It's a beautiful spring day in Ponyville, the kind of day where you wouldn't expect to stumble upon a murder scene.
It's a beautiful spring day in Ponyville, the kind of day where the clouds look like fluffy sheep (and the sheep look like ground-clouds), the kind of day for a pony to be out and about. It's not the kind of day to come upon a grisly murder scene, but that's how Rarity's day is going so far.
Who could have done such a thing?
Trigger Warning: No pre-readers. Are you sure you want to read this? Are you really sure? Additional Characters (subject to change): Chell, Sparkler, Dinky Hooves, Kit Kat, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle
It was also a beautiful spring day near Ponyville. (That’s how geography and weather patterns work.)
Ponies were taking advantage of the beautiful spring weather to do the kinds of things one would expect ponies to do. Picnics, long walks, enjoying the park, lying on their backs and looking up at the clouds and identifying the shapes that the clouds made—something more tangible than constellations, and yet in Equestria also less random, since a cloud that looks like a sheep might have been made to look like a sheep by a pegasus who really likes sheep but she can’t get a loan from the bank to buy a sheep farm, or at least a small flock of sheep—even one sheep (and you’d think that there’d be a separate term for one sheep versus many sheep, but language is weird that way) because she’s a pegaus and everypony knows that only earth ponies are cut out to be farmers. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business: she’s not economically viable, so she makes clouds that look like sheep and every day at the weather factory she’s got a brave smile on her face but really she dies a little more inside every day she’s making clouds and not herding sheep and each and every cloud she makes is shaped like a sheep. A nuanced shepherd would be able to identify different breeds of sheep because if her calling wasn’t as a shepherd it would’ve been as an artist and yet this detail is lost to ponies on the ground. All I’m saying is that it’s not a perfect system and her cutie mark is clearly a sheep, not a cloud and anypony who says otherwise is wrong.1
🐑
Spring was in the air, love might have been blossoming amongst the ponies visiting one of the many parks the Ponyville Tourism Board promotes (one of which has not yet suffered a monster attack; depending on who they’re trying to attract it’s either played up as being safe from monsters, or due for an attack at any time), and we don’t really care about any of that. That's all just scene-setting.
One particular pony was using the fresh spring air and the relatively balmy climate to her advantage, not packed for a picnic but instead packed for an expedition. Fashionable saddlebags, fashionable cart, fashionable pickaxe, it’s none other than Ponyville’s most swank fashionista, Rarity. And while it’s true that gems care not for seasons, it’s a lot nicer to pick them out of the ground when the weather is pleasant.
Were she the kind of pony who had a gem cutie mark, she might WERE SHE THE KIND OF PONY WHO TOOK HER CUTIE MARK LITERALLY she would of course be gem-finding in all kinds of weather but in her opinion her cutie mark meant making fashionable dresses and dress accessories. Did I mention it wasn’t a perfect system? ‘Cause it ain’t.
Anyway, Rarity had her gem-finding spell and a pickaxe and a light lunch in case she got hungry ‘cause she was too prim and proper to just nom on the flora like any earth pony might, and since she was multi-talented and multi-tasking, she also was keeping an open mind for things that might influence her to come up with a late Spring fashion lineup or an early Summer Fashion lineup—or Autumn, even, ‘cause let’s be honest there’s some lead time required and everybody knows that Spring is the same as Autumn except that they’re reversed (unlike Summer and Winter, which are clearly opposite; Rarity was a successful fashionista since she understood that making a new Summer lineup required her to be inspired by winter and then do the opposite [or sometimes the same, just to mix things up, keep ponies guessing, etc.]).
Rarity isn’t a pony given to whistling jaunty tunes, or—Celestia forbid—actually singing popular music. Wasn’t ladylike, at least in her opinion, certainly not out in public. Unless she were singing with the Ponytones, of course.
But you can imagine that she might have been, as she trotted to her favorite getting spot, a place where the gems seemed to spring up out of the ground. It was a place of good memories, and a few that weren’t so great but the thing with memories is sometimes you had to have a few bad ones with the good ones, that’s just life.
One thing it was not—or, more specifically, had not been until just now—a crime scene.
Technically, I suppose, a crime scene is a crime scene the moment the crime is committed . . . at that scene. Even if it isn’t discovered until some time later.
Rarity had been looking for gems; what she found instead was the grisly remains of a murder. The victim had been worked over with a pickaxe, very similar (at first glance) to the pickaxe that she, herself, was carrying. The very pickaxe with which she had intended to chip away at rocks to discover hidden treasure within.
That did not occur to the fashionista/miner when she stumbled upon the scene, of course. Nor would it occur to anypony with a shiny conscience; their first thought would be to notify the appropriate legal authority.
Or, in the case of our fantastic fashionista, faint.
She did not. For one, when she’s not playing a character, Rarity is tough as nails and the first to throw a hoof in a fight. Furthermore, there was no point in fainting without witnesses, what was she going to do, just lie there for a while (and maybe the murderer was still around) and then recover and trot off to Ponyville to report a body?
Moreover, if she were to faint she’d land on the dirty ground which was simply Not Done; a proper ladylike swoon required a fainting couch or some other couch-like furnishing on which to collapse. If she’d seen the murder occuring, maybe falling to the floor would have been acceptable, but she hadn’t. Just a corpse. And various bits of corpse strewn around hither and yon.
❗
Ponyville hadn’t invented 911 (or 999, or whatever phone number gets you emergency services in your particular locale). If they had—and if they had also invented cell phones—she might have just let her hooves do the walking. Instead, she had to let her hooves do the walking, right back to Ponyville, where she reported to——
Ponies also hadn’t invented police. If there was a crime that needed solving, it was going to require a smart citizen and maybe some Film Noir or a bubble pipe or Twilight Sparkle because she was smart in a different way than Rarity or Pinkie Pie.
In the case of a murder, Rarity judged that Twilight would be a more immediately helpful resource, and would be sympathetic to the unicorn (her, not Twilight) dramatically fainting as she recounted The Horror.
