.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“I told you. You taste like salt.”
“Well, stop it.” He scooted away. “Aren’t you supposed to be training with the other pegasus ponies?”
She flopped down on the floor again. “Don’t wanna.”
“I don’t blame you.” Realizing he still had his gloves in his hands, he tossed them to the floor. It was odd: Danny knew his mother would have had a conniption if she had caught him welding without supervision, but here in Ponyland that hadn’t even crossed his mind before he’d started. He already did other things here that were much more dangerous than welding.
“I think sis finally went off the deep end,” he said. “I miss the days when we could just, you know, hang out.”
“You get to hang out with the big brothers, though,” Surprise said with a pout.
“Yeah. They’re actually pretty smart: 4-Speed already knew what most of the stuff in here was, and he repaired the generators. I think, if I can fix this engine, we can get the gizmonks’ sub-aetheric discombobulator working again. That’d be cool. Steamer and Salty are probably gonna be mad that I’m working on the boiler without them, but they can’t weld without hands anyway. Oh, and we found a frame, with an engine, that 4-Speed’s sure is for a land buggy. He thinks we can put it together if we scrounge for some wheels. He’s super-excited that he might get to drive something.”
Still on her back, Surprise stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry. “All he cares about is driving!”
“Well, yeah, but think how handy it might be for the ponies to have some vehicles—”
Surprise turned over onto her side and shut her eyes as if she were planning to take a nap. “Lofty wants you to make her a hot-air balloon.”
“I would, and I’ve been reading up on ’em, but we don’t have enough silk. I swiped a few of Heart Throb’s dresses, but that’s still not enough.” Danny leaned back against the boiler and stared up into the bright afternoon sky. “The gadgets in here are kind of a hodgepodge—steam engines and cameras and kitchen tools and stuff I don’t even know what it does. But if we can get it all working, who knows? Maybe the ponies can build more stuff like it.”
Surprise blew another raspberry. “Rub my belly.”
Danny lowered his head and looked at her. She still had her eyes closed.
“Rub my belly! Rub my belly!” She flailed as if threatening to throw a tantrum, but Danny could see she had a smile on her face.
He paused a moment longer, but then obligingly slid toward her and ran his hand along the fur on her underside. She sighed in contentment and took to wiggling her hind legs while humming tunelessly.
After a minute, Danny whispered, “I don’t think I like Ponyland anymore.”
Surprise stopped humming. She opened her eyes and raised her head. “You still like me, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
She lowered her head again. “Good.”
“But, I mean, it’s not fun. Not like it used to be.”
“I know what you mean. I don’t wanna fight, an’ I don’t wanna work. I wanna play. Come play with me, Danny.” Surprise rolled over and rose to her feet. After shaking herself off, she flexed her wings. “Climb on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Don’t know. Someplace fun. Scoops says she’s found a couple of guys who can keep our ice cream supply going, and she’s building a sweet shop. We can go there.”
“But she hasn’t built it yet.”
Surprise stuck out her tongue again. “I know a gnome village only a few miles from here. Let’s go there. Maybe they have ice cream.”
“We have ice cream.”
Surprise rolled her eyes. “But for that, we gotta go back to Paradise Estate, an’ then we gotta see your sister!”
“Oh yeah. I forgot.” Danny climbed onto Surprise’s back.
“Got your camera, Danny?”
“Yep.” He pulled it out of his satchel and slung it around his neck.
“Good! We can take some pictures from the air again, too.” Surprise pranced into the yard, flapped her wings, and leapt.
Danny’s stomach lurched, and he clenched his legs tight around Surprise’s barrel as she gained altitude. When she leveled out, he pulled his cap down tight and stretched out his arms, letting the wind blow across his body, dry his sweat, and cool him down.
Dream Valley, green and lush, stretched out below. In the distance sprawled a blot of pink, the villa that was Paradise Estate. Danny lifted his camera to his eyes: through the zoom lens, he could make out the pegasi and troggles in front of the house. Two by two, the pegasus ponies launched into the air, spears clutched in their pasterns, and dove toward the ground, apparently practicing attacks from above.
Danny snapped a picture.
“Let’s get away, Danny,” Surprise said. “Just you and me.”
He lowered the camera. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“I mean for good.”
Danny felt his gut tighten as if he had a bad stomachache. Unsure what else to do, he patted her withers. “You don’t wanna do that. What about Baby Surprise?”
Surprise was quiet for a minute. “We could take her too.”
“This isn’t gonna last forever, Surprise. Megan’ll get tired of it.”
Surprise shook her head, which destabilized her flight. Sucking air through his teeth, Danny clutched her mane as she dropped a few feet. Once she was steady again, Surprise said, “It’s not just Megan. Wind Whistler’s gotten real bossy. More than usual. She wants us to do those dumb drills all the time.” Surprise stuck her tongue out.
“Well, she’s commander now, right? I guess she takes the job seriously.”
“Don’t wanna be serious.” Surprise dove. Danny leaned down and grabbed her neck.
“And Megan won’t let the big brothers leave!” Surprise shouted over the rush of wind.
“Do you want them to?”
She pulled out of her dive and corkscrewed in the air. Danny grabbed her tight and felt the sweat renew itself across his back.
She flapped hard and lifted on an updraft rising from the rugged hills at the valley’s rim. Opening her wings wide, she soared in a circle. “I don’t wanna join a herd,” she said. “But Wind Whistler’s gonna make me.”
“You could have more foals.”
“I got Baby Surprise. That’s enough.” She dove again, and this time she flew low enough that leafy tree branches scraped against Danny’s sneakers. “Let’s find another valley, Danny. You an’ me an’ Baby Surprise.”
“I can’t stay forever,” he said. “I gotta go back home and go to school, and Mom gets worried when we’re gone all the time. We can only stay here over the weekends.”
“School?”
“Yeah, school.”
“Sounds like serious stuff.” She shot up into the air, and he slid backwards onto her croup. Struggling to keep from falling, he clutched her mane, but her hair came away in his hands.
His insides lurched, and he thought for sure he would be dead in a few seconds, but before he fell free of her back, Surprise reached her hind legs forward and wrapped her fetlocks around his ankles, arresting his slide.
The air grew sharp and cold as she rose higher. She leveled out again suddenly, throwing Danny forward onto her withers.
He gasped, “Megan would kill me if—”
He sucked in his breath as Surprise dipped into a bank of cloud that left her coat and Danny’s skin streaming with water.
Surrounded by cold white mist, with his head against her thick mane, Danny could hear Surprise whispering, her voice barely audible above the wind whistling past his ears.
“I always feel like I have to move,” she said. “I can’t hold still. If I sit down for too long, or if I try to watch something for too long, I get all twisted up inside. I want up. I want to run around. I tried to watch a ladybug climb a blade of grass once, but I couldn’t do it. I yelled, ‘Too slow!’ And I jumped up and took the ladybug on my hoof and threw her into the air so she’d fly. All the other ponies are too quiet, too slow. Everything is.” She whinnied softly.
“Except you,” she added, her voice even lower so he had to strain to make out her words. “I feel like I can hold still and be quiet when I’m with you.”
He lay there for a minute, breathing against her mane. The soft feathers of her wings brushed up and down along the backsides of his arms. He could feel his heart pounding hard but slow against her withers. His insides were knotted up with a sensation he’d never felt before, one both painful and pleasant.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
Slowly banking back and forth, Surprise lowered gently out of the clouds. Down below, surrounded by rugged crags strung with white tufts of fog, stood the straw huts and the lazily turning windmill of a village of gnomes.
Fists on hips, Danny looked at the card table where Megan had laid out her equipment for grooming. Pinkie, with her front hooves resting lightly on his back, peeked over his shoulder.
“To be honest,” he said, “I usually let my sisters do this stuff, cuz, y’know, braiding hair is for girls. But I can do this. I can. Still, I might be a little outta practice.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” said Pinkie. She dropped to the ground and bounced back and forth behind him. “Just take a little off the top, fluff out the sides, and make sure it’s nice an’ curly!”
