Piecing Things Together
Twilight woke up feeling like scum of the earth. As she got up from her bed, she tripped over her tail, and tumbled onto the wooden floor underneath her. Disheveled mane ruined even further beyond repair. Dust whooshed up around her in plumes, and already, she began to regret the entirety of her existence, only three seconds after waking up.
Groggily, she stumbled with her lead feet, trying to fight the dehydration that sapped at her energy, which occasionally made her totter from its weak spells. She made it to the bathroom and picked up her toothbrush. Then dropped it into the grimy moldy sink that she hadn't bothered to clean up for the past six months.
The spotted stained mirror reflected her horrible morning visage, and Twilight grimaced at the sight of it. She tried to look away, but occasionally had to catch a glimpse of herself in the corner of her eye, as she rubbed the disgusting toothbrush bristles across her teeth in efficient strokes.
It what's she deserved really, for cracking into those romance stories late at night. Fraught with the emotional baggage that liked to follow her from her work to her home life, since all of Equestria really did depend on her.
In a way, as much as they forced her into the sleeping routine of an insomniac, they also helped her maintain her cracking sanity under the constant onslaught of eager ponies expecting the best from the princess.
Or in some cases, dealing with the ponies that no longer held respect for her, after finding out that she really was as fallible as the rest. That the fact she was a princess didn't immediately give her infinite resolve and omniscience do deal with all the crap she had to deal with on a daily basis.
However, today was her weekend, and she would live it to the fullest. She'd been put on palatial probation after losing her head around a noble. Letting slip to them that their behavior really did a lot to make her peeved.
She felt a bit of shame that she'd been placed on probation, sure, but it also served as a kind of relief to know that she didn't have to hear the whining voice of Blueblood for another three days. With a smirk of satisfaction, Twilight realized that the other princesses likely didn't harbor much resentment toward her. They broke the news to her matter of factly, with a wink or two added, as if to indicate that hadn't intended it to be a punishment.
They were probably just relieved they could push off all the unsavory tasks onto the newer princess, which was how things always went for Twilight every time she worked on something new, or worked in a new country.
You just had to grin and bear it until another poor sap came along to take your place.
Twilight spit the toothpaste out of her mouth and rinsed.
Then stared at her unkempt face and mane. Kind of proud that she had these moments. That she didn't have to worry about the paparazzi whispering sweet nothings from her closet. Looking for scandalous side shots to put on their Pony Pony Pony magazine cover. Which was something she'd had to deal with her first few weeks in the office.
With a bit more spring to her step, and mental sanity strengthening, she barreled her way into the kitchen, and began simultaneously making pancakes, eggs, and bacon.
The lights in her house flickered for a moment, but the magical energy powering everything managed to stabilize under the strain of all the stove tops set to 'High'.
She hummed a little ditty to herself. Then said all kinds of nasty curse words, relishing in every rancid syllable. It felt so good.
Finally, she contented herself with staring at the sizzling bacon, falling into a kind of meditative stupor. She ceased to be a pony, and imagined herself as that sizzling piece of meat in the pan. Smacking, crackling, popping hot grease everywhere. Releasing the pressure built up in the fat, ready to explode.
Then she blinked and came to again. Flipped a pancake.
This time, she imagined herself as the over easy eggs. Viscous liquid that threatened to lose its grip and get everywhere, slowly congealing into something spongy and stable, chemical bonds formed to add coherency to the mess. Twilight's brain felt the same.
Once again, she flipped a pancake. The uncooked side sizzled into the pan.
Just as her breakfast came together, so did her thoughts. She found that she could focus on everything more clearly. Her short term goals coalesced in her mind and she immediately felt the agency necessary to do stuff, rather than just sit around and read all day. Which she used to have a problem with.
And the first thing on her mental list of things to do, was write the perfect story.
She didn't know how to do it yet, or what steps to even take to find out, but it was something she dreamed of doing since she was a filly. Always reading things from other ponies, she wanted to contribute to this hidden discussion that only ever happened behind closed doors or among small groups of like-minded individuals. She wanted to be the one that influenced other ponies for a change, since she'd grown up cramming her brain with all the interesting facts and tidbits other ponies had to offer.