She didn’t gallop back to Ponyville for three reasons. One: it was unladylike to gallop. Two: if the murderer were still around and if they tried to murderize Rarity, they’d find out why giant crabs and dragons and guitars feared her. Three, it would make her coat all sweaty.
Rarity did trot for some of the journey, since it was faster, and since a pony in motion doesn’t have to think too much about what she’s fleeing.
She could have barged in, a murder was a perfectly valid reason to, but she knocked and waited, and by the time Twilight answered the door, her chest was heaving, her mascara streaked, and:
“Rarity? I—”
“Oh, it was horrible, darling; I was out in the badlands near my secret spot to find some gems on this fine spring day and I came across a body, a dead body, the scene of a most brutal murder.”
Not a weasel in the sense of the slang (‘a sneaky, untrustworthy, or insincere creature’), but an actual, literal weasel, family Mustelidae. Specifically a least weasel—American English often lumps any members of the genus (including polecats, stoats, ferrets, and minks) into that one word. Some people also call ferrets ‘stretch rats,’ but that’s neither here nor there.
Also since the weasel was sneaking around in the Hooves household, I suppose I can rescind that first statement, too.
Anyway, he was sneaking around not looking for food but instead looking for something to steal. Since he was very smol, he could fit into a foal-proofed room in the Hooves Household, where he found a thing that smelled like marzipan and also vaguely like potato for reasons which will become apparent but did not smell like a chocolate cake for reasons which will also become apparent.
Just as Americans and also ponies aren’t very specific when it comes to identifying weasels, so too are weasels not very specific at identifying guns. A gun was a gun, they smelled like gun oil and gun powder and while he did have cute little paws (they’re related to otters, yo) the recoil from any firearm larger than a derringer would send him flying backwards if he tried to use it.
However, tucked in a corner of the room was a genuine imitation portal gun—crafted by Pinkie Pie from the finest of marzipan and imbued with Pinkie’s chaos-adjacent deus et machina earth pony magic.
That was something a weasel could use. It only had two buttons, blue and orange, and while it wouldn’t fit through the mouse-hole where he’d entered, it could make a portal. Obviously.
He pushed the button, a portal opened, and the weasel escaped with his ill-gotten goods.
O
There was more to using portal guns than just pushing buttons. Especially this portal gun. He’d expected it to be a convenient way to portal himself into mouse nests or rabbit dens or chicken coops—he’d seen it used in the past—but in fact it portaled him straight to the Enrichment Center, where he was promptly accosted by a tall biped who some[who?] might consider a Lara Croft ripoff, at least in terms of design.
That wasn’t what he was interested in at all, so he portaled right back out of there, reappearing outside Ponyville in what was prime gem-hunting territory.
Unbeknownst to him, Chell grabbed up a companion cube and portaled herself right behind him—she recognized that Equestrian-made portal gun, and if it was back in play again, the ponies must be in trouble!
O
Torch Song is a single mare living in Ponyville. She has a red and purple mane, a beige-ish coat, and a hat for a cutie mark. If cutie marks run in the family (they might, who knows?), she could be related to Coco Pommel.
She’s an earth pony, and besides singing, her hobbies include long walks on the lakeshore, drinking Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain and finding beautiful fragrant flowers and pressing them flat.
She’s an earth pony but she hates flowers and her walls are covered with the pressed, framed flowers, gruesome mementos of the flowers she’s killed and a warning to those she’s going to kill in the future—
—is what Lily would say if you asked her about Torch Song’s pressed flower collection. If you reminded Lily that she put a flower behind her ear every single day and then at the end of the day tossed it onto to compost heap she’d narrow her eyes and tell you that’s not the same and then she wouldn’t talk to you again which is for the best because that pony has I S S U E S.
So while it wasn’t that aforementioned beautiful sunny spring day, it was a pretty enough day, and feral flowers don’t follow pony schedules.
(Lily also took issue with feral flowers*)
She didn’t find a feral flower that was to her liking, but her nose sniffed marzipan which she also loved, and so she tiptoed through the tulips—currently unbloomed—when she came upon a hastily-abandoned portal gun, with least weasel pawprints leading off in one direction and Chell-sized bootprints leading off in another. Not that she recognized either of those; she wasn’t a tracker.
She didn’t recognize the portal gun, either, but she picked it up anyway because it was clearly a well-crafted object that likely belonged to somepony.
A smart pony wouldn’t have pushed any buttons on it.
She did.
At least she was smart enough to have pointed it away from herself when she did the button-pushing.
💥
You’d’ve expected that in a town like Ponyville, an unknown bipedal creature coming out of the Everfree with a portal gun on one hand and a Companion CubeTM under her other arm would cause a panic, especially since at time of posting, it’s Tuesday. However, while the Companion Cube$58.12 on esty was a new thing, Chell wasn’t; most of the ponies had seen her before, and nothing bad had happened then.
Even Torch Song had seen her before. Briefly, off in the distance, leaving town, being carried by Derpy, but the point stands.
In fact, it was a reunion of sorts, even though in fact only Derpy, Dinky, and Amethyst Star had actually ever talked to her. Well, a number of other people had, too, but they’d all been unalived some time in the past, and we’ve moved beyond that now.
[We haven’t, because here we are again.]
Point is, while Humans were banned from Equestria, Chell was cool and not considered a human. An honorary horse, perhaps.
So the quartet made their way to Sugarcube Corner because it was either that or the bar, and Amethyst—A.K.A. Amey the Hoof—was banned from the bar after The Incident. The barkeep wasn’t a monster, so she was allowed to stand outside, maybe lean her hooves up on the windowsill and converse with her party inside, but she couldn’t order drinks.
Before anybody says that’s unfair, all the members of the Moofa were banned, even the ones who hadn’t been there when The Incident happened, and the ban would last until the scorch marks were finally scrubbed off the ceiling.
And the wall.
Sugarcube Corner had more Pinkie Pie related incidents, anyway; so incidents caused by other ponies really didn’t show up on the radar, if you know what I mean. It was the perfect place for a quick reunion, prior to her necessary return to the Enrichment Center.