“This isn’t a barber shop. And, um, I’m supposed to braid it.” He picked up a mane comb. “Do you mind if I, you know, pull out a bunch o’ your hair? To thin it?”
“What?” Pinkie jumped onto her front hooves, kicked her rear legs in the air, spun, and looked at Danny upside-down. “Why would you wanna pull out my hair, silly?”
“We do that to the . . . okay, never mind. I’ll skip that part. We’ll just have to figure out how to manage your hair as it is.”
After Pinkie landed back on all four feet, Danny dug a hand into her mane. “You’re sort of like a Bashkir Curly, I guess. But we’ve never had one of those.” He lifted his cap and scratched his head. “I’m not sure how to groom a horse with curly hair. This could be interesting.”
Looking away from her, he grabbed a bottle of essential oils from the table, but when he turned back around, he found Pinkie jumping around the yard.
“Uh, Pinkie? You’ll have to hold still for this.”
Obligingly, and with a shrill skidding sound, she pulled to an abrupt stop in front of him, and he began to comb.
“All done yet?” she asked.
“No, I’m just starting.” As Danny tried to pull the comb through her hair, it got stuck. “Hmm, it’s really tangled—”
He tried to tug the comb out, but found it lodged in place. At first, he thought perhaps some hair had wrapped around it, but the comb wouldn’t come even partway out of her curls.
Frowning, he scratched his head. Pinkie began shuffling back and forth on her hooves.
“Done yet?” she asked again.
“Uh, no—”
“Hey, wanna play a game?” She bounced onto her hind hooves and reared. “I’m thinking of a number between one and fifty million, and you gotta—”
“Pinkie, c’mon. If I don’t do this, Meg’s gonna be mad. Madder’n usual, I mean.”
With a loud thud, Pinkie’s front hooves hit the ground again. Danny grabbed the comb and pulled. He strained, clenching his teeth and leaning backwards. Pinkie’s mane stretched like gum, but the comb still wouldn’t come free.
“What in the world? What is this? It’s like your hair’s made o’ glue!”
“Oh, do you want your comb back? Here.” Pinkie closed her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and puffed out her cheeks. The comb shot free, and Danny staggered backwards.
He smashed into the table, upsetting it, and then collapsed onto his rump. His head cracked against something, sending flashes of light into his eyes. Wincing and rubbing the back of his skull, he climbed to his feet to find Pinkie now balancing on one hoof and spinning like an equine ballerina.
“Well,” Danny said, “maybe I should curry your coat first anyway.”
Danny and Surprise lay on a grassy hilltop outside the gnome village. Near their heads stood a picnic basket, and beside it lay two tin dishes that had formerly held meat pies, but now held nothing but a few crumbs. Beside those lay a half-eaten dish of pastries, a nearly destroyed wheel of cheese, and several empty bottles.
After gathering food in the village, they had spent most of the afternoon sitting on this spot and gorging themselves. The gnomes had sold them bottled sarsaparilla: Danny liked it because it was sweet; Surprise giggled when the bubbles tickled her nose, and she claimed the drink made her feel lightheaded. They had eaten until they were stuffed, and then they had lain down to watch the clouds.
“I could live like this forever,” Surprise said.
“Not forever,” Danny answered. “I had to give them my watch and my calculator to get this food, but they wanted gold. You ponies need to figure out how to get some gold.”
Surprise hiccoughed and giggled. “Majesty left us lots of gold.”
“It won’t last.”
She sighed. “Stop, please. Let’s just enjoy the afternoon.”
He turned his head and smiled at her. “I guess I can do that.”
Giggling, Surprise started rolling back and forth in the grass. “Ah, that feels so good! Come roll with me, Danny.”
“What? I don’t wanna—”
She almost rolled on top of him. He yelled in alarm, but she reached one hoof past his shoulder and stopped herself before she crushed him. After swiftly nuzzling his cheek, she rolled back the other way and, laughing all the while, rolled right down the hill, stopping at last in a bed of wildflowers and tall grass. When she sat up, a bright green butterfly landed on her nose.
Hands in his pockets, Danny walked down the hill to join her, and the butterfly flew away. He sat down, cross-legged, across from her.
She threw herself back down into the grass. “Do you ever wonder about the Rainbow Bridge?”
“It’s weird, but we didn’t think about it much before the pegasi showed up. The rainbow was always there, hovering over the ranch, but none of us knew what it was until ponies started crossing it.”
“Maybe Majesty made it.”
“Maybe. It sounds like, if anybody could have made it, she could.”
Surprise turned over onto her stomach and poked at a flower with one hoof. “Sometimes I wonder if things are the same on both sides. Once, I was playing a record on the phonograph, and I realized I could make it go really, really fast so the voices would get all squeaky, or I could make it play really deep and slow. And I wondered if Ponyland and your land were like two records, and I wondered if they played at the same speed.”
Danny plucked a stem of grass, stuck it in his lips, and lay down. “I don’t know.”
“I wonder, if you went home and didn’t come back until you were all grown up, maybe I’d still be here, and it would be like only a couple of days had gone by, and I’d say, ‘Oh, Danny! You’re all grown up!’ But on the other hoof, if it went the other way, maybe you’d be all grown up, but I wouldn’t even be here anymore, and maybe Baby Surprise’d be grown up and maybe have her own babies—”
Danny chewed the grass stem and stared up at the drifting clouds overhead. “I dunno, Surprise. Why are you thinkin’ ’bout this stuff?”
She turned her face toward his. “Because I want you to hurry an’ grow up.”
A lump formed in his throat and his stomach clenched again. He turned and looked into her lavender eyes. A faint breeze tousled her curly mane and made the grass wave in front of her face. They gazed at each other in silence for a few minutes before Surprise closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
“You’re making this difficult, Pinkie.” Every time Danny touched Pinkie with the curry brush, she started giggling. “C’mon, just hold still.” He started brushing more vigorously, hoping it would somehow hold her in place, but she collapsed onto her back in a fit of laughter, causing him to fall across her barrel.
“That tickles!” she squealed.
“Man, even your coat is curly. I wonder if I’m doing this right—”
“I got my hooves polished to come here. Lookee.” She raised a front hoof, which was trimmed, painted pink, and buffed. He took it in one hand and peered at it.
“Well, that’s good. Less work for me. Still, I gotta brush your coat and braid your hair.”
She slid out from under him and leapt to her feet. He hit the ground with a thud.
Brushing himself off, he got back up and said, “If we’re gonna get this done, you gotta hold really, super-duper still. Okay?”
“Hmm.” She rubbed her chin. “Once, I did stare at a wall an’ watch paint dry. It was really, really tough, but I had to do it for my friends.”
Danny scratched his head. “You had to watch paint dry for . . . ? No, never mind, I don’t wanna know. Think of this as like that. You an’ your friends are ambassadors, right? You don’t wanna disappoint your friends.”
She poked his nose with a hoof. “That’s true!”
“So just stare at the barn wall here, and don’t move.”
“But the paint on the barn’s already dry, silly!”
Danny ripped his cap off and scratched his head more vigorously. “Yes, I know, but—”
He stopped and spun, looking around the yard for anything that might seize her attention. “Why don’t you, um, watch the grass grow?”
She stuck out her tongue. “Boooring!”
“Of course it’s boring! That’s the . . . okay, fine. How about you watch the clouds? Look at that one there.” He put an arm over her shoulders, placed his cheek against hers, and pointed at a white tuft floating near the horizon. “It looks kinda like a peacock. Uh, no, more like a turkey. A chicken, maybe? Just stare at it, okay?”
“Okee dokee.” Pinkie threw herself onto her back again.
“Pinkie!”
“What? This is the perfect position for cloud-gazing.”
“I need you on your feet. Please?”
Pinkie jumped up with a slight frown. “Okay, but it’ll be hard to get in the cloud-gazing mood—”
“Just stand there, hold still, and report to me what the cloud looks like. Don’t take your eyes off it.”
She spread her feet, set her shoulders, opened her eyes wide, and furrowed her brow.
With a sigh of relief, Danny set the curry brush to her shoulder.
She snorted.
“The cloud, Pinkie. Focus on the cloud.”
“It looks like a meadowlark.”