But she always struggled with something every time she tried to write. No matter how long she thought about it, she couldn't think of an idea worth expressing to other ponies. Yes, she had written non-fiction in the past, but that only served to further purposes of her study in academia. What she wanted to accomplish felt dearer to her heart. She wanted to make ponies live her life, and show them what it meant to be her. Guide them through the issues that she experienced so that they would be more equipped to handle things on their own.
Of course, all these feelings were direct results of her need to influence something. It didn't matter what or why she wrote. All that mattered was that she'd get to establish the same sense of communication she'd felt as a filly hidden in her room, away from her parents, reading and trying to escape the world.
Every time she tried to come up with an idea that would accomplish these things, she fell short. Nothing felt good enough, and it felt maddening that no idea could truly represent what it was she wanted to put into writing form. Heroes were too fake, thrillers laughable, psychological fiction too unnecessarily obscure, slice of life stories too aimless. Nothing seemed to fit. Nothing felt new enough to grab the attention of lonely fillies like herself, to make them care about what she had to say.
But, regardless of whether or not she could actually come up with something worth reading, she decided to write.
After tidying herself up a bit, she dragged a stool to her desk, grabbed a newly sealed ink jar, plucked a feather from her wings, and punctured the seal with the feather to dip into the ink below. She wrote frantically, aware that moments like these were rare, and that she rarely had the confidence to produce fiction like this.
It almost felt as if the current version of Twilight knew that she'd be eventually replaced with one that felt the pressures of her duties as a princess. Driven more by her sense of responsibility, than the need to express herself to those that may very well need it the most.
Her breath subdued, but body tense, this is what Twilight wrote.
It's only when you're neck deep into something that you start to regret what you've gotten yourself involved in.
Hey, my name's Jeff, and I'm a vaguely bipedal blob of amorphous flesh. My skin is purple, as are all the other creatures of my race, and I don't particularly take to well to other species. Seeing as they tend to look less like a blob, and have the sparkling visage of one of those smooth pebbles worn down by our mercury rivers. Call it jealously if you will, but I'm more inclined to think of it as disgust.
The more blobby something is, the better.
At the moment, I'm sitting in a diplomacy meeting with a bunch of the rock golumn elite.
It's bad enough that their bodies are tough and hard, but the fact that they like to chisel their own features out is unthinkable!
Imagine if I did that do my pristine amalgamation of flesh blobs. I'd die!
It was also clear, from the smug smiles that they had chiseled out onto their features that they had the personality of apathetic egotistical nobles. On our planet, the ruling class didn't get into power that way. They gained popularity through their emotional sensitivity, as well as awareness of the population's needs and wants.
These golumns seemed to have the attitude of engorge or be-engorged, with no room for compromise in the middle. We'd have to be careful to work them into a state of erudition. Do our best to rough out their edges a bit so that they'd be easier to work with.
Twilight scrapped that piece of the story. Already, she felt her resolve wearing down. It all just seemed so pointless, and whatever it was that she had vomited on that piece of paper was entirely see-through. Ponies reading it, knowing that the Princess of Friendship had written it would know that she was just complaining about her interaction with the nobles. She would have to make things more obscure.
A green-blue neon blur of motion crashed through the iron-cast awning set up in the marketplace of Spathatten square.
Servomotors clicked into place, repairing the damage done by the sudden jerk of acceleration applied to the poor metal pony. Little clicking sounds sent sparks through the shivering creaking form, as systems booted up again. Desperately trying to regain atononymity before the government thrashers found her and tore her to pieces.
A loud popping noise drew the thrashers to her location just as her eyes blinked on. In the space of a few microseconds, the thrashers were on her, but she'd already ducked, and they rushed past her at supersonic speeds before finally crashing into an abandoned apartment complex. Stripped mattresses and peeling plaster fell down in a tsunami of dust, but the metal robot did not cough, since she had no need to breathe.
A loud whine came from the rubble of the destroyed building, and she could tell that they'd only gotten pissed off.
