Physical Therapy

Despite what her name would indicate, Mayor Mare did not always think she was going to become the Mayor of Ponyville. There was a time, in fact, where she thought she wasn't going to be the Mayor of anything.

In her foalhood days, the Mayor was convinced by the adult figures in her life that she would grow up to be a farmer just like her parents and grandparents (on both sides). She was raised in a bitter and labor-centered hoursehold, mainly because her father was a chronically disgruntled stallion who worked all his life and yet died poor—mainly because of his father.

Mayor Mare's paternal grandfather was a sot-weed plantation owner from Vanhoover who for a good forty years made an absolutely obscene amount of money off of growing and selling the aforementioned crop. Business was booming, but then the old coot also had quite a bit of free time on his hooves, and so he ended up generating a lot of progeny (not all of them strictly legitimate) as well as material wealth. When the time came where everypony in the family knew the grandfather was going to die soon, he agreed to have his money and his land split among his several sons and daughters. The second youngest son, Mayor Mare's father, agreed to inherit the plantation and a hundred bits when he was but hardly a teenager.

The assumption was that Mayor Mare's father would make a fine living as a sot-weed farmer once he came of age.

But then cruel irony struck! Shortly after the grandfather's passing, sot-weed started to fall out of fashion among the ponies, and its value negatively corresponded with the newborn Ponyville's prosperity.

The plantation had become next to worthless.

After all that trouble, Mayor Mare came to appreciate the goodness behind the bitter veil her father possessed, and so she promised to him that she would one day make something of herself.

It took her most of her adult life to do that, but she did it.

"I feel even older than I already am just talking about it," the Mayor told Jim bitter-sweetly. "Nopony mentions all the things that happened back then anymore. And I was a little filly when it was all going on, so even I can barely remember."

The man was wheelchair-bound, sitting comfortably close to the Mayor in her office. Members of the Royal Guard could be seen outside the windows; Princess Celestia had ordered a dozen of them to keep a temporary eye on the town once it became clear that Jim would survive his injuries.

Redheart sat close to Jim, feeling somewhat protective of him as she noticed the guards making their rounds. She knew those boys held nothing against Jim, but Ponyville had been in a real collective funk for the past week or so.

"Come on, don't think of it that way," Jim said, a bit raspy. "You're lucky enough to have been around for that history, and to have even a decent recollection of it. I was just a baby when the World Trade Center got bombed by all those wackos, and way after the fact—when I was in elementary school—my parents would still talk about it. My mom would say something about how much of a national tragedy it was, and my dad would quip back with something along the lines of, 'Well, it can't get any worse!'" He smiled crookedly at that.

"The World Trade Center..." The Mayor rubbed her chin. "Was it like a tower?"

"Two towers, actually." Jim fussed with his robe and stared down at his navel. "I didn't understand any of it then. To know that we would never see those towers again."

The Mayor sensed her alien friend was feeling downcast again. "Well, it was lovely to see you again, James—" for she tended to call him by the name he was given at birth. "You look much healthier now. Why, the first day when you were carried into the hospital, you appeared near death!"

"Thanks," he said. "Although who's to say I didn't die back there?"

Both Mayor Mare and Redheart gave the man a funny look.

"Okay—bad joke," he said uncertainly. The Mayor assumed he seriously considered the possibility.

In the few conversations they'd had together, the Mayor and the man found that they shared a penchant for reminiscing on historical events in a melancholic fashion. They were also opportunities for Jim to talk to a public official like the Mayor about politics from his own world. About what his country was like and how self-loathing it was as a whole.

Seemingly ravaged by more tragedy than the Mayor thought she could ever deal with.

How could a country be so suicidal?

And it was at this moment that she thought of the aircraft wreckage on the outskirts of town. She gazed out her window and saw it in the distance, over the hills and far away, like a haunted sunset. After the bodies were tallied up, reports came out that over ninety "humans" were in that plane—the one that Jim was found in. The guards had set up a perimeter (a fence that—blessed with a unicorn's spell—formed a force field) around the crash site, and although the royal sisters had their schedules filled for the time being, they knew they had to come to Ponyville and try to sort the whole thing out.

Even as she was thinking of this, the Mayor felt tempted to hit Jim with the hard questions then and there.

Yet when she glanced at the man's meek form, she decided it'd better to wait on the dicussion of what was troubling them all.