“Good.” He pressed down and moved his arm in a circle, currying her coat.
She snorted again and her barrel started shaking. The muscles under her skin twitched madly as if she were shaking off a horde of flies.
“The cloud, Pinkie! Watch the cloud!”
Her voice strangled, Pinkie said, “It looks like a pigeon—”
Another snort cut off her words.
“That’s it,” he said. “Stay focused.”
One of her hind legs started to lift, as if she were a dog wanting to scratch.
“Stay focused!”
“It looks like a duck.”
“Good.”
“Now a goose.”
“Okay.”
“Now an aepyornis.”
“Wait, what?”
Bursting into a fresh fit of laughter, Pinkie shied from him and scratched vigorously at her barrel with a hind leg, smearing dust across her coat.
“Pinkie! You didn’t focus! You told me you could stare at something—”
“Not while getting tickled!”
“Well, dang it, you’re just gonna have to focus extra hard!”
They faced each other silently for almost a full minute. Danny fingered the curry brush, holding his arms at his sides. Pinkie, eyes narrowed, watched his hands.
He took a step forward. “Pinkie—”
She took a step back.
“You know this is serious,” he said. He took another step.
Again she stepped back.
“The future of two worlds depends on you having a well-brushed coat!”
She didn’t answer.
In a flash, Danny raised the brush as if drawing a pistol from his hip. He sprinted for her and leapt onto her back. Neighing loudly, she bounced around the yard and tried to unseat him as he clutched her neck and vigorously brushed any spot of fur he could reach.
“Hold still, Pinkie!”
Her neighs turned to frantic laughs punctuated by loud snorts, and her jumps grew higher and more rapid. “Oh, stop it! It tickles! It tickles!”
She hit the ground hard and skidded to a stop, throwing Danny over her head. He spun in the air and slid across the yard on his back, coming to rest when his legs struck a rickety old fence.
Feeling sick, he lay in the grass and stared into the sky. Struggling to keep his gorge down, he noticed a small cloud floating overhead.
“Huh . . . y’know, from this angle, that kinda does look like an aepyornis.”
When the sun tipped toward the horizon, Danny and Surprise headed home. They landed beside a dirt path some distance from Paradise Estate, and Danny dismounted. He heard the whine of wheels spinning over gravel, and then Speedy appeared on her rollerskates. She turned her hooves sideways, pulling to an abrupt halt and spraying rocks.
Her expression blank, Speedy swiveled the faceted jewels in her eye sockets up toward Danny. Like all twinkle-eyed ponies, she had a face that, no matter her mood, was unreadable: even when her mouth turned up, those glistening stones in her eyes remained expressionless, making the smile appear feigned. Danny knew the story of how the twinkle-eyed ponies had lost their sight and received magic stones to replace their eyes; he felt sorry for them, but, though he had never admitted it aloud, they made his flesh crawl.
“Megan and Wind Whistler want to see you two,” Speedy said, her voice as flat as her expression. She blinked a few times, and the sight of her eyelids sliding over those jewels made Danny think he might lose the picnic lunch he’d just had.
Having delivered her message, Speedy turned and skated away. Danny and Surprise walked slowly after, in no hurry to get home.
When they reached the villa, they found Megan and Wind Whistler standing in the enclosed courtyard. Danny crossed his arms, leaned against a wall, and prepared himself for a berating. Surprise sat down next to him.
Several minutes passed before Wind Whistler spoke. “No pegasus is allowed to vacate the premises without express permission from the commander,” she said, “and no pegasus is allowed absence from combat training without grave reason.”
They were all silent for a moment until Surprise looked up and, with voice shrill like an angry child’s, shouted, “I don’t want combat training!”
“That is not your decision to make,” Wind Whistler answered, her voice rising only a little. “The needs of the community outweigh your personal desires, Surprise, and logic dictates—”
“I don’t care!” Surprise screamed. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!”
“You are confined to your quarters until further notice,” Wind Whistler snapped.
“I don’t have a quarters!” Surprise snapped back. “I have a room, and I go there when I want.”
“I am your commander,” said Wind Whistler.
“You’re not the boss of me!”
Her face still impassive, Wind Whistler stepped forward. Her usually calm voice took on a dangerous edge. “I am most certainly the boss of you, as you are about to discover. We have tolerated your childish antics for far too long, but things are going to be different now in Dream Valley. No more illogical foolishness.”
Surprise stuck out her tongue.
“Insolence,” Wind Whistler said. “Insubordination.” She looked over her shoulder. “Megan, we are going to conduct a court martial.”
Megan shifted, looking uneasy. “I don’t know if—”
“You wish the pegasus ponies to be a guard unit, do you not? A military unit? Then we must conduct ourselves as a military unit. Am I not commander?”
“You are, but—”
“Then I have the authority of a commander and all that pertains to such authority, including the right to discipline those under my command.”
“Maybe we can talk this out,” Megan said.
“What, precisely, would be the purpose of interlocution with someone who will not hear reason?”
Twisting her mouth, Megan shifted again. “Perhaps, if we just understood why Surprise—”
“I can tell you why,” said Wind Whistler with uncharacteristic vehemence. “It is because she obeys her passions instead of governing them. It is because she, like most of the ponies, wants to let sentiment instead of reason direct her life. Well, if pleasure and pain are all that can move her, then I can give her pain and take away her pleasure. I will rule her if she will not rule herself.” Taking a deep breath, Wind Whistler added more calmly, “I leave you to discipline your brother, who is under your command, not mine. I will deal with Surprise.”
Megan glanced back and forth between Surprise and Danny, paused a moment, and nodded.
Wind Whistler walked to Surprise and champed her flank, taking off a patch of hair. Surprise yelped.
Danny stood straight and, clenching his teeth, raised his fists. But he made no further move.
“To your quarters,” Wind Whistler said. Sulkily, with many angry glances over her shoulder, Surprise walked into the house, Wind Whistler following close behind.
His fists still raised, Danny breathed hard through his nose. He glanced at Megan, who watched him with her arms crossed.
“I wanna go home,” said Danny. He shook, and tears started pouring down his face.
“You’re in trouble,” she answered.
“You can’t tell me what to do!” he shouted. “You’re not Mom, Megan! And you’re definitely not my ‘commander!’”
“Somebody has to watch out for you!” she shouted back. “You’re always running around, getting hurt, making trouble, and screwing off! And Mom can’t watch you! She’s too busy dealing with the ranch, now that Dad’s run off with that floozy—”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up!”
“Don’t talk about him like that!”
Megan marched to Danny, grabbed his collar, and slapped him. He raised a fist, but just as quickly dropped it again when he saw anger, doubt, and agony pass across Megan’s face like clouds rolling over the sky in a high wind.
She grabbed him roughly around the shoulders and hugged him tight. He could feel that her cheek was wet.
“I want you safe, Danny. And I want Molly safe, and the ponies. Do you understand that? Don’t go flying off again without telling anyone. Just don’t.”
He waited several seconds, but finally hugged her back. After he thought he was calm enough to speak without his voice cracking, he whispered, “I just want things to go back to how they were.”
“They can’t, Danny. You know that as well as I do.”
Danny staggered to his feet again. He’d lost track of the number of times he’d been knocked down that day.
“Man, no wonder sis is so bent outta shape. You ponies really are hard to groom.”
“I’m sorry,” Pinkie said, landing beside him and poking him in several places. “You’re not hurt, are you? Getting hurt is no fun . . . well, unless you’re playing freeze tag and you’re running real fast to get away from the pony who’s it, and then you trip over a stump, and then you fall down because you tripped over a stump, and you say ouch because you fell down because you tripped over a stump. And then you’re hurt, but you were having fun when you got hurt, except it wasn’t actually fun getting hurt but only fun while you were getting hurt, and then it’s like you’re having fun and not having fun at the same time, and not having fun while you’re having fun is no fun! So—”
Danny pressed a hand over Pinkie’s mouth. “Our mom always used to say, it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.”
“Ooh!” Pinkie backed away from his hand so she could speak again. “That must be why I’m always having fun and games, because I haven’t lost an eye yet!”