🎂
Somewhere outside Ponyville is a place where the feral flowers grow, where the gems can be found, and where there was a portal gun.
Where there was a Companion Cube.
He didn’t know what it was, he’d never seen one before. He only caught a glimpse of it as Chell popped through the portal, closed it behind her, and set it down.
She retied her orange jumpsuit around her waist, and then picked it up again and headed off to Ponyville.
He wanted it. He needed it. And he would do whatever it took to get it.
Nobody’s ever heard of Seckelville, Equestria. It’s very much like Ponyville, except that the foundational farm is a pear farm, and ponies have pear cutie marks and names like Pearjack, Big Bartlett, Pear Bloom, Golden Spice, Harrow Gold, Moonglow, Stinking Bishop, 豊水, and Perry [which is a much closer pear-themed Applejack than ‘Pearjack’].
If you were to find yourself suddenly appearing via random portal in a good gem-searching spot on the outskirts of Ponyville—’outskirts’ being a rather broad term—and you had to choose a direction to go to find civilization, if you did the opposite of the thing that would take you to the manticore (Manny) and then Ponyville, you’d wind up meeting the anticore (Annie) and then get to Pearville.
In Pearville, there was a bar, and—although she didn’t know it—Amey the Hoof wasn’t banned from that bar. They served pear-themed drinks, like Peary Bird, Daphne Martini, Christmas Hearth’s Warming Mule (seasonally), and Spiced Sailor.
KitKat was at the bar enjoying a Spicy Sailor when he came in, accompanied by screams and ponies fainting in terror. Pearville doesn’t see the same share of monsters that Ponyville does, so an unfamiliar biped in clothes was a cause for alarm.
[It’s worth pointing out to readers who are unfamiliar with this abominationfranchiseholiday tradition abomination, KitKat knew a thing or two about humans and had every right to shun them. Screaming or fainting in terror weren’t really her thing, though, so she finished off her Spiced Sailor, tightened a hoof around her tabarzin (تبرزین), and turned to face the newcomer.
He wasn’t a wizard, which was already a point in his favor. He was dressed in respectable clothes—khaki pants, a tan button-down shirt, sun-faded campaign hat, and had an undersized pickaxe stuck in his belt. Kind of like a cross between Indiana Jones and Theodore Roosevelt.
KitKat had been wandering around looking for work; the civilized areas of Equestria had better inns and hostels but fewer opportunities for her particular set of skills. The two of them were out of place, especially here, and would make a great team.
Maybe. KitKat knew better than to look a gift human in the mouth or anywhere else. She’d done some research since the last time and prepared her own legal document for the next human she might hire, thanks to her friend Mia Fey (known as Chihiro Ayasato in Neighponese). She tapped her hoof on the empty barstool next to her, and as soon as he sat down she bought him a Sultry Sailor, then got the contract out of her saddlebags.
For when things got down to business.
📜
Okay, now it’s in the present.
“A murder victim?” Twilight asked once Rarity had recovered from her heroine’s hebetude1 and explained what had brought her to Twilight’s doorstep in such a state. It was a long, shaggy dog tale, rambling in its nature, overly dramatic, overwrought; in general one of those things that continues on and on when it really shouldn’t and really brings one to appreciate the advice in Alice in Wonderland that she [Alice] should start at the beginning and when the gets to the end, stop; or perhaps for a more modern reference William Shatner commenting in the music video for Celebrity by Brad Paisley (for some reason the singer who came to mind was Blake Shelton even though I knew it wasn’t him) that the part of the song he enjoyed the most was when the end (“You know when the song ends and you come to a stop? I love that.”)—like this paragraph, Rarity was stringing various bits of vaguely coherent narrative elements together into one long thing that upped the word count but provided no actual value to the reader: all that was missing was a colon to make it even longer!
“Are you sure he was dead?” was the first thing that Twilight replied with, at least after she’s parsed the long rambling tale which was rambling in its nature &c. Not exactly the best response, but given that Twilight was at best an ad hoc detective, it was a logical reply. “Maybe we should bring along Nurse Redheart.”
Rarity sighed, semi-swooned, and called upon her vast repertoire of euphemisms for death. “He [REDACTED] snuffed it. He’s rolled up the curtain and joined the b——dy choir invisible!”
[Wait, we’re putting pictures in this now? Is this a blog? Has this gone completely off the rails, or can it be pulled back?]
“There were—” Rarity took a deep breath, sniffed some smelling salts, downed a shot of brandy to fortify herself. “Parts scattered all around.”
“Oh.” Twilight wasn’t a doctor or a nurse, honorary doctorate from the Saddle Lake Universite TechnicaB notwithstanding. Nonetheless did understand that ‘parts’ ought to remain on or inside a pony, rather than be scattered around. “Well, we ought to go out to the scene and gather evidence, I suppose. According to my Lady Mallowan books, that’s what a good detective does.”
As she gathered the things she thought she’d need in her saddlebags—Twilight didn’t have a specific checklist for ‘investigate a crime scene’—she started musing about the circumstances of their mission. “Gosh, I think this is the first murder ever in Ponyville.”
“Near Ponyville,” Rarity corrected.
“Near Ponyville.”
“Really, closer to Pearville as the pegasus flies.”
“Pearville? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Good.”
“I’m more into peaches anyway. Say, you never said who it was—a pony you recognized?”
“Oh, darling. I couldn’t possibly have brought myself to get that close to a dead body,” she said dramatically. Plus that would spoil the surprise, she added under her breath.
Twilight furrowed her brow*. “Say, aren’t you a Noir detective?”
🚬
Now it’s the future
An older and wiser Torch Song looked dubiously at the stately ponyless carriage, the first Ateliers d’Automobiles et d’Aviation 10A Luxe from Prance. It was electric and came with a ten-year warranty and despite the ‘aviation’ clearly in the brand name, it couldn’t fly. She—
Oops, we went too far into the future
A marginally wiser and slightly older Torch Song, one who had, thus far, only learned to not push buttons on a found portal gun lest a weird biped in clothes come out of a flamy hole in the ground was at the bar, the one where Sparker was banned, sipping on a cool refreshing Flaming Green Fairy, so named because it contains absinthe and is on fire.