A tiny click emanated from the smoke, and the metal pony caught it on her hypersensitive auditory feedback organs. Aware that each of the drones had cut the fuses on their mini-atomic fuel reactors.
It took 2.314 seconds for their reactors to escalate into nuclear destabilization, and she'd already wasted .2 seconds trying to process what to do.
She set her flight path for 45° above ground level, and launched herself into subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic, then extrasonic speeds. Their fuel reactors detonated behind her, and already the bright light threatened to envelop her, explosions speeds that far outmatched anything a pony could ever hope to achieve in this lifetime.
Thankfully though, she'd gained the necessary distance to just barely make it out of the explosion that threatened to vaporize her. The metal caps on the backs of her hooves melted off, and she berated herself for taking so long to figure out what to do.
Then she braced herself for the inevitable airburst that would tear off her wings, and send her plummeting into Celestia knows where.
Snap!
She instinctively hissed as her wings were ripped from her body, only feeling vague pain at the two points of her back that now lacked appendages. She didn't have time to think about the phantom wings she could still flex with her mind as she went into a tailspin, out of control, confused and scared, eyes bright with terrified excitement.
Twilight slammed her hoof on the desk and then crumpled up another sheet of paper, throwing it into the living room behind her.
Too much jargon, and it didn't feel like a part of the setting she wanted to create. Already, she didn't know where to take the story. The action scene felt intense, but it was only that. It didn't feel like a part of some new and unique world, didn't seem to serve a purpose. Nothing about what she wrote felt like it had a deeper meaning to it, besides the fact that occasionally, life made it very difficult to keep things under control.
She tried again, but this time, she vowed to write something longer.
There existed a being that had no body. No senses in which to interact with the world. Only charred husks of extremities that used to feel, used to alter the environment around it.
Through years of negligence, it forgot how to communicate with the world, and went through a crisis of identity. Not sure it could reasonably see itself as existing without others there to reinforce that idea.
However, as the months passed, it grew to accept how things were, and after a year, actually kind of preferred it that way.
It was just him, and him.
Which felt nice because he didn't have to worry about defending his point of view from other ponies. He didn't have to worry about losing who he was to the scrupulous glares of the masses. He could let his sexuality roam free in his mind, and for once, no longer felt any pressure.
For a while, he let his mind entertain taboo ideas, excited by the fact that he could think them. As well as express them to the only entity he knew. Himself.
He went from taboo ideas, to the unconventional, and considered what it would have been like to live from the perspective of a serial killer, or a dictator. He tried to alter his own way of thinking to truly experience it. Tried to simulate the rush of blood to his brain after every kill, tried to match the excitement felt as he led countless ponies to pursue the goals that only he got to decide.
But soon, he got bored of those things too, and allowed himself to fall into listlessness. Which eventually evolved into his own form of meditation.
He'd forgotten a long time ago, what things looked like, what they felt like, how to interact with other ponies. But one thing he hadn't forgotten was the peace of silence. And he had a near infinite supply of it here.
Using it, he could gain control of himself, guide his emotions however he felt. He'd be able to flesh out the facts of his past life he'd long forgotten, able to weave wonderful stories using the details garnered from his own memory.
So he meditated, in the hopes that one day, he would find himself and write a story.
But after ten years of this, something interrupted him.
Something probed at him, as if poking with a stick. He tried to ignore it, but could not help but flinch on occasion.
The probing grew in intensity, driven on by the fact that he was flinching. It continued until he couldn't take it any longer, and he lashed out however he could.
Of course, since he'd forgotten how to interact with the outside world, nothing happened, and the poking continued.
It kept going and going until he screamed in agony, but then it stopped.
He felt a warm glow somewhere, but he'd forgotten the locations of his body.
Then, for the first time in years, new information began to invade his privacy. Voices.
“Stop it! No more poking. I was only doing that to see if it increased his heart rate.”
“But daddy. I like poking him!”
“I'm going to ask you to leave if you don't listen to me.”
“Alriiiight.”
The forgotten pony violently rejected what was happening to him. He did not want this. He only wanted to create stories in the past. He wanted to stay the king of his own domain.
“Stand back Bright Light, I'm going to give it sight.”
