F-F-F

There is an ancient story, a myth, a legend; call it what you will. It goes, roughly, like this:

Once upon a time, ponies walked the earth on all fours, similar to most other animals. Like now, there existed three types of us: earth, pegasi, unicorn. Because the unicorns were the only race to have fine motor control with their magic, only they could construct intricate machineries, tools to benefit the species. With this natural advantage, they became arrogant rulers, using their powers only to benefit themselves, exploiting the inherent differences between their class and the others. They employed the pegasi as an enforcement class, which explains their role as palace guards today. The pegasi did not have it quite so good as the unicorns, but they benefited from their master's magics, and thus elevated, did not complain. They helped to keep the earth ponies in line.

The earth ponies, then, were serfs for all intent and purpose. They worked the land so as to provide ponydom with food, but large tithes were taken from them by force for their more powerful cousins, causing a lot of resentment. Then, it is said, one day they had had enough. They refused to give any of their crop away. Violence ensued. Families were torn apart. Ponydom was divided.

In those days, Celestia was a different sort of ruler. The stories say she was aloof, absent, letting her little ponies run their own society. But when revolution cam creeping up, finally, distraught, she decided to take action.

I'm getting to the point, don't worry! Be patient with me.

Celestia descended from on high, casting great magics. A scheme had occurred to her, something to make ponies live more harmoniously than before. She rolled back time and changed the shape of herself and her children. Instead of walking on four hooves, she now walked on two. Forehooves were replaced with what was unknown then, but which we now call 'hands'. Supposedly, this allowed earth ponies to devise things with their new appendages, giving them a much greater capacity to manipulate their environment. So Celestia again withdrew. Equestria began anew.

Whereas in the old model where power was determined by magic, technology only developing slightly, the new society was characterized by thriving earth ponies, using ingenious technology to make life easier for all. In the old way, none but unicorns could craft tools very well, and they had limited use for machinery. Why bother, when magic was easily at one's beck and call?

Instead of another agrarian, top-down society, things became more egalitarian, industrial. Through their new-found potential, the earth ponies experimented with the living world, developing empowering industry, discovering innate principles of the world, universal forces like gravity and electromagnetism.

Yes yes, I'm hurrying along! You need to hear the whole creation story to understand, though.

So unicorns still relied heavily on their magic, their abilities, much the same as before. But earth ponies made leaps and bounds forward. A 'balance of power' was achieved. Sure, some unicorns helped technological progress along but most were content to rely on their diverse magical tomes. Pegasi seemed naturally indifferent, though some of them also became scientific. All races could benefit from the new, gadgetry-enriched, way of life.

Which brings me to the last bit of the story. Supposedly, we are the same ponies who existed before the reconstruction of our species. When Celestia turned back time, she could not stand to destroy all of the persons she had come to know and love, and all the traces of who they had been. So the same ponies were born.

Last year was to have marked the same length of time that society had developed as four-legged creatures before New Genesis.

I guess that means that it worked, and we are better at sustaining harmony than our previous selves.

Yes, yes, I know. It is a convenient explanation for the way our civilization has turned out, a justification for our massive cities and immense technological power. It explains our electric lights and skyscrapers and computers, but nonetheless, I still have my doubts. There are lots of inconsistencies.

What do you mean? I know everypony believes it, but does that make it true? Weren't you the one who was just saying that it was 'a convenient explanation'? I see. You're playing devil's advocate, making me justify myself whether you agree with my conclusions or not.

Take then, for example: how can we be the same ponies as from the past? Surely with our massively efficient food production, because of science and machines, we must have a greater population than the small towns and villages of our four-legged ancestors. Our civilization is at least ten times as large as that of the legend. Then, there's Celestia. Nopony has seen her for awhile, except perhaps her protegee. But if she has the power to turn back time and recreate Ponity in a different image, why bother? She could have just told the unicorns to stop being dicks, or not created three innately different kinds of us.

Nitpicking? That's not nitpicking. Fine! There's also that element of the story that abhors the top-down organization of society in the past, as if something like that did not still exist. Sure, it's not like the unicorns rule over everypony else like they do in the myth, but Celestia herself sets the precedent. Both 'then' and now, her word is law. Tithes we call taxes, and though they might be taken at more reasonable rates, the principle is the same. Top-down organization never ended.