Besides enjoying pressing flowers, she also enjoyed things being on fire, as her name would imply.
She had a sympathetic audience of ponies around her as she regaled her tale of finding the portal gun and pressing the button not once but twice, producing not one but two weird bipeds wearing clothes, one of them being Chell and the other one being Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy♣ (who had, at this point in the future of the story, left the bar in Pearville in the company of KitKat).
Or maybe they were enjoying the whimsical green flares of the Flaming Green Fairy—that was a drink that the bar didn’t make all that often, due to the fire hazard and the hallucinatory nature of wormwood. Fun fact! Wormwood is toxic to horses but not to sheep, as Merino well knows.
🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑
Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy was a paleontologist, and he’d been minding his own business as he carefully extracted trilobite and blastoid fossils from a layer of rocks (a very deep layer as anyone who knows what both those things are will appreciate). Trilobites are vaguely related to horseshoe crabs, and blastoids are only found in fragments because part of their life cycle is exploding, hence the name.
One of those facts is true; the other is my own personal theory.
He’d suddenly found himself in a portal and before he could do more than swear (in French) he found himself in Equestria, where he appeared in front of a rock that contained fossils he’d never seen before. There was also a human female walking off in the far distance and an equine with a recently-used portal gun galloping off . . . he was a paleontologist and focused his attention on what was really important.
🔨🔨
Eventually, his glassine sample bags were full, his hand was cramped from rock-hammering and meticulous note-taking, and he fancied a drink.
He couldn’t remember which direction the equine and human had gone off in, so guessed, and after walking for a while found himself entering a bar.
Many of the equines freaked out at the sight of him, but a bulky mare with feathered hooves, scars in her coat, and a notch out of her ear tapped the stool beside her and he gratefully took it.
She ordered a drink for him, produced a stack of papers out of her saddlebags, and asked, “Are you a wizard?”
While Chell was catching up with Derpy, Sparkler, and Dinky; while Torch Song was reconsidering some of her recent life choices; while Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy and KitKat were coming to an agreement; while Rarity and Twilight were on their way to investigate a murder scene, the news of said murder was being tweeted all over Ponyville.
No, Fax Machine Spike wasn’t being gossipy: he hadn’t even been home at the time. Starlight Glimmer and Trixie were talking about kites—euphemistically—and all the servants who logic would suggest must live in the castle or at least work in the castle to keep things functioning, keep things clean, etc. keep their muzzles shut if they know what’s good for them.
Owlowiscious was fast asleep on his perch.
In Ponyville, ‘a little bird told me’ is often quite literal. A chickadee overheard and told his mate, which other birds overheard, and the news spread quickly in the non-pegasus avian community. For some it was a trivial bit of gossip—as long as there were seeds to be had, the chickadees could really care less what the ponies did.
When the news hit the vultures, it reopened a philosophical debate. Was it okay to eat a dead pony? The general consensus was yes, but with criteria attached. Other ponies should be notified (but a few quick mouthfuls were okay before notification, gotta have some strength for flying, after all), the body should be treated with decorum, unattached parts were fair game but anything attached to the main corpse should be left alone, etc.
Crows and other corvids were of the opinion that as long as there were more of them than ponies, a body was fair game, so while the vultures were philosophizing they simply flew off to feast while the feasting was good.
🦅🦅🦅
Fluttershy wasn’t the only pony who could understand the birds. There are at least two ponies in G4 canon who have a bird in their cutie mark, others that have feathers, or eggs, and as we’ve well-established by this point, what a pony’s cutie mark means is kind of vague and open to interpretation. Fluttershy’s got insects, she can talk to birds; so would a pony named ‘Natural Deduction” who has a bumblebee also be able to talk to birds and put the pieces together, so to speak?
Whoever it was that first heard the news, it wasn’t long before it became the gossip on everpony’s ears. Who was dead? Who had killed them?
By the time Rarity and Twilight Sparkle got back to the murder scene, there was a list of a few dozen local ponies that nopony had seen in a while, along with a few false alarms: the boutique was closed; was it Rarity? Torch Song had gone off into the wilderness to look for flowers, and she wasn’t home. . .
💢
Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy, as he called himself, wasn’t worse than the wizard. His name was a mouthful; KitKat just rolled off the tongue, even “The Wizard” wasn’t bad (the wizard was bad, but ‘The Wizard’ wasn’t bad to say, even if it was describing the worst wizard KitKat had ever known [sample size: 1]).
There were a half-dozen shorter names he could have chosen if he’d not wanted to monologue any time he introduced himself. “Jean,” maybe, or “Michelin,” or even “de.” She never introduced herself by her full given name: KitKat Trademark Nestlé S.A.
His biggest flaw was his enthusiasm for his fossils, and the fact that just when she thought he’d run out of pockets full of fossils he produced another pocket and it had fossils in it, too.
One could argue that as an adventurer (probably a Ranger in D&D rules) she could be involved in the first stage of fossilization: a dead body. After that, though, it was beyond her interest, unless that body later produced vengeful kin or a torch mob.
Finally, KitKat could take it no more. “What do you want?”
He blinked. Academic fund-raising was never this much on point.
“Uh, I guess a guide to get me back home, maybe carry some samples for me.”
She’d heard his tale of how he got here (the very brief version, before he started showing off his swag).
“Last time I went to your planet, I got chased by a Kum and Go clerk with a shotgun, so it’s gonna be a hard pass on any more portal-jumping. I can toss rocks after you, though. And I can guard you while you’re here.”
“It’s a deal.” Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy stuck his sample bags back into one of many pockets and bumped her hoof.
📝
While at first, speculation revolved around who was dead, it quickly turned to who dun it? Certainly not a pony, that was what some of the quickly riling up crowd thought. A monster!