“Uh . . . yeah, okay. I used to know a bunch of ponies who’d lost eyes—”
“Were they having fun and games?”
“Didn’t sound like it, from what I heard. They were nice and all, but they freaked me out.”
“I’m gonna keep careful track of my eyes, then, so I don’t freak you out.” She reared and shouted, “Oh no—!” Cautiously, she touched her front hooves to her face. “Oh, nope, I was wrong. I still have two. For a moment there, I thought I lost one.”
Danny rubbed his hair and pulled his cap down tight. “Let’s just call your coat good and work on your mane and tail, huh?”
Danny marched into Paradise Estate’s Pretty Parlor where Candy Kisses was putting on her makeup. With a gasp, she shied and dropped her lipstick.
“Danny! Don’t walk in on a girl like that!”
“Sorry, but I really need your help.”
“Why?”
Danny took off his cap and rubbed his hair. “Well, it’s sorta . . .”
Candy Kisses raised an eyebrow. “Girl trouble?”
“How’d you know?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because that’s all anybody comes to me to talk about.” Stretching out one hind leg, she displayed her hip symbol, which looked like a stain left by a lipstick-coated kiss. “Honestly, I might start wearing a skirt all the time to cover this thing up.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Do you want a giant pair of lips on your butt?”
Frowning, he stuck his hands in his pockets. “Not really—”
She moved to a velvet-covered chaise longue and patted the space beside her. “Sit down. Tell me your troubles. Let’s get this over with.”
“Look, if you don’t—”
“Sit down, Danny.”
Danny quickly planted himself beside her. Staring at his hands, he twiddled his thumbs and, after an uncomfortable silence, said, “Could you, um, teach me—?”
He paused when sweat broke out along his spine. He glanced sidelong at her and saw her staring at him with a glum, impatient expression.
He squeezed his eyes shut and blurted, “Could you teach me how to kiss a girl?”
Another uncomfortable silence followed. Candy Kisses snorted. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you again?”
“Eleven—”
“And that’s, like, what? Two in human years? You don’t need kissing lessons, kid. Wait until you’re at least four.”
“C’mon, Candy, ya gotta help me.”
She hung her head. “Why don’t you ask Kiss n’ Tell instead?”
“She told me to ask you.”
“Kiss n’ Make-up?”
“Also told me to ask you.”
Candy Kisses snorted again. “Don’t you see a pattern here? My sisters and I are—” She stopped and waved a hoof. “Never mind. It’s disgusting and it’s degrading, but it is what it is.”
“What’s ‘degrading’?”
“Being cursed with a special talent for kissing, that’s what. Fine, I’ll teach you. But these are emphatically not going to be hooves-on lessons, got it?”
“They’re not gonna be what?”
“Hoo boy, you really should come back when you’re older. Okay, I’m not repeating myself, so listen up. First, you close your eyes. If you don’t close your eyes, you’re a punk. Got that?”
“I guess.”
“Then you tilt your head.”
“Why?”
Candy Kisses paused. “I . . . I don’t know, really. It’s tradition. Tilt. Or you’re a punk. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you lean.”
“Lean?”
“Yes, lean. Of course you lean. Do you expect her to come to you? If you do—”
“I’m a punk?”
“Yes, you’re a punk all right. Close, tilt, lean: remember that. Then you kiss. And that’s it.”
“But, wait a minute, that’s the important part, isn’t it? I want to know how to do the kissing thing. What’s the trick?”
Candy Kisses groaned and put her face in her hooves. “Honestly, Danny—”
“Please, Candy! Help me out!”
With a harrumph, she pushed herself off the chaise, spun around, and stood before him. “What sort of kiss are we discussing? There’s the Eskimo Nose Kiss, the Butterfly Kiss, the Light Peck on the Cheek, the Gentle Kiss on the Forehead, the French Goodbye Kiss—”
“French kiss—?” Danny shrank back.
“Not that kind of French kiss, you idiot! You kiss the air beside her cheeks! The air!”
“Okay, fine!” Danny wiped his damp forehead with a wrist.
“There are many kinds of kisses, and each one carries a special meaning. Like flowers.” She turned her head aside and muttered, “Posey is so lucky, having a special talent for flowers—”
“I’m just looking for a regular boy-girl kiss. I guess.”
She pursed her lips and nodded. “Hmm. Mm hm, mm hm. A First Kiss, yes. A difficult specimen. It must be just so or else it’s ruined. And, of course, as a first, it will be remembered forever—”
Danny swallowed.
“This will be your First Kiss, I assume—”
“Well, yeah, that’s why I’m—”
“And what about her?”
Danny blinked. “I . . . I dunno. I think so.”
“Then assume so. Don’t ask her, please. That would make you—”
“A punk.”
“Exactly. The First Kiss must be slow, tender, gentle, and, above all, brief.”
“How can it be slow and brief?”
“Augh, you fool! Must I explain everything to you?” She tapped a hoof on the shag rug for almost a minute and at last said, “I suppose there’s no help for it. You’ll simply have to practice.”
“Wait, what?”
“Kiss me, idiot.”
With his mouth hanging open, Danny stared down at Candy Kisses’s pink-lined lips.
“What are you waiting for?” she demanded. “You wanted lessons, didn’t you? Well, what are lessons without practice? You don’t learn to play an instrument merely by studying the theory: you must pick up the instrument and play, and you only learn to play well by playing badly. Kiss me badly, you silly boy.”
Danny closed his mouth, swallowed again, and found his voice. “But then it wouldn’t be my first kiss.”
A grin spread slowly across Candy Kisses’s face. “Very good. Lesson’s over. You passed. Now get out of here.” She shoved him off the chaise and onto the floor. Then she returned to her vanity and continued applying her makeup.
Danny stood and brushed off his jeans. “I don’t get it.”
She sighed and stared at him in her mirror. “Danny, there’s no ‘trick’ to kissing. That was your mistake. Love isn’t a hoofball game; you don’t try to approach it with a bunch of skills and techniques. It’s more like a journey of exploration: you learn new things about each other and you cherish even the disappointments and mistakes because you love each other. Got it?”
“I—”
“You also don’t walk in on a lady while she’s applying her makeup. Goodbye, Danny. I trust you can find the door.”
Danny had a mane comb and Molly’s hairbrush stuck in Pinkie Pie’s mane when Megan walked around from the back of the barn with Rarity, Applejack, and Twilight in tow. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were apparently still down by the creek.
Danny glanced up briefly as he struggled to convince Pinkie to hold still. “I thought you were gonna work on Applejack.”
“Actually,” Megan said, “I had an idea.”
“Ooh, goody!” said Pinkie.
“What is it?” Danny asked. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I realized we’ve gone about this the wrong way,” Megan said. “Rarity styled my hair earlier—”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Danny said as he yanked on the hairbrush, trying to dislodge it.
“So I asked her if she could help speed things up.”
“I figured you might be having difficulty here, darling,” Rarity said. “But I’ve dealt with Pinkie Pie’s hair before.” She chuckled. “Once, when we were fighting a group of changelings—real ruffians, you understand—several of them turned into Pinkie Pie. I restyled her hair so we could tell the real Pinkie apart from the villains.”
Danny grunted. “I did not understand a word you just said.” He strained as he yanked on the brush and watched Pinkie’s hair stretch.
“I shouldn’t have eaten all that taffy before we came this morning,” said Pinkie. She hiccoughed.
“Let Rarity do Pinkie’s hair,” said Megan.
Danny let go. Pinkie’s hair contracted, and the brush smacked her in the side of the head, knocking her over.
“I don’t need help,” Danny said as he marched toward Megan.
“Danny, you should be done by now.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly been Miss Speedy this morning either, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I needed help. But Pinkie’s especially difficult to—”
“No!”
Megan paused.
Danny lowered his voice, leaned toward her, and muttered through clenched teeth, “This is important to me.”
“Danny—”
Danny lowered his voice still further and hissed in Megan’s ear, “You’re not going to take her away from me again. Not this time.”
He thought for sure Megan would get angry, but instead she pulled back and, arms crossed, stared at him for a moment, her jaw working. She glanced around at the ponies before she said, “Come talk to me in private. Behind the barn.”