See? That's why I take the legend with quite a few buckets-full of salt. But I can't disregard it completely. I have the suspicion that buried underneath a big fib that most people leave unquestioned must be a tiny nut of truth.

What's that? You say you're skeptical of my interpretation? What do you mean?

. . .

No, I'm not saying society is evil or anything like that, just that things aren't as perfect as everypony makes it out to be. That our culture's creation story can't be literal, unless Celestia is batshit crazy. Hey! don't be offended. I don't think she is. . .

Here's another hole in the story for you! So, Celestia changed us because she was tired of one-third her subjects being treated like slaves, but when she morphed us all into bipeds, why did she neglect to unfetter any of the other species from a lack of opposable thumbs? The cows and buffalo must be angry.

Come on! Don't just instantly reject what I'm saying, think about it! In the old society, supposedly earth ponies lived in close proximity with other hoofed creatures, like buffalo or your ordinary dairy cow. They still do speak our language, and speak their own. But WE treat THEM like slaves, because they don't have fingers. Buffalo plow many of our fields where harvesting machines haven't been deployed and cows are penned so we can harvest their milk! You think they don't notice? Instead of ponies against ponies, it's us versus everyone else. You think our empathy filled Celestia wouldn't have thought of that, way back at the beginning of time?

All right, I'll cool off. I just wanted to make the point. It's fine, you can stay unconvinced. But I remain firm in my belief that the creation story is a metaphor about power, not a literal fact of history. Power abuse still happens today. Else we wouldn't have earth pony unions in earth pony owned factories demanding wage increases for earth ponies.

What? OK, enough politics. Why do you want to know that? You want to know about me? Funny you'd go there, when we're just two faceless screennames typing to each other. It's especially funny you'd ask about me like that, because I just finished a sort of short-story based off myself. I was thinking about publishing.

. . . Yeah, I'm an amateur author. I hope it's not that bad. Tell me what you think!

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Oh yeah, I'm Featherweight, nice to meet you too!

The lonely child was lost among his own thoughts, feeling strage because every time he met a new pony, they were packaged into a neat little box, just like everyone else. Though the boxes were different shapes and sizes and colors and came in all varieties, they still seemed restricting and unneccessary to the uninitiated. The already boxed seemed to love placing boxes on those without them. He hadn't yet been placed in a box, though everyone he ever met already was. He was not sure what to do and so, when the time came, he accepted the box placed around him, over him, suffocatingly but not without air-holes, which had the word 'shy' scrawled across it in childish hand. He played that assigned role for lack of any other direction given to him. It changed the course of his life.

He hid himself whenever he could. The isolation was self-imposed because he felt far more comfortable without ponies watching. It was less about avoiding others than it was about preventing them from studying him. He still preferred to observe, just without being seen. It was a hypocrisy of sorts. When no other option was present, he would feign invisibility rather than face the crowd: he would hide his eyes behind the locks of his mane to eat, or sulk in a corner to watch the activity in the room, or steal in the shadows a ways away, even if it meant a loss of connection with the stream of coveted information.

That coveted information being any and all of it, especially gossip. Though he wouldn't confess it to himself, his aversion for personal contact with equine society was second only to his passion for knowing the goings-on of those he avoided. Like a spider unnoticed on his web upon the wall. Ideally. Then he met the filly who did her best to turn everything upside down.

"You should've been a cat." She told him, not asked.

"Uhm.." He didn't have any good words to respond. He wouldn't have had them with anyone else, but to have her staring at him seemed to flummox him even more. She just stood there petulantly, penetrating his illusory veils with her bright purple eyes and snub of a nose, her incessant gum smacking and now her inquisition.

"I said, you should've been a cat, so that nobody expects you to actually act like a pony. Then you can just laze and mope around all day, and still see everything that goes on."

He just stared at her, wonderingly.

"Be that way, then."

He continued to stare as she sauntered off, popping a bubble she had blown with her gum, seeing her tail sway with the motion of her body.