Light flooded the ponies vision, and for a while, he could only see searing white light.
He couldn't make it stop.
He couldn't make it stop.
Voices and light were assaulting him, and he could already feel the last ten years of his work disappearing. Everything in him wanted to scream but he couldn't. He could only entertain thoughts of his body in grimy chains, forced to behold horrors he'd forgotten long ago. Whispers of a time long ago coming back to haunt him. Foreshadowing the return of a new and violent age.
“Repairing motor control.”
This time, the forgotten pony had the ability to lash out, and he did, accidentally striking the doctor on the head.
The doctor didn't pass out, but he staggered, cradling himself, dragging his daughter behind him. “Stupid, stupid,” he mumbled. It was clear he should've thought this through better.
The forgotten pony found his voice and he wailed and wailed. Mourning the loss of what he'd worked on for ten years. Never again to be retrieved because of all these senses invading him without his permission. Sensory experiences re-animated him, forced him out of the meditative stupor he wanted to remain in.
The forgotten pony punched the bed, ripped the sheets, jumped off the bed, and promptly knocked himself out.
Twilight moved her hoof to the sheet up paper, already feeling kind of uncomfortable about what she'd just written. There were a lot of problems with this one. It needed a proper ending for starters, and a lot of the story was spent doing nothing really. That had been the purpose of the story, actually, to explore how a pony might act in the face of nothing.
But Twilight didn't have these experiences, and she didn't know how a pony would really react under those circumstances. She could only guess at it and hope for the best.
Other ponies would no doubt decry her for trying to write about something that she had no experience with. What right did she have to insert her own feelings over ponies that might actually have comatose relatives?
Wouldn't they hate her? No doubt especially because she depicted them as not wanting to come back. Foals would read this, and they might get the wrong idea.
She sighed, started to crumple up the piece of paper, but couldn't get herself to throw it away.
Her intention had been to influence others. Even if the story made foals cry, made ponies cry out against her, or grew to be generally accepted, it would influence. Provided that she let it get exposure.
She could crumple up the piece of paper now, and let her ideas die in obscurity. She could spend the rest of her life making stories and discarding them, never getting feedback, too afraid to offend or receive criticism.
Or she could publish it.
Hearing that a pony of Twilight's stature actually wrote fiction sent a few publishing companies into a fritz. They fought each other, offering exponentially increasing bit-per-book prices, until Twilight gave up and just accepted the most recent offer.
This did not go down well for the other publishing company, and they stared from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity to poach Twilight's fiction for themselves.
She didn't edit her story beyond what she'd written. She didn't care.
She just wanted to see what happened. If anything happened.
It didn't take very long. B journalists looking for something more interesting than golf drama picked it up after the publishing company's numerous advertising efforts. It was expected that this would happen, and it was also expected that they would try to sensationalize it.
What Twilight didn't expect was that they praised it.
Headlines filled the street of Twilight's writing habits, and ponies everywhere were demanding that some sort of business get set up to allow story requests.
Twilight didn't have the time to handle individual ponies' story requests, but it tickled her pink to know that so many ponies wanted her work. To know that she actually had fans! That if she actually met some of them, she could really make a pony's day.
However, with all this excitement, she also felt a large amount of disappointment.
It seemed that ponies didn't really care about what she wrote, more that it was the Princess of Friendship that had written it.
As long as it didn't hate on a specific race of ponies, or break any other social taboos, she'd sell well regardless. Two days was all it took to get over herself and realize that her writing wasn't getting treated for what it was.
Even the highest nobility, known for their critical tastes, ruffled through the slop her story offered, pulling out the nuggets of half-worth everywhere they could find them.
Twilight realized she couldn't succeed as a writer for the rest of her life.
She could only write for her friends, and most of them didn't even like reading.
She could only hope that as she continued to push her stories out to the public, a select few would understand the messages she left hidden inside her stories. That these select few would forget about the fact that she was a princess and actually read her words for what they were.
And they were allowed to hate it. She wanted them to hate it, so long as it meant they took the story seriously.
Somewhere out there, a pony like her would understand.
At least one pony.
Otherwise, it was all for nothing.