She turned and walked away. Danny followed, but Megan called over her shoulder, “Rarity, go ahead and get started on Pinkie. Just a simple continuous braid will do.”
Danny knocked on Surprise’s door. The knock was so faint, even he could barely hear it; nonetheless, Surprise shouted from inside, “Go away!”
“Surprise?” he murmured.
He heard the squeak of furniture shifting and the boom of something heavy hitting the floor. After that came the distinct clopping sound of hooves on hardwood, and then the door burst open. Danny stumbled backwards when Surprise barreled out.
She nuzzled his cheek for a moment, but then clamped her teeth on his shirt, dragged him into her room, and shut the door.
He sat on the floor, stunned, as she lay her head against his shoulder.
“Let’s run off somewhere,” he whispered. “Like you said.”
“What about your home? Your mom? Your school?” she whispered back.
He shook his head. “I don’t wanna go back there anymore.”
With a thump, she lowered her haunches and sat across from him. He had never seen so much sorrow on her face. “Why is it like this, Danny? Why have Megan and Wind Whistler gotten so mean?”
“I don’t know.” He watched tears roll down her cheeks. Her eyes were pleading.
Danny had grown up surrounded by girls. His older sister had always been bossy, and Molly had always followed him around, insisting on bothering him at recess when he was playing with his friends. When he had joined Megan in Ponyland in the hopes of embarking on a great adventure, he had discovered it was full of yet more girls. He had dreamed of the day when he might finally grow up, escape Megan’s shadow, and do the kinds of things he wanted to do.
Only recently had he begun to think that girls might be more interesting than he had previously supposed. A few months earlier, while playing hooky from school, Danny and his best friend Jake had been hanging out in a trash-strewn alley. They kicked cans around and complained about their teacher, and then Danny noticed the corner of a magazine sticking out of a nearby dumpster. Even before he caught a good glimpse of the image on the open page, he somehow sensed what it was.
Jake pulled it out, smoothed out the creased pages, and chuckled. Danny backed away.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jake said. “Chicken?”
“No.” Danny snatched the magazine and leafed rapidly through it. Most of the images, depicting things outside his previous experience, reached him as a series of disconnected impressions, refusing to come together into coherent wholes. But when he reached the centerfold, he stopped and stared. His throat closed up, and it felt as if someone were punching him in the stomach, or perhaps a little lower down.
Jake looked over his shoulder and sniggered again.
Since that day, he had warily watched the girls at school, trying to relate them to the pictures he’d seen. He couldn’t quite do it; he couldn’t really believe that the chattering girls with their skinny legs and bobbing pigtails and dolls and jump ropes were the same variety of animal he had seen in the magazine. He tried to imagine kissing them, but that couldn’t quite come together in his mind, either. Nonetheless, a newfound mixture of confusion, desire, and anxiety roiled constantly and unpleasantly in his gut.
Then there was Surprise. Even though she didn’t look like one, he knew she was a girl. She didn’t make his face heat up or fill him with anxiety the way the magazine pictures had, but he enjoyed talking to her and spending time with her. And perhaps, because she looked more like one of the horses on the ranch than like the girls at school who previously had been mere nuisances but were now dark and mysterious creatures, he didn’t find her frightening or confusing. He could relax with her, as she had said she could with him. Or, at least, he usually could. Now was different.
Sitting on the floor in her room, watching the tears roll down her cheeks, Danny clenched and unclenched a fist, trying to make up his mind. His head floated, his throat burned. It felt as if his ribs were crushing his heart like a vice. He was so nervous, he was afraid he might throw up. Slowly, awkwardly, almost losing his balance, he rose to his knees. After swallowed a few times to get the extra saliva out of his mouth, he leaned toward her. He leaned so far, he was afraid he’d fall over. He didn’t just close his eyes, but squeezed them shut. He almost forgot to tilt, but remembered at the last moment.
Her lips were rough, and she didn’t respond at all; it was like kissing warm stone. Remembering that it was supposed to be brief, he pulled back and opened his eyes.
Tears streamed more quickly down her face. She lowered her chin and slowly shook her head.
All feeling dropped away from his heart and left him empty. Numbly, hardly aware of what he was doing, he stood, walked to the door, and put his hand on the knob.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He leaned his face on the door; the lacquered wood felt cool against his burning forehead. “So am I.”
“I’ve been so stupid!” She pressed her head against the floor and burst into sobs.
“It’s okay, Surprise . . .”
“I can’t leave! My friends are here, my baby is here. I want to, I wish I could, but I can’t!”
“I know.”
“And you’re a child.” She managed a weak laugh. “You’re older than I am, but you’re still just a child.”
Behind the barn, Danny tossed his hat to the ground and rubbed his palms through his hair. “Okay, look, Meg, I’m gonna tell you somethin’. And if you ever repeat it, I swear I’ll kill you.”
Megan raised an eyebrow and glanced sidelong at him. “What is it?”
“Promise me you’ll keep it secret.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Pinkie promise.”
“What are you, five?”
“Like this. Pinkie Pie showed me.” He crossed himself and stuck a fist to his face as he recited the couplet Pinkie had taught him earlier.
After he finished, he watched Megan for a moment. “C’mon, Meg.”
With a small sigh and a weak, indulgent smile, she repeated, “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye. There. You happy?”
He took a deep breath, looked down, licked his lips, and spread his hands as if laying them on a table. “Okay, here goes. And just remember, I was eleven at the time, so don’t get on my case.”
“Get on with it, Danny.”
“Okay. Back in Ponyland . . . back in Ponyland . . . I had a crush on Surprise.” He winced and glanced sheepishly at Megan.
She blinked a few times. “Danny, I already knew that.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it was obvious. Everyone knew it.”
“What?”
“Like you said, you were eleven. Relax.” Megan shook her head and waved a hand in the air. “Is that what this is about? Is that what has you so upset—?”
He could feel heat creeping into his face. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, it’s just, I mean, after all this time, meeting Pinkie—”
Megan laughed.
“Hey, don’t—”
She laughed louder, slumped against the wall, and slid to the ground.
“Go ahead,” he said, crossing his arms. “Let it all out.”
She stopped, but then she glanced at him and started laughing again.
After a minute, she wiped her eyes and tucked her face between her knees before she came up for air and said, “Oh, thank you, Danny. I haven’t laughed like that in years.”
“Glad I could be of service.”
She rolled her eyes at him with a grin. “Don’t be mad. You gotta admit it’s funny.”
He leaned against the wall and scratched his head. “I don’t think it’s funny.”
“C’mon. So you met a girl—or a horse, rather—who reminds you of a silly childhood crush. So what? You’ll get over it.”
“It wasn’t silly, Megan, and do you really think it’s that easy? After what you did to her?”
Silence. Megan rose slowly to her feet. “After what I—?”
“Yeah, you.”
“I tried to protect her.”
“Protect?” Danny’s voice rose. “You call that protecting? You think you can just screw up everybody’s life as long as you tell yourself you’re protecting—?”
She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t even. I swear, Danny—”
“Shut up, Megan. I’m sick of it.”
“Oh, what are you sick of, Danny? Did I interrupt your playtime?”
“Grow up!”
“You are saying that to me?”
“Yeah! I am! You’re always whining like you got it so hard. You been whining for five years. Oh wah, I had to go to the land of magic ponies, oh wah, I gotta take care of my brother and sister, oh wah, my daddy left me—”
She hauled back and tried to punch him again, but this time he was ready. He deflected the blow with a forearm, grabbed her collar, and slammed her against the wall.
Her teeth clenched, she whispered, “You are just as bad as him.”
“You don’t understand me, Meg. Don’t pretend you do.”
“I understand you just fine. You’re a jerk who chases anything in a skirt, and that’s why I always find you feeling up every bimbo in the school—”
He gave her another shove and stepped away.
“Is that what happened with you and Surprise?” asked Megan with a glare. “Did you get mad cuz she wouldn’t put out?”
He struggled to hold them back, but a few tears ran down his face. “You don’t understand a thing, Megan. Not a damn thing.”