Maybe it was a pony, others thought. Not a Ponyvillian, of course, nopony in Ponyville would murder a pony. However, those bastards in Pearville, well, that was just like them.
[One might speculate that some of the Apple clan started that rumor, but that’s not true. They just didn’t do anything to stop it once it was started.]
Thus it was that two torch and pitchfork mobs began forming. One had their sights set on the nearest thing to a monster that they’d seen recently—Chell. The others had their sights set on Pearville.
Torches and Pitchforks did brisk business that afternoon. It was run by a Lithumaneian mare named Molotov; she had the only business in town that was built of three layers of brick, had a slate-tiled roof, and steel shutters for the windows and doors. Some thought that was overkill; she thought that was just good business.
Also not judging ponies when they felt the need to visit en masse and buy up torches and pitchforks. She did mark up prices when there was a run, though.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Ponyville
Speaking of mobs, there was an angry mob of crows around the 'murder scene'
Twilight regarded the murder scene with a frown.
On occasion, she’d direct that frown in Rarity’s direction.
She was gathering evidence, and in the process of gathering evidence she was coming ever closer to being her own one-mare torch mob—when she could set herself aflame, kirin-like, there was no need for a pitchfork.
Like the kirin, Twilight had learned to control her emotions. That was one of the hallmarks of a good leader. Only let the beast free when it was absolutely justified; in all other times be as placid as a stone.
A stone.
She ground her teeth and snorted then took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and shoved her raging emotions back inside, to be dealt with later in a more productive manner.
A moon-cursed stone!
One more breath, put it all inside, the placid smile on her face ready to shatter at any moment. Much like . . . well, like a stupid REDACTEDREDACTED rock that her good REDACTED friend—her REDACTED overreacting drama queen friend had claimed was a space for rent murder victim because some REDACTEDREDACTED with tassels had cursed her to think it was a huge REDACTED diamond and apparently thatREDACTED curse had never quite worn off, who cared if it was a diamond or a rock or a Faust-REDACTEDpeach. “Rarity?”
Her voice was dangerously sweet.
“You see, Tom is—”
“Tom is a redactedrEdAcTeDREDACTED rock! Not a defunct pony, not a REDACTED other sapient, not even a REDACTEDsnake, a ROCK. With chips out of it.”
“Him.”
“With chips out of him. He’s a rock, he’ll be FINE.”
Rarity scoffed. “Easy for you to say, you don’t have chips out of you.”
With an audible screech and a very distinct smell of burning metal, Twilight’s mental processes came apart, one final fweeeee tapering off as the machinery of her mind dynamically disassembled.
She stood stock-still for an entire minute as Rarity prattled on. The sounds came in one ear, and then just bounced about in the void until they were totally lost. Her eyes were unblinking, unfocused, and she even forgot to breathe. For that minute, it was as if Twilight were stone as she mentally ascended to a higher plane or perhaps a lower one.
Finally, her mouth opened. Not in the manner of making speech; it just dropped open and words came out from somewhere, as if she’d swallowed a Bluetooth speaker and the latest hit song from Countess Colortura was playing and she just wanted to share it with you.
What she intended to say was: “Rarity, I love you like a sister and we’ve been through a lot together and I feel like we have a mutual trust and respect for each other; as such I am not cursing you to tartarus or worse for leading me to believe that there was a dead pony when in actual fact it’s your pet rock who has a few pick-marks in him. Had you not lured me her on false pretenses, I would have been more inclined to ask around and see who was fossil-hunting on what is debatably your property and also debatably imbued with chaos magic, and I might ask you why you keep him out here if you value him so highly, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m a smart pony and sometimes an empathetic pony, maybe you felt he’d fare better with his rocky kin. I don’t fully understand it, but then I don’t fully understand the Pies either and they seem to make it work . . . well, all their daughters have different issues but then don’t we all?”
Imagine Twilight's brain as some giant Steampunk machine. Big iron walking beams slowly marching up and down, keeping steady time, driven by small engines with big flywheels.
Nearly every bit of their workings exposed to view—giant cast flywheels spinning around, screw-type governors on the machines, the constant hiss of steam.
And that’s just for the heavy lifting. Other processes are more fine-tuned, clever contraptions of gears and escapements, regulators and countwheels, racks and snails, everything in shiny brass with a thin sheen of lubricant on it.
Decorative trimwork, because why not? If you’re going to build a machine, make it a thing of beauty. Glossy green enamel, pinstripes painted with a feather, decorative scrollwork on every machine because it’s not just a thing, it’s an art, it’s a masterwork.
It needs a whole crew to run it, and to keep it running. While a governor keeps an engine from overspeeding, a careful hoof on the steam nozzles can finely set the shaft speed.
Bells ring out, the telegraph system, for it’s too loud to hear voices shouting when everything is operating. Wipers go everywhere, crawling over the moving machines with their little cans of oil, lever-operated with a bendy spout. A rag is always tucked in a back pocket, white at the beginning of a shift and stained brown at the end of it.
Dynamos spin off exhaust steam, and the lights dim when a heavy demand is made; voltage regulators haven’t been invented yet.
Everything working like clockwork, and then a pony goes and says something crazy and that’s like a broom handle jammed into a clock gear—everything comes to a grinding halt, safety valves pop and for a moment nothing can be heard over the shrill shriek of steam. The air is thick and heavy; everyone looking around for the malfunction. Control wheels spin, bells ring, steam nozzles are shut off, the electric lights flicker and dim as the dynamo spins its last, and then all is silent except the clang of a wrench on a catwalk.
The machine has malfunctioned, and the machine needs to work. Ponies scramble to action, engineers shout orders, the cause is identified. It can be fixed, but that will take a while, a new piece needs to be patched in and the machine cannot be left idle for too long.