Nailed, that's how it felt. That was exactly why he operated the way he did. When somepony came up and threw reality in your face like that, just to spite you, it was no wonder that he chose to stay hidden. Who could believe the audacity, the machismo of such an action? Not him, not from a girl, that's who. He'd show her next time. (Of course he would do his best to avoid having a next time, but left to the fates, he was sure they would abdicate to her will and readily provide it!) He'd throw some witty remark, like egg into her face, the way she had humiliated him! (It wasn't humiliation, really. . . But by Luna that's as close as one should ever get!) The battle was on. Step one: think of something to say.

That was the funny part. For all he invested in flightiness and obfuscation and deflection, his speechcraft was such that if his other skills were bypassed, he was rendered weaponless. What was he expected to be, perfect? It's not like people are supposed to just walk up to you and tell you what animal you should've been, like that, with no introduction or foreplay or warning of any sort. Besides, it's not like anyone had ever gotten so close to him so quickly... He hadn't even noticed her approach.

Which wasn't technically true. He had seen her coming from fifty feet off, and he only needed a tenth of that to make a slick getaway. But his alarms hadn't gone off, his 'flight' mechanism. Ordinarily, any shift in the movement patterns of his Observed caused him to habitually begin an exit strategy, to offer the least amount of resistance for natural reaction to those he watched. As just a colt, he already understood what the physicists had recently discovered: that even to observe has the weight to alter results.

But his habits, his self-training, his acute sense of surroundings, they never helped him one whit. She had just come up and hammered her words into his head, immobilized him with her unbridled certainty. Her self-assurance. He had just stared as his legs jellified while she did the same to his brain.

What was it? Could it have been her fiery-red hair, braided into pigtails but with a halo of frizz around the whole scheme? Or the splatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose, spread under her eyes like a galaxy of red dwarfs on the white canvass universe of her face? Or the. . . What was this? Was he thinking about fillies?

It couldn't be. The roles were clear and obvious to him as to all his peers. Colts were supposed to hang out with other colts and play sports and run around while fillies were supposed to hang out with other fillies and play dress-up and giggle at each other. But here he was, after having talked to a filly (or rather after being talked-to by a filly), now he was thinking of her? Preposterous. Absurd. Phantasmagorical. Screw-wickity.

The reality remained, though, and he had yet to think of what to say to her if she tried to assail him again. Then, I got it!

At school the next day, same time and place as before. That is to say, all of the foals are in the same general vicinity.

Today, he is in his the hollow of some shadowy bushes instead of lurking on the outskirts of the kickball group. Historically, this has been solely his domain. Amazingly, none of the other foals have found it, for it is a hiding spot that would appeal to nearly any of them. It is placed just close enough to the play courts to be functional in peeping while hearing activity from almost any part of the area. He wouldn't have been able to hold it against a determined siege of his peers.

He had been watching her for several minutes, but was frustrated because she was in one of the few far places he couldn't hear from his vantage point. She was nodding her head at her friends, studiously pretending indifference to the rest of the class. It was a thing they did because it was in style. Cool foals didn't care what other people thought of them: they only acted impressed by grown-up things, but only when foals did them. Adults weren't cool. Everything else, no matter how interesting, had to be taken in with an air of practiced disdain, because they were too commonplace to show interest in. So she fixed her eyes halfway open to look like she was about to fall asleep, effecting her face with the expression only through intense willpower and conscious effort. Her friends tried the same, but without as much success.

There were three of them. The one thing they did do better at than her in their very serious attempts to look as un-serious as possible, was the bracelet jangling. Bracelets were definitely the rage this year and all the fillies tried as hard as they could to shift around imperceptibly, as if to give the things ensconcing their limbs a life of their own. She didn't have the subtlety for it, or the patience. She was a straightforward, bull through it type, even if she had mastered the lazy-eyes look. That's why he was taken aback when he looked to her crowd after turning for a moment to watch the freeze-tag game, and she had disappeared.

He frantically scanned the crowd of milling youth. Nowhere! That's when a soft cough alerted him to the foreign presence. He turned in his bush. She was sitting there, grinning like a jackal. His face turned red. His eyes bugged. He almost screamed and cried and wet himself in the same moment. Thankfully he was made of sterner stuff than in years past.

"I knew it," she said, "you are like a cat."

He couldn't say anything. Again! The sheer frustration, the rage of impotence.

"This is a neat place. I won't tell anyone." She hummed with pleasure. He was almost boiling over, and she knew it. That was the goal.