“We are here today for the court martial of Surprise,” said Wind Whistler to the assembled ponies. Surprise, her eyes red and puffy, sat on the grass between Danny and Megan. Megan had forbidden Molly to attend this particular event, convincing her to babysit the baby ponies for the afternoon instead.
“Discipline and order,” Wind Whistler said. “Sensibility and reason. A place for everything and everything in its place. Sentiment was the way of the past, but logic is the way of the future. Before, ponies wandered hither and yonder, following their hearts. But from now on, we shall walk the narrow path, guided by our minds!”
Surprise heaved a deep sigh.
“The pegasus ponies made me their commander,” Wind Whistler continued, “and so as commander, though it pains me, I must discipline them when they refuse to heed my authority. Surprise, without leave, absented herself from combat training, and she left the perimeter without permission. For these crimes, I shall punish her with two weeks of isolated confinement. That is all.”
In anger, Danny jumped up, and he was startled when he looked out over the crowd of ponies to see that many of the twinkle-eyed ponies had leapt to their feet as well.
“You can’t do this,” Danny said.
“I can and I shall, Danny,” Wind Whistler answered. “The earth ponies, sea ponies, and unicorns may conduct themselves as they see fit, but the pegasus ponies are now warriors, and warriors cannot afford to be democratic. I am their leader, and my word is law.”
Galaxy, her jeweled eyes sparkling in the afternoon sunlight, stepped forward and said calmly, “Wind Whistler, shouldn’t you have some rules written up first to ensure that, if you must punish somebody, you do it in keeping with—?”
“You know I have always sought to conduct my life in accordance with the dictates of reason,” Wind Whistler replied. “Do you think my decisions are unjust?”
Galaxy paused. “Well, I don’t know—”
“You are the queen of the unicorns, not the commander of the pegasi, and have no say in this matter.”
“Actually, we decided my title would be ‘princess.’ To honor Queen Majesty—”
“Very well. Nonetheless, this is not your business.”
From the midst of the pegasus ponies, Masquerade flapped her wings and rose into the air. “I agree with Galaxy. We have to have rules and laws. Shouldn’t we—?”
“You are a pegasus,” Wind Whistler snapped. “You cannot question my authority. Sit down.”
“I’m also a twinkle-eyed pony,” Masquerade said. “I know what it means to—”
“Sit!” said Wind Whistler.
Masquerade slowly dropped back to the ground. Though she muttered under her breath, because of the silence, her next words resounded across the meadow: “I know what it means to be a slave.”
“More insubordination?” Wind Whistler cried. “Is it not enough that I make an example of one of you? Must you all question my authority? Masquerade, you too shall be confined for two weeks.”
Masquerade gasped.
Now Galaxy lost her usual calm. “Wind Whistler, you cannot do that to a twinkle-eyed pony. No isolation, no closed rooms, no dark spaces. You cannot do that. I won’t allow it!”
“It is not your place to say,” Wind Whistler replied.
“No twinkle-eyed pony must face such indignity again!”
“It is not your place!” Wind Whistler shouted.
All the gathered ponies gasped; most had never heard Wind Whistler raise her voice before.
Wind Whistler closed her eyes for a moment, apparently gathering herself. “We have the stone prison where we kept the Crabnasties. We shall put both Masquerade and Surprise inside with adequate food and water until the time of their punishment is at an end.”
“No!” Masquerade staggered backwards, stumbling into the pony behind her. “Not that, Wind Whistler! Please! Not in the dark!”
“You should have considered the repercussions before you uttered insolence.”
“That’s it,” said Galaxy through clenched teeth. She cried, “All twinkle-eyed ponies who value freedom, rally to me!”
Fizzy, Mimic, and Speedy, the twinkle-eyed unicorns, quickly gathered around Galaxy. Tic Tac Toe, Bright Eyes, Quackers, Sky Rocket, Party Time, and Gingerbread, all of them twinkle-eyed earth ponies, soon joined. More hesitantly, Masquerade, Locket, Sweet Pop, and Whizzer, the twinkle-eyed pegasi, joined as well.
“We’ll form our own group if we have to,” Galaxy said. “After all, we learned to rely on each other down in those mines—”
Wind Whistler marched forward, but the twinkle-eyed ponies clustered close around Galaxy, protecting her.
“It’s a coup, is it?” Wind Whistler said. “A mutiny in my ranks, perpetrated by the leader of a rival group—”
“Stop it!” Megan shouted. She stepped between Wind Whistler and the twinkle-eyed ponies. “None of us are rivals here! We’re friends. We’re getting organized so we can work together, not so we can fight each other!” She looked around at all the ponies. “I think Surprise and Masquerade deserve a warning for now. We don’t need to punish them if they can behave themselves.” She dropped a hand onto Wind Whistler’s neck. “Don’t you agree?”
Wind Whistler said nothing.
“It’s settled, then,” said Megan. “Everyone, let’s get back to work.”
Slowly, with many whispers and glances over their shoulders, the ponies dispersed to their various tasks, leaving Danny standing beside Surprise, who still sat on the ground with her head hanging low. He saw her shoulders heave once, suggesting she had been silently crying all the while and was just now struck with a violent sob.
Frustration coursed his veins. He had wanted to defend her, but after his initial outburst, no words had come to him. He had stood by silently and let others stand up for her.
Quietly, he knelt beside her and touched her withers. Her shoulders heaved again.
“Surprise—”
“Go away,” she cried. “Oh, please, Danny, just go away!” Tears had left spidery, crisscrossing stains in the fur on her cheeks, like cracks twisting through weathered stone.
Something in his stomach shriveled. His hand, as if lifeless, slid from the base of her neck and dropped to the grass. He watched her in silence for several minutes. Her muzzle lowered almost the ground, her eyes squeezed shut, she moved not at all except when her sorrows racked her.
At last, when Danny was sure she intended to give no further acknowledgement of his presence, he stood, looked down at her for a moment longer, and walked away. Without knowing where he was going, he strode downhill, deeper into the valley, toward the high pinnacles of Dream Castle and the twinkling arc of the Rainbow Bridge.
At that moment, he was unaware that he would never see Surprise again.
Stats
Page generated in 0.03 seconds
Total duration
946 users online
131,168 hits today, 2,314,256 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
You're missing a beginning quote on this sentence.
Same here, you're missing a quote before "Rarity".
Excellent chapter. This one makes me wonder when the ponies figured out that their saviors were children.. or if only some of them did. The kind of slow horror of what they were doing, and what they needed to keep doing to survive would be perfect for this kind of work.
I love how you flesh out the characters. I want to hate Wind Whistler, but I can't help but think she's acting out of fear and ignorance than anything else. Maybe a little stunted emotional development, too.
Wait, where are the crystal eyes ponies from again?
Also, I've noticed something. All these kids how go these adventure appear to be from broken homes or orphans, etc. Maybe none of these fantastic places they visited actually existed and it was just mental escapism from their crappy lives?
I really like those story notes at the end; they were quite a help with this chapter! And good work on the characterization with Danny.
You are a fucking boss.
Velocity isn't a straight synonym of speed, actually; it refers to a vector, which describes both speed and direction. Ergo, Wind Whistler comes off as a bit of a poser here for saying angle and velocity; she's really saying angle and angle and speed.
Well clearly Pony land is going to hell in a hand basket fast. in those flashbacks.
Wind Whistler is turning into a ruthless dictator, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Galaxy is likely more than ready to break off and form either the Unicorn kingdom or the Crystal Empire. Megan is barely holding everything together and is fighting with Danny then and now.
Yeah I can see why the moment the rainbow bridge was lost the tribes formed and were at each others throats until Hearth's warming.
Props for remembering all of those G1 races like the Troggles, Crabnasties, and Grundles.
2237615
The Twinkle Eyed Ponies' origin story can be found here. The followup can be found here.
2238138
Geez, ponies back then played for keeps. Did Applejack just kill a guy?
2238306
Eeyup.
Also, if you are interested in seeing Queen Majesty in action, I recommend these three stories.
And for sheer WTF...
(Be sure to note the size of Majesty's book in that one, as well.)