A workaround is found. Not with shop drawings, not with a long study, it’s all back of the hoof calculations by grey-muzzles in their navy blue coveralls. Shut that valve, reduce steam pressure to the triple-expansion engine; orders are shouted and carried out without question. One of the main beams is stopped at full height; that’s a design flaw they all know. A hempen rope over the beam and a dozen ponies pulling in sync as the starter gear is engaged and it starts to sluggishly pull itself downwards, at first resisting the inevitable expansion of steam and then its momentum starts to take over. The beam weighs tons for a reason—it doesn’t start or stop quickly, but when it’s going, it’s going.
Essential processes are online. Emergency lanterns still provide the only light; the dynamos are still and silent.
Clockworks are cleared and reset, pendulums are set in motion again. A steady ticking as the duplex escapement starts moving again, followed by the whirring of the wheel train. Things are starting to work again, but it’s a demanding process getting everything back online especially as an unexpected command comes from on high; steam pressure’s not yet back up, half the machines are still in their startup process, and the crew does what they can with the pressures and machines they’ve got to work with—something is better than nothing, right?
“We’re giving her all she’s got, captain,” the third engineer shouted, hoof deep in a packing gland.
Hooves on valve wheels, more steam nozzles open, a low whirr as the first dynamo gets a breath of escaping steam. Filaments in the lamp are glow-worms, less than a candle, and then it gets a bite in and ramps up, ffffwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeettttt. Not a success until the steady drip of condensate is established.
The heartbeat is almost back—trained ears can hear the absence of some machines, the off-rhythm pulsing of walking beams and oscillators, can hear a governor race up and spin out as the steam supply to that machine is too high; its partner isn’t online yet.
But they’re getting there. A disaster has been averted; everything is coming back online as quickly as well-trained experienced ponies can manage. For the grey-muzzles, it’s yet another malfunction, and later on while they’re on their union tea-breaks, they’ll reminisce about the failure during HRH 1001 or the Pink One Conflagration [everypony agreed that the Pink One Conflagration was the worst failure thus far, having been a long-running disaster in progress followed by a significant fire].
For a rookie, it’s her first trial by figurative fire, and after a few moments of panic—she’d just learned where the emergency lanterns were and then forgotten in the heat of the moment—she got right up into the maw of the machine like everypony else and did her duty.
Medals aren’t awarded to the crew, but they should be. Fitters and wipers and pumpmares all did their duties; the engineering crew averted disaster once again. Already at ninety percent capacity, and the crew was clearing the (metaphorical) broom handle out of the mechanism, checking the gears for stress fractures or missing teeth. It looked good, things would be back to normal soon—
💭🗯💭
In reality, brains are just electrically-charged tapioca, subtle and nuanced beyond the ken of science.
In the case of unicorns, there’s probably some rainbows and sparkles in there somewhere, too.
Wearing pants was stupid, but KitKat felt a bit of longing towards Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy’s khaki’s—they had a seemingly limitless number of pockets, even some contained within other pockets. She didn’t have much use for carrying around rocks or fossils, but there were little apothecary bottles and small wheels of emergency cheese, twine, soup stones—any number of small things that could be easily carried on her hind legs.
And speaking of small things, after settling the bar bill, KitKat led Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy around town until she found a Baggies and Bedframes so that he could restock his sample bags. They didn’t have any with ZiplockTM closures, as nopony in Equestria was licensed to produce or sell them, so he made due with the more traditional pleated fold and close type.
Sometimes she was one for making smalltalk—it helped the journey go by faster. Other times, not so much. KitKat had a feeling that any smalltalk she’d make might quickly turn into conversations about his fossils, something she had very little interest in. While Trilobites might be extinct, pillbugs and horseshoe crabs were still around and to her untrained eye it seemed quite possible if you put the two of them in a room together and played some romantic music you might very well get more Trilobites.
As for the blastoids, there were still plenty of those around, mostly in places like The Forbidden Swamp and The Forbidden Bay and The Forbidden Pond and especially The It’s Not Technically Forbidden But it Really Isn’t a Good Idea Swamp (of Doom). That last one was nestled between The Cliffs of Peril and The Tree of Lingering Existential Dread, and you had to scale one or fight the other to even find the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Forbidden Swamp,’ so ponies mostly didn’t go there.
Still, a silent safari was stultifying, so she finally perked her ears and turned her head towards Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy, who was currently trying to retrace his steps back to Tom the Rock. “Is this your first trip to Equestria?”
“Second,” he said. “A couple years ago I was fossil-hunting in South Africa, and we stopped for a couple of days. There weren’t any talking equines there.” That came out as an acquisition.
“Really? I’ve been to Zebrica a few times myself and there were lots of equines. Never South Zebrica, maybe that’s the difference. What was there?”
“Well, there—”
“Besides fossils.”
He shrugged. “Houses, cars, a shopping mall with an ice rink in it. Our hotel.” The he pointed. “There it is.”
There it was, a majestic rock covered with pick-marks, surrounded with chunks of chipped-off rock, not as glorious as it had once been.
Over on the other side of Tom, as-yet unseen, there was a lavender alicorn whose mind had just completed a reboot sequence, and a flustered alabaster unicorn who was considering fainting again as a way to move the conversation along.
👖👖👖👖👖
Meanwhile, back in Ponyville, the two torch and pitchfork mobs had coalesced. One of them started marching in the direction of Pearville, while the other was a more raggedy, less-organized mass, going business-to-business and house-to-house and horse-to-horse in search of Chell.
Derpy, Sparkler, Dinky and Chell didn’t know this. If they’d have been invited to one of the torch mobs, that would have solved things really quickly, tied them up with a neat little bow—but they were reminiscing in Derpy’s backyard, drinking flower wine, or, in the case of Dinky, a juice box.
Even if they weren’t really paying attention, they were all smart ponies (and one smart human).
Chell set down her wine glass and looked at the three ponies. “Does something in town seem . . . off?”
“It’s too quiet,” Dinky said.
“I smell torches,” Sparkler added.
Being a pegasus, Derpy flew up to take a look, then landed back in her backyard. “Torch mob.”
Sparkler’s eyes narrowed. “Monster?”
