Merge - Yet Another Ponies on Earth Story

“Hmm. Vera’s getting a little dusty.”

Sky Dancer looked up from her book, somewhat surprised by what she’d hear her special somepony – boyfriend, she corrected herself – say all of a sudden.

“Martin, who’s Vera?” she asked, warily watching as Martin walked over to the kitchen to get a wet rag.

“My gun, honey. The big one hanging over there on the wall?”

Indeed, there was still a fearsome device hung on a sturdy spike in the wall, ever since the third chapter. “That’s a gun?”

“It so is a gun,” Martin confirmed as he returned with a rag. He carefully removed the rail gun and placed it on the coffee table. “Don’t worry. It’s only good for display purposes.”

“I’ve only seen one other gun in my life, you know,” Sky breathed in awe. “And that one gun didn’t look anything like this monster.”

Martin gently rubbed the wet rag over the odd-looking barrel of the gun. “What did it look like?”

Sky paused in thought. “It was… mostly metal, with a wooden part on the back, if I remember it right. Long and tube-like.”

“Sounds like your typical rifle. I’d imagine it’d be like a flintlock, maybe? Now, why would ponies invent guns in the first place?”

“That’s actually a very good question,” Sky admitted as she watched Martin work. “But before I tell you, why do you have a gun?”

Martin shrugged and made an indistinct sound with his nose. “I saw it, thought it looked pretty cool, and had some blank space on that wall.”

“Oh. Okay. What kind of gun is this anyway?”

“It’s a Heckler & Koch MAG4,” Martin answered matter-of-factly, pointing out the letters on the near side. “Fourth model of the modern generation rail guns they produced, along with a bunch of other defense companies. Things went predictably fast when they found a power source that was small enough to fit in the gun itself and still yield enough juice to fire it a bunch of times.” He tapped a little slot on the back end and poked it open. “See? No power. The control system’s removed, too. I think they’re up to MAG9 nowadays?”

“What does it fire? Equestrian rifles used to fire little iron balls.”

“This baby fired metal slugs. Not unlike your iron balls, really,” Martin answered. “It’s funny how that works – you start with little iron balls, work your way up to proper bullets…”

“Oh yeah, I remember now! I think they experimented with bullets at one point,” Sky interjected as the word triggered a long gone memory.

“What about that, eh? Anyway, iron balls, bullets, more complicated bullets, and now we’re back at… basically iron balls level again.”

Martin grabbed a tablet from next to him on the couch and quickly called up an image that he showed to Sky. “This is what goes into a Mag Nine,” he announced as he pointed at the image, a block of densely-packed short metal rods with slightly rounded ends. “They’re pretty much somewhere between a bullet and a ball.”

“Right… and this is the sort of thing that brained the princess?”

“Yeah, I guess if she ever goes evil we’ll need somewhat heavier ordinance than that,” Martin joked. “But that’s enough about the Mags. You never answered my question: for what reason would Equestrians have rifles?”

“To fight a war, of course.”

The very idea of ponies at war to such a degree that they’d need to invent flintlocks confused and frightened Martin, and his expression revealed as much.

“Second Pony-Griffon War. The first one was all mêlée and slings, but when the second started, the griffins had invented muskets. Unicorns can only shield so many other soldiers and usually not do other magic at the same time so the Equestrian army had a bit of an incentive.”

“An arms race, that’s lovely. How’d that end up?”

“When the griffins started using flintlocks, Princess Celestia realized there would indeed be an arms race. So she sent word of warning to the griffin palace and dropped a meteoroid on it.”

“She did what!?”

“The war was ended right then and there, and the griffins got a new source of iron out of it. It all hinged on the king being too cocksure to leave his palace. And that’s why you never call Princess Celestia a ‘namby pamby pink pony princess’,” Sky finished her story with a smile and about as much of a bow as she could manage from her position on the couch.

“Who even needs nukes when you can… but Celestia’s not pink, isn’t she?”