2238063
If they are to become the founders of the Crystal Empire, that makes their descendants' eventual fate at the hooves of Sombra even more horrific.
2237383
Thanks. I'll fix those. Missing quotation marks are the worst.
2237778
This is one of those things that makes me slap my forehead, because of course I knew that but goofed it up anyway when I wrote it. I'll fix that, too.
2237615
Although you've already seen the gory details in the comic, the twinkle-eyed ponies will get their origin story in the next chapter.
Another great chapter, I wonder though if Discord would be making an appearance since I doubt he would pass up this kind of opportunity. I also hope that they will be able to help Megan and Dan.
I'm not sure, but are we supposed to feel sympathy for Megan? Because I don't. At all. At this point I want Twilight and the others to drag her off to Equestria to stand trial for crimes against Ponykind by sentencing stallions to sexual-suppresion and gender-discrimination for thousands of years, for turning a pegasus into a dictator who immediatly started abusing her power, and probably a host of other crimes as well. Megan should be petrified, like Discord. And sent to the moon. She submitted generations of stallions to gender-discrimination because she has daddy-issues. She's a horrible person through and through.
Poor Wind Whistler. I know how much more serious she always was compared to the others, but assuming responsibility for her whole race?
Also, what's the canon on Majesty being killed? I know she appeared in short books after Escape from Midnight Castle, but I was never sure on their continuity.
2238779
No. She is a teen. A normal (albeit badass), flawed person with no political experience who suddenly was in charge of an entire specie, and she honestly guided them the best she could. Megan, unlike Majesty, wanted the ponies to be able to rule themselves (she couldn´t be there forever, after all), and that sadly meant to give green light to the Evils of Free Will: discrimination, corruption, war, greed, etc... (the ponies aren´t perfect themselves, like many on this forum like to believe). Pulling of Megan all the crimes of Ponykind after thousand of years being relegated to "Magog the Legend" is not only unfair, but stupid.
Megan is like Discord? Really?
2238966
I did not say that. I said she should be turned to stone like Discord, because she's an awful person who was the direct cause of horrible things, and she deserves to be punished for her wrong doings.
2239005
I'd really like to see an example where a 12-14 year old would have better judgement. I think this is a case where the good vastly outweighed the bad.You know, the whole thing with teaching the ponies to support themselves, defend themselves, and ultimately not be killed or enslaved forever by the next evil of the week.
2239175
Your forgot: arm ponies that have no clue how to use them, install dictatorship by giving a random pony supreme authority because you say so, condemn all stallions to pretty much sexual slavery for generations because you have daddy issues, be a bitch to your friend and make her unhappy for the rest of her life, be a jackass to your brother because you have daddy issues, sow the seeds of discord that'll lead to the tribe wars and the separation of the crystal empire, and all under the name of "for your own good, lolz!". Not saying the ponies were any smarter for picking someone like her to be their champion, either, but that's another matter entirely.
2239207
I think you might be confused. This story is about Megan, the fallible human. Not Megan, the shining god-empress who can do no wrong. Have fun demonizing a young teenager who is established to be way out of her league.
2239222
So just because she's a teenager, it's okay to commit crimes now? That'll go well in court. "Yes, your honour, my client may have installed sexual slavery for entire generations to come, but she was just a teenager, and should, as of such, bear not a single bit of responsibility for her deeds at all! I mean, she has daddy issues! How can you be so mean to her as to not sympathise with her and call her deeds horrible? She was just a teenager! That immediatly should make everything okay! Hell, she could have murdered someone, and it would have been just fine and dandy, because she was just a teenager when she did it! Have some sympathy and forgive her for everything already, darn it!"
2238779, 2238966
I think both views have merit. This is, indeed, not the omnicompetent and almost infallible Megan we meet in the cartoon show, but someone immature, bitter, and unprepared. The EqD pre-reader who accepted the story warned me that a reader could lose sympathy for Megan as I continued to develop this depiction of her.
My job has an added difficult, too: the reader can see where Megan's choices lead, because the reader has watched "Hearth's Warming Eve," whereas Megan herself cannot foresee the consequences, and probably none of the ponies could, either. The pegasi chose Wind Whistler as their leader, and given her role in the show, she is the natural choice: who could possibly foresee the most level-headed and logical pony becoming power-mad?
I hate to admit it, but what I'm doing here is deservedly called deconstruction. As a rule, I detest deconstruction, even though I usually end up writing it, and I detest it for the same reason I write it: it is a trick used by cheap hacks, and I am a cheap hack. Deconstruction is as simple as picking up someone else's hard-wrought artwork and smearing dung on it. It can be as simple as taking a lovable and admirable character who happens to have little or no canonical backstory and giving her the added attribute of hatred for her father, an unimaginative and cliched attribute that has been wearisomely popular in Western literature ever since Freud made father-hatred fashionable.
Although talented authors have indulged in deconstruction, deconstruction itself requires no talent. Creating is hard work, but destroying is easy. Any oaf can do it.
2238901
Majesty is not killed in canon, but she is never so much as mentioned in the television series. Her death at the hands of Tirek is a fan theory I found floating on the Internet and decided to exploit. Her absence from the show only makes sense: aside from a few filler episodes, the cartoon runs on a monster-of-the-week formula, and Majesty is so powerful that she would have drained the show of all drama had she been present. Megan appears to stand in for Majesty in the cartoon; she acts as a sort of mother to the ponies, but unlike Majesty is mortal, vulnerable, and at times even fallible. Depicting her as Majesty's literal replacement is only natural.
Fantastic chapter. I love this backstory you're creating for Equestria. It makes a scary amount of sense, the way you've tied G1 together with G4.
I was happy to help, though I feel obliged to point out that you misspelled my name (Portmeirion).
2239441
Whoops. Will fix.
The problem is that we're not seeing Megan show any guilt or penance for all the harm she caused with her decisions. No moment of self-recognition that she turned the pegasi into militant brutes, or the earth ponies into slaves, or the stallions into second-class citizens.... and it was all because of her own immaturity and daddy-issues. She still thinks of herself as perfectly in the right, as the only adult in the room... She needs a world-shaking slap in the face, some brutal epiphany where she sees that she was being foolish as well.
Yes, she's sad about all the hard things the ponies went through---and we can excuse the mistakes she made as the sort of mistakes a teenage child would make. But never once has she admitted that what she did to them was wrong. Equestria survived-- but largely in SPITE of what she did, not because of it. She was bitter and angry about having her childhood taken away by her louse of a father, and so she took it out on the ponies... but she still hasn't seen that or admitted it to herself.
2239005 she did what she had to do. "Crimes against ponykind"? seriously?? thanks to her the races survived all those milennia.
"Wind Whistler is acting like a ruthless dictator"? she is just acting like a normal every day military commander! which in contrast with the rest of the ponies and their history might seem like an "evil ruler"
If Megan had (and still has) daddy issues that is absolutely irrelevant, since, at the end of the day what it matters is that they all survived and even managed to "just live"
2239330
It occurs to me that the daddy issue could have easily been something else and worked well enough. For example, if she was just trying to organize the little ponies like horses from our world (at least what a child can understand,anyway) without considering that sapience has fundamentally altered their behaviors it could have still had the same consequences: with only a (relatively) simplistic understanding of horse behavior it wouldn't be too surprising if she believed that stallions are only good for breeding so she would still make the bad call to relegate the big brother ponies to the status of sperm donors and without understanding that the three races are ultimately one she would have still made the same mistake of segregating the ponies according to race. The only thing the daddy issues do better than that explanation is give Megan more sympathy.
2239481
Wait for it . . .
2239557
You just read RealityCheck's post above yours, since I couldn't say it any better myself. To make it even easier for you, I'll quote it here:
Thanks for this post, by the way, RealityCheck. You worded my feelings on the matter better than I did.
2239731 so, what you are saying is that, one mere decision, whose "consequences" could have never been foreseen, and that it worked just fine in a long term, weights more than all those times she saved them all...? ...And she did that she did this only because she is angry at her father...?
you make me
Good leaders are not supposed to be loved by everyone, they are no to please anyone, they just do what is best for the people in their charge. And when you have to choose between survival--or in this case, the survival of an entire especies--or eventual death, there's nothing to regret, you can't regret, for there is no place for regret or remorse on a situation like that.