Derpy shook her head, and then four pairs of eyes regarded Chell (before you ask, she looked at her own reflection in the window. Since the ponies hadn’t invented float plane glass, her reflection was wavy and kind of monster-y). “They’re coming for me, aren’t they?”
“We don’t know that,” Dinky said. “Could be they’ve finally cornered the cootie monster.”
“Spoiled Bitch—Spoiled Rich passed that mantle on,” Sparkler explained.
“Well, I hate to leave early, but. . . .“
Derpy paused in thought. They had more than enough perimeter security to defend their house against a mob of Ponyvillians, and more than enough guns to mop up any stragglers that made it past the layered defense systems, but she had little desire to mount a full-on assault against her friends and neighbors over what was surely a little misunderstanding elevated to mob justice. Just like a friendship problem, this would ultimately resolve itself after a while and things would go back to normal.
“How about we just head off into the Badlands? Nopony would bother looking out there, we can catch up, and then you can head back to the enrichment center.”
“I like that plan, but.” Chell held up a finger. “How do we get out of town without being seen?”
“Oh, that’s no trouble at all.” Sparkler lit her horn and a moment later, a hatch in the backyard opened, revealing a tunnel. “Dug this baby years ago.”
“In case the house got overrun?”
“No, because Mom had a curfew and I wanted to see my stallionfriend.”
The second torch mob was proceeding into the Badlands in orderly fashion. While it had started off disorganized and unruly, a leader had appeared to bring them to victory or at least frontier justice, and that pony was no other than Torch Song.
Not only did she know the way, but she knew the mob song.
You might think it was an original composition for the G5 movie, but it’s in fact a traditional pony song.
Maybe Lily wasn’t entirely wrong about Torch Song after all.
🔥 |
For those of you keeping track at home, there’s Tom (with some chips out of him); there’s KitKat and Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy, who is currently chipping more fossils out of Tom. There’s Twilight and Rarity, and there is one torch mob on its way, another that soon will be (Sand Digger, who happens to be visiting town, has a skill for digging holes and finding holes that have already been dug; she works for a mining interest out west), and of course there’s Derpy and company. There are also a bunch of frustrated crows still hanging around, I guess.
For reasons of plot convenience, aside from the four who were already at The Rock, the other three groups arrived nearly simultaneously, from three different compass directions.
🔀🔁🔃
“Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy, I think it’s time for us to go.”
“Not now, I just found a really nice Tentaculite.”
KitKat shuddered—she knew a thing or two about tentacles. “Well, chip it off quick, ‘cause we’ve worn out our welcome.”
“I’m paying you to guard me.”
“Yeah, and part of being guarded is that you listen to your aantrekkelijk guard. I can only take on one torch mob at a time.”
Things went as smoothly as you’d expect when two angry torch mobs came together.
Never mind that both torch mobs were made up exclusively of Ponyvillians, friends and neighbors, lovers and strangers, siblings and that one weird stallion who likes jelly a lot.
Never mind that both torch mobs had the same motivation and were seeking the same enemy, even if they disagreed on who that enemy was.
Never mind that there wasn’t actually a murder victim, just Tom “The Rock” Johnson and Rarity’s melodrama. There’s probably an important friendship lesson there.
Torch mobs ought to get all the facts before they launch on a crusade.
. . . There’s probably two important friendship lessons.
As the two mobs collided (not literally, everypony in Ponyville knew just how far a torch or pitchfork could reach), the shouting began.
“Cursed Pearvillians!” came from Torch Song’s mob. They should have recognized their fellow citizens, but when anger rules a pony’s heart—
“Pearvillians? You’re the Pearvillians! Filthy murderers! And you’re trying to pin it all on a poor, innocent human!”
Just then, Chell (and company) arrived. As we discussed in the last chapter, it was from a different direction than the two mobs had arrived from.
Chell just heard the word ‘human’ and while her ears didn’t flatten (she wasn’t a pony), she had a finely-honed sense of self-preservation. Being experimented on by a quite frankly insane AI developed by a shower curtain company will do that to a person. She (GLaDOS) can also de-ice fuel lines, but only if she wants to, because Cave Johnson built in the concept of consent [at least for GLaDOS, not so much her test subject]. Let’s be honest, we’ve all read the wiki.
Point is, Chell heard the word human and rightly assumed one of the two torch mobs she’d just seen was after her.
What she should have done was lobbed her Companion Cube™ at the mob as a distraction and portalized herself the hell out of there.
Option B was to start portalizing ponies until the barrel of her portal gun melted down, just to see how they liked it. Just to see how GLaDOS liked it—how would she deal with a pony? Or a whole mob of them?
Instead, she picked the ‘do nothing for now and see how that works out.’ The mobs were yelling more at each other than at her, and she had her friends with her. Derpy was hovering at shoulder-height, regarding the collected mobs, while Sparkler had adopted a defensive stance and a ‘try me’ look.
Dinky had a tactical vest on, and a 12-gauge shotgun.
She wasn’t aiming it at anypony in particular; Derpy and Sparkler had instilled the filly with good gun discipline. The barrel was down, the gun was safe.
🚷🚷🚷
The two torch mobs hadn’t yet noticed that there was no body here (nor was that really their concern; once they formed into a torch mob, they were not focused on crime-solving [has any angry mob in the history of ever actually solved a crime rather than causing new crimes?]).
Both of the torch mobs more or less simultaneously noticed Chell (and Derpy, Dinky, and Sparkler). One of them collectively pointed, said ‘there she is,’ and either lowered their pitchforks menacingly, or raised their torches. Menacingly. A couple ponies were dual-wielding; if they were unicorns they were twice as menacing; if they weren’t they fell on their faces.
“That’s just Chell,” the other mob shouted in reply. “She’s cool.”
“She is not cool.” “She’s a human!” “A murdering human!” “Humans aren’t welcome!” “Polly said so! [citation]”
“Humans are welcome!” “They have hands!” (that was Lyra) “The blog was an April Fool’s joke!” ‘The cake is a lie!” “Chell would never hurt a fly!”
