Assorted dribblings of my brain that are under 1000 words. Kind of like mental gravy, but possibly less tasty.
Rated T for excessive weirdness and future-proofing. Named because it seemed clever at the time never seemed clever at all but I made myself promise to use it anyway.
Here it is: a place for me to dump anything I write that's too short to be posted on its own. Maybe having this will get me to actually do that more often. (Then again, last time I set out to write something super short, "super short" turned out to be 3406 words.)
No descriptions of the individual stories will be provided; I'd prefer that the people who aren't going to read these not read them without preconceptions. Just assume that they're all kind of dumb, but I kind of like them anyway.
Once upon a time, in the distant past when cutie marks had not yet been invented and wub zones were used only for storing food, a filly was born with a magic zapper and a pair of flutter-flappers. Her parents gazed upon her (though the midwife did not, since she had lost her pony peepers to a wolf attack in her youth) and, wrinkling their wiffermuzzles in confusion, asked each other what to make of this. So caught up were they in their debate that they did not notice when their filly made her first attempt to stand. Using her clippity-cloppers (and wiggling her parasprite whip considerably in a foalish show of concentration), she levered herself up onto her tushie, but when she tried to get her tree buckers underneath herself, all she managed was to knock herself over. When she fell, her magic zapper struck the ground, and the still-not-fully-hardened bone chipped. The only possible response to this, of course was to cry, and soon tears were streaming liberally from her pony peepers and the most pitiful of sounds were coming out of her wiffermuzzle. But her parents still had flippity-floppers only for their own debate, so she began to thrash her parasprite whip around and bang on the ground with her clippity-cloppers and her tree buckers. This finally got her mother’s attention, and she instinctually went to comfort her daughter, whose crying slowed as she latched onto her mother’s hug zone.
“Shh, shh, don’t cry, little one,” her mother crooned. “Mommy’s here now, so wipe those tears from your pony peepers.”
“Te-a,” the filly tried to imitate.
“Did you hear that?” her mother excitedly whispered while continuing to soothingly stroke her filly’s back between her flutter-flappers. “Her first word. I think we should call her Tia.”
Once upon a time in Chrysalis’s new hive, a grub was hatched who was rather unique. It (for changelings do not earn a gender until adulthood) was quite affectionate towards Chrysalis, and would go to great lengths to get close to her, and then coo contentedly until she moved away. Normally Chrysalis would have killed such an oddity without a second thought to ensure she didn’t end up with another Thorax on her hooves, but this grub was also singularly vicious. On the very day it hatched, it killed four other grubs and wounded a nursery attendant worker that got between it and Chrysalis. For lack of a better word, Chrysalis was proud of this grub’s killer instinct, and she couldn’t bear to get rid of it.
As the grub went through its childhood molts it grew ever more affectionate towards Chrysalis and ever more hostile towards everything else. Chrysalis was forced to separate the grub from the rest of the hive to avoid permanent injury to productive members of the hive, and she had to visit it every hour to give the walls of its room time to heal from the mindless rage it exhibited whenever she was away. It began impacting her ability to rule, but she was too blinded by visions of it brutally destroying her enemies to see that it was a liability.
Eventually the grub entered its pupal stage, and even though this freed Chrysalis of the obligation to visit and calm it, she spent more time than ever in its room, watching over its metamorphosis. It is rare for changelings to die as pupae absent outside interference, but it is not unheard of, and she worried that her precious future warrior might be one of the rare cases. So day after day she sat beside the cocoon, monitoring for vital signs as best she could and waiting for the changeling within to emerge.
She was dozing when the cocoon began to split, but the sound of the pupal covering cracking woke her. Eagerly she watched as the changeling within broke open an exit, and once the hole was large enough she reached in with both front legs to help it get out. But in this moment, she was so happy to see it that her legs shared their love and transformed, blowing her clear off of them.
Despite her own injury, all she could think about was whether the explosion had hurt her favorite child. Laboriously, she crawled across the room to where the young changeling lay unmoving. As she drew near, it raised its head, and for a moment she was filled with relief; but then it hissed at her just as it used to hiss at the rest of the hive. Shocked, she put up a magic shield just as it attacked; it tried a few times to break through, but it couldn’t stand up to a queen’s magic. It hissed one last time in frustration, then grabbed the transformed legs, broke through an area where the wall had been weakened by the explosion, and flew away. Just before it disappeared into the distance, she thought she could hear it cooing.
And from that day on, Chrysalis never again allowed herself to play favorites. The next time a grub impressed her she killed it on the spot, just to be sure.
Jackpot had been expecting his wife to be happy to see him. She’d give him a kiss, welcoming him back from his latest tour, and maybe his daughter would be waiting for him too, never mind that it was past her bedtime, hoping to hear stories about being a magician on the road or look at the props for his newest tricks. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for the icy cold reception he was actually getting. “Isn’t that next week? The 23rd?”
“It was the 13th. That’s why your tour was supposed to end on the 11th.”
“The 13th?” Jackpot repeated, puzzled. “Are you sure it’s not the 23rd?”
“Yes I’m sure!” Embarrassed by her outburst, she looked at Trixie’s door, but seeing no sign that she had woken Trixie, she continued in a more controlled tone. “Unlike you, I remember my daughter’s birthday, because unlike you I was there.”
“Hey!” Jackpot tried to shout his objections in a hushed tone. “It’s not my fault that she came early! I was supposed to have plenty of time to get back from, um . . . ”
“You don’t remember where you were, do you? Can you even tell me how many years ago it was?”
“Um . . . ” He tapped out a mental timeline on the floor. “Six years?”
“Nine!” The shouting was getting less hushed. “Trixie turned nine four days ago, which you would know if you had been there because that’s what it said on the balloon! But instead you were out doing magic, and apparently too busy to even call and tell us that you wouldn’t be home.”
“I wanted to call, but you know there’s a time difference! So I sent a letter instead.”
“It’s only two hours! You can escape from chains underwater but somehow a two-hour time difference is an obstacle you can’t figure out!”
Lying in her bed, Trixie couldn’t help but listen to her parents arguing. She wished she hadn’t shown she was sad when her dad wasn’t home for her birthday; it was disappointing, of course, but she hadn’t meant to make her parents fight over it. If she hadn’t gotten her hopes up that she was going to see him on that specific day, this wouldn’t be happening.
In years to come, she would remember this as the beginning of the end of her parents’ marriage.