To Serve Bronies

by Fuzzy Necromancer

Chapter 46

Lyra tottered towards the sound of water, on all fours now, shivering a little as the first human she’d ever seen talked to her like an old friend.

She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d expected in terms of human personality. The legends were full of contradictions. She guessed they might be abrasive and dominance-oriented, like adolescent dragons, or low-key and friendly like Earth Ponies. This one…well, he talked nice, he was as welcoming and charming as Pinkie Pie or Fleur De Lis, but he felt…strange. Every time he looked at her it was like another set of eyes gazed out from behind him. Every time he talked, no matter how inoffensive the words, he seemed to be saying something else that she couldn’t hear.

“You, I mean, your show, the show with ponies in it, it’s really brought us together,” Max said brightly.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Lyra said. “I don’t think searching for two-legged, I mean, your people, the legends, they haven’t really helped me much with other ponies.” She missed the times in Human Club (okay, it was her, Rarity, and Still Waters under a blanket suspended from a bush), the theories, the legends, speculating about how such a bizzare species ever came to exist, but they’d drifted apart. She knew her interest was mostly a tolerated quirk, but something that kept her apart from the herd.

“Anything else you want to know about Bronies?”

Lyra sighed. She wasn’t interested in all the things humans thought about ponies. She was a pony. She lived with ponies all the time. He’d answered a lot of her broad strokes questions about government, religion, and ecology (imagine living in a planet-sized Everfree Forest), but he was curiously reticent about his personal life.

“How do you fix nitrogen into the soil if you don’t have Earth Ponies or Pegasi?” It was something that bothered her about this “natural” world. The water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, patterns of heat and light so the planet didn’t cook or freeze, it all seemed way too complex to just happen by itself. Then again, from what he complained about, some of it was already breaking.

Max the human frowned. “I think I learned something about that in my Sophmore science class.”

Lyra nodded. “And?”

He shrugged, a very expressive gesture on a biped. How did they balance without any tails? “Oh, I don’t remember the details. I just like, learned about it once.”

Lyra pushed aside some bracken and lead him down what he hoped was a deer path, this time. “So, I understand a lot of these weird words you use, but what is ‘jailbait’? Is that, like, political entrapment?”

Max laughed. “Sort of like that. It’s not important right now.” He looked around and shivered. “Are there any Timber Wolves or Dragons here? Have you ever seen a cockatrice?”

“They shouldn’t be in this part of the woods, but it’s still a good idea to keep your eyes peeled,” Lyra said. “I’ve got at least one teleport spell saved up for emergencies but I’d prefer not to use it.” She didn’t admit that she had no idea if it would actually work with all the background interference.

Warm, moist digits dug into the fur on her back. Lyra tensed up.

“It must be nice to have fur,” Max said, with a broad, tooth-exposing smile. “I bet you don’t get cold on lonely nights.”

Parts of Lyra’s ancient equine brain where flashing red, but she had no idea what threat a clawless, blunt-toothed, unarmed, non-magical human could pose here and now. Anyway, he’d been friendly to her so far. Somehow it seemed rude to ask him to let go of her, especially when he was so scared and alone.

“So what does jailbait mean?” she asked, patting him with her tail in case that might reassure him.

“What about Ursa Minors? Do they live here?”

#

“Oh…my…blueberry-muffin-bucking-ass-blood seven-severed-deep-fried-dicks, holy-mother-of-Celestia-mother-bucking-Nightmare-Moon’s-flank-on-fire, gosh.” Rainbow Dash moaned.

“Do you need another coffee, or something stronger?” The three-armed human asked. The other human’s mouth was hanging open.

Rainbow struggled not to take off. “Yes. I mean, no. I just, I need to go into my room for a bit. Alone. Don’t write any fandom fiction or walk off any clouds while I’m away.”

She fluttered in a circle around the room, brushing feathers against the walls. She felt too hot and too cold at the same time. Twilight Sparkle is your friend. So is Applejack. So is Fluttershy. So who is your best friend then?

“Don’t make me do this, don’t make me do this, don’t make me do this,” she whimpered.

The noise outside her window broke through the babble and the pounding of her own air bladder.

There were a lot of pointy horns underneath her cloud, some of them glowing.

There was also a dust cloud on the horizon, with a few trebuchets sticking out of it.

This is ridiculous! We’re ponies for Celestia’s sake, not minotaurs or dragons or animals.

“Oh my Celestia-bucking goooosh,” she whimpered.

Fights between friends happened. They happened a lot, especially around her, for some reason. She’d dealt with spats between her friends before, and they always found a way to patch things up, maybe after a bit of dark magic got out of control or something destroyed Applejack’s barn or after a really big song, but still, they sorted it out. That’s what good friends did. She’d find some kind of middle ground or compromise, and then everyone could get along again, and things would go back to normal.

Somehow, she’d find a way to keep both of her Pinkie Promises and she wouldn’t have that disappointed face glowering at her out of the bathroom mirror.

Somehow. Definitely. Certainly. No problem. She could sort it all out, and maybe once Fluttershy stopped being such a pain in the flank she’d sort things out with Fluttershy too.

Everyone had panicked when Zecorah came into town, and they’d solved that problem, and now they were friends. Sure, that had been rabid xenophobia she’d participated in, just because somepony had stripes instead of a solid color, and Zecorah was still an equine ungulate from their own world, but the same friendship lessons had to apply here, right?

Dash squeezed out through her window and ignored the trembling that made it feel like parasprites had nested under her skin. No problem. She would solve this friendship problem and later they would all laugh and write a letter about it to Princess Celestia. She could do this, because she was Rainbow Dash, and she was the best, and she was awesome, and she definitely wasn’t hurt and angry that Fluttershy had turned against her and afraid that Applejack and all her Earth Pony friends would do the same thing. She certainly wasn’t confused, horrified, and a bit darkly fascinated by learning that her friends Twilight and Rarity wanted to eat the still-living flesh of walking, talking, creatures that used tools and told each other stories about her adventures and the adventures of her friends and were as trusting and vulnerable as a newborn foal. Nope, not at all. And she definitely hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew by taking two creatures from another world under her wing and making conflicting promises to friends she’d faced life-or-death threats with. Nope. Not in the least! She was cool and calm and collected.

“Cool as a cucumber, that’s me! Rainbow Dash! I’m awesome and c-cool is my middle name,” she muttered into the icy downdrafts. She didn’t remember anypony scheduling a cold front here and now, but it was fine. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. She absolutely, positively wasn’t scared or confused. She still knew and cared about all her friends and they all still loved her, even Fluttershy, and she wasn’t afraid that things were going to go to Tartarus in a tail-basket as soon as she confronted what looked just a bit like an army of well-armed Earth Ponies or a pack, that is, a heard of drooling, glowing-horned unicorns.

“I’m not nervous, you’re nervous!” she shouted at nopony in particular. She’d talk with Twilight Sparkle first. Twilight always had a sensible, calm, reasonable approach, and she wasn’t as stubborn as Applejack could be.

“N-no problem,” she repeated.

Comments

[bonberjean]

I'm pretty sure Pinkie can forgive you for making 2 conflicting promises, well make a life insurance just in case.

[JDunk1971]

IT LIIIIVES!

Dashie is about to find out that her 'calm, level-headed' unicorn friend has already gone right over the Lesson Zero cliff and is at the lead of the pack of glowy-horned drooling unicorns.