2239909
No, I'm saying that her actions of turning pegasi into militaristic brutes, stallions into sex slaves, Earth ponies into slave labourers, taking away ponies their free-will and choice and sowing the seeds of discord that lead to the tribe wars and separating of the Crystal Empire, all because she was bitter because of her daddy issues, are damn messed up and just plain wrong. RealityCheck is right, they didn't survive because of what she did, but DESPITE what she did. Even worse that she doesn't even think there was anything wrong with the way she behaved. The fact that you see nothing at all wrong with this, that all the previously mentioned is perfectly okay and even good, now that's pretty sickening. I question your moral standards, good sir. Heck, anybody who read this chapter should realise, her actions aside, Megan was anything but a good leader. She was bitter teenage girl who took out her frustration with her father on the ponies. Yeah, sounds like splendid leader material right there.
Did you mean "pony years" here?
This is yet another good chapter. I don't see any problems with how Megan's been acting - it seems like she's had plenty of second thoughts about what happened in the previous chapters. You don't really see that in this chapter, but that's fine as this is told primarily from Danny's perspective. And yeah, they get into an argument, but they're siblings - I think it all works.
This story has almost convinced me to watch G1 - is it worth it?
2239909, 2239995
I am flattered and humbled that you two have such strong responses to something I wrote, but please don't resort to personal insults. It's just a fan fiction story. It's not worth it.
2240002
I thought that might be confusing. No, I meant human years; it is similar to when we compare a dog's developmental stage to a human's: we say "dog years," so I have Candy saying "human years" when she compares a human's developmental stage to a pony's. I threw that in as a gag, but then realized I had to save it, which is why I have that paragraph earlier in which Megan speculates about the ponies' evolved physiology. I halfway regret that, as I previously had no intention of implying that the different art styles and visual gags in the shows represent literal physical differences between the G1 and G4 ponies.
I agree that Megan expresses regret in Rainbow Dash's and Rarity's chapters, though not as much here because she's mostly off the page. However, her short fuse, and especially her anger at the beginning of this chapter when she finds Danny making a new pony friend, suggests to me a guilty conscience, so she may be closer to the epiphany 2239481 wants than we think she is. (I say "we" because, though I have an idea of where I'm going, I'm writing this on the fly and know no more than the reader does about the characters' interior lives.)
I quite enjoy G1, and in spite of my treatment of it here, I mean it no disrespect. I own a complete DVD set of it except for the movie, and I think it deserves the dedicated Brony's attention. The animation is rough, the writing variable in quality, and the character development minimal. The entire series has not a single good musical number. But it is to my mind an impressive work of imagination nonetheless. It has a sprawl and a sense of adventure that G4 lacks, as well as a greater range in tone. It was made at a time when American children's cartoons still had teeth, so the contrast between the fun-loving rainbow-colored Horses of Purity and the dark and evil Villains of Villainy is much sharper. Also, Megan. I mean, seriously. Megan.
2240089
Ah, that makes sense now. I think there was one too many layers of indirection in there for me to get it - serves me right for trying to read this before having my coffee this morning. I did notice the ponies' evolved physiology bit, and like that line - even if not's a physical difference it's at least fun to comment on.
Oh, I almost forgot. I love that you got a "human kisses pony" scene in there and managed to actually make it work. That's impressive.
2240226
Readers of my blog may recognize Candy Kisses. It was perhaps inevitable that she would get a cameo, and I think the scene wherein she inducts Danny into her arts is my favorite scene in the story thus far.
2239557
Pretty much this. Besides, 12-14 years old girl. Period.
I think merely the numerous times she sneaked out her house and travel to the magic land the loved and hated the most, to take care of the ponies and fight nail and tooth against monsters, witch and demons to give them another day, or promoting diplomace with the rest of cities and countries, is enough for not demonize her.
Bad political decision, some of them based in personal prejudices? Tell me one single real human leader in History who can say otherwise. Obviously Megan never intended her labour-sharing strategies devolved into segregation or dictatorship (the judgement scene prove how disgusted she is about Wind Whistler´s sentence or the bickering between the pony races). Any proof even Celestia was perfect in the beggining?
This said, I agree with RealityCheck that present-Megan needs to realize the negative consequences of her past decisions. In fact, considering the fic direction, It is inevitable, Mr. anderson.
Haven't read the new chapter yet, but it's a measure of how much I've enjoyed the story so far that when I got an email notifying me that it had updated, it brightened my whole day.
So, Wind Whistler had a power trip, huh? It's odd, you'd expect that Ponydom's own Vulcan would be free of that oh-so-human disease of pride. However, looking at how her how-many-times successor Cmdr. Hurricaine conducted himself/herself during the Windgo Crisis it suggests that nothing much changes - pride and stubbornness is a common pegasi personality trait (something even Fluttershy can demonstrate sometimes).
Significantly, with this clash, the myth of pony unity was shattered forever (although Megan didn't know it) and the path to the Tripolar Cold War and the Eternal Winter was set. The sundering can't be far off now - I suspect that Wind Whistler and Galaxy will probably be butting heads for the rest of their respective terms of office and that doesn't make for good decision-making. Certainly, the twinkle-eyed ponies will never trust Wind Whistler's decision-making again. History shows that it wasn't until true neutrals, the alicorns, took the throne in the aftermath of Discord's reign (that probably would have made Tirac seem like a whimsical eccentric by comparison) that the ponies were ever united again.
Megan, as ever, was trying to do the right thing. As ever, the road to hell is too often paved with good intentions. If I were her, I would have begged Wind Whistler to stand down - to lose her temper like that might mean she is unfit for command.
2239481
I think you might have missed the opening of the chapter where Megan muses that she believes the modern Equestria is something that occurred in spite of her. She's already coming to realise that things went horrifically wrong and it wasn't just after her last visit either.
I think we're about to learn just how Megan, Daniel and Molly were separated from their little ponies for so long.
I also think that, in the final irony, it will now fall to the ponies to save Megan as she saved their ancestors. She is all broken inside and she needs to be able to heal, something that her circumstances don't allow and for which her oh-so-human pride and pain will not let her ask.
2238428
Ouch, you've got a point.
I see we might have the beginnings of the crystal empire here, wonder what else will happen? Seaponies leave and live with their Merpony cousins? Flutterponies cursed into changelings?
Found a typo.
"With a loud thud, Pinkie’s from hooves"
FRONT hooves.
2242001
In horsemanship terms, the from hooves refer to those hooves that are moving toward the viewer . . .
No, okay, it's a typo. I've fixed it. Thanks.
Later, Rarity becomes Fred.
2242047
Hmm . . . you'll have to explain this one to me.
2242056 Actually, I meant George. I must have mixed that up due to Harry Potter.
Regardless, that is an event from the second issue of the comic. A troll gets some pony dolls made by Rarity in the likeness of her and her friends in exchange for their freedom, and the enthusiastic Troll calls the bearing her image George. She was less than pleased.
2242083
Was that the classic, ""I will love him, and hug him, and squeeze him, and I will call him George." gag? :D
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2JlVqfC8-UI#t=23s]
2242237 Pretty much. The troll also has a rubix cube, an 8 ball, and Optimus Prime made out of rocks. Think the comic might be telling us something?
2242295
Yeah, it's been stuck under a bridge since 1986.
2240089 I have to agree on the quality of G1. Believe me, when you were a kid watching that very first MLP special on TV and you saw the dragons, Tirek, and "BEHOLD THE POWER OF DARKNESS!", you were glued to the screen!
I never did know about the little kissing ponies before, though! Maybe they were ancestors of Rarity?
That said, and it's something I never even noticed until now -- we saw poor Heart Throb's heartbreak over Prince Charming in a past chapter. That said, if I recall properly she DID have a foal in-show after meeting Charming but before the stallions returned. And there were male humans and other beings near Paradise Valley... Maybe this train of thought has gone long enough.
This is a very good story!