“Well, if she didn’t do it, who did?”
Just then
Inconveniently
None other than
Jean
(hyphen)
Louis
Hardouin
Michelin
De Choisy
lifted his head above Tom, the tiny Tentaculite he’d just chipped free held proudly aloft.
“Another human!” both torch mobs yelled simultaneously.
“And he’s a stallion, so it must have been him!”
“Why, just because he’s a stallion?”
“Think about it, every monster that we’ve ever faced has been a stallion.”
“Isn’t that kind of sexist?”
“Androgynistic?” added a somewhat well-read pony from that same mob. If he’d been more well-read he’d have realized that the correct word is not androgynistic.
Twilight’s ears perked. The metaphorical ponies who maintained her brain had busted their hooves to get everything back in working order and now it was. Well mostly; there were still a few issues with recent memory (that was being worked on; one of the reel-to-reel tape drives had broken a drive belt when everything came to a crashing halt). Angry mobs meant friendship problems, and she was the Princess of Friendship.
The soapbox appeared naturally, and she stood upon it. “In fact, the majority of significant threats Ponyville has faced—excluding those made up of groups of creatures, such as the fruit bats, or those which are genderless, such as the apples—”
“Apples ain’t genderless,” Applejack objected. “And I know you ain’t talking about apples as in ponies, but apples as in the fruit of a tree. Fact is when it comes to tree biology”
(Nopony was listening to her)
“Flim and Flam sold you on a bill of goods, but that’s not evil. Sombra, Tirek, yeah, they were evil and I’m still salty that Tirek blew up my tree, but consider Nightmare Moon, Starlight Glimmer, Daybreaker, Tempest Shadow—”
“Tempest Shadow was working for the Storm King.”
Twilight gritted her teeth. “She was the brawn of the operation, wouldn’t have worked without her. And then there’s Pinkie Pie . . .”
KitKat wasn’t a mage or a Wizard, so she couldn’t magic Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy out of there. She didn’t have a portal gun, so she couldn’t portal him out. He lacked a good sense of self-preservation and she didn’t have time to instill one.
She couldn’t take on two torch mobs, especially now that it was two torch mobs and an alicorn. And also a cluster of ponies with guns (Sparkler, Dinky, and Derpy) as well as a human with a portal gun.
Maybe in a Haywood movie or an animated TV series with VAs from Vanhoover she could have rushed the mobs, caught them by surprise, wrested the portal gun out of Chell’s hands and then just portaled them out, but this was reality and any attempt to do so would have failed as utterly as a tired author trying to come up with a metaphor for failing utterly and failing utterly.
She didn’t have magic, but she did still have one of the Wizard’s spellbooks, the one with French government minister Marlene Schiappa on the cover. Who—appropriately enough, given the current discussion with the mobs about misandry and sexism in general—is France’s first ever Gender Equality Minister.
She whipped it out (the Playboy), stuck a hoof to her lips, and whistled, a piercing whistle that even a fossil-hunter would hear. He snapped his head around, and the first thing he noticed was the magazine.
Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy was interested in French politics, so of course that got his interest, just as well as a Want-It-Need-It spell would have done. If KitKat could cast spells. He trotted over, she grabbed the scruff of his shirt with her teeth, planted him on her back like an unruly foal, and took off at a gallop.
🦅
“—Not to mention Trixie who somehow convinced me to give her a job at Horsewarts the School of Friendship, Cozy Glow, Lily Longsocks—”
“What did she do?”
Twilight ignored the question.
Luckily, someone else answered, sort of. “She knows what she did.”
Chell said her goodbyes. She didn’t feel rushed; after all, Twilight was monologuing and that could take about forever.
Well, Chell didn’t know that for actual fact, she’d never heard a complete Twilight Sparkle monologue yet (nor would she, for reasons which will presently be obvious), but she’d heard Amethyst monologue about how long Twilight’s monologue was, and so she said her goodbyes and hugged and nuzzled her friends and then she opened a portal at her feet and there was time for one more group hug and a promise to get together when things had calmed back down.
She also tossed away her companion cube to let it go free, to live among the wilds of Equestria where it could be happy.
And it was happy there. Tom had fallen in love with it the moment he’d first seen it and it fell in love with him, too, and they went off and did the kinds of romantic things you’d expect a rock to do.
Well, more than that, since I guess you’d expect a rock to do nothing except sit there and slowly erode. You get my point. This story has a romance tag for a reason.1
And then she was gone in a poof of portal and a lingering scent of chocolate cake which didn’t really exist. Dinky, Sparkler, and Derpy made their way back home, knowing that presently two chagrined torch mobs would be returning to Ponyville, wiser than when they’d left.
Some of them would go to Torches and Pitchforks and try to return their recent purchases, but Molotov is a smart businessmare and didn’t offer refunds except for a defective product.
[As an aside, her criteria for ‘defective’ was “does it burn?” This applied equally to both torches and pitchforks; since the pitchforks she sold had wooden handles (and so did the torches) all of them would burn, even if the pitchforks weren’t capable of forking a single pitch.]
There was a store that bought used pitchforks (not torches, because what use is a used torch?); to nobody’s surprise it was run by another Lithumaneian mare. She was named Sprong, her cutie mark was a spading fork, and now you know that there are different kinds of pitchfork.
She was also Molotov’s sister and they were in ~collusion~
KitKat galloped off into the sunset with Jean-Louis Hardouin Michelin de Choisy on her back, and a personal vow to no longer accept self-titled Wizards as adventuring companions, or paleontologists, or anyone with a really long name who didn’t go by a nickname or a shorter version of their name.
As mentioned above, the two torch mobs did return to Ponyville (chagrined); Twilight and Rarity lingered behind and Twilight lectured Rarity on the potential harm in overdramatizing what was in fact a rather innocent situation and everypony would have benefitted from getting all the facts before they sprang into action. Twilight is a humble pony and admitted that she, too, sometimes rushed in without thinking.
Applejack didn’t learn anything, she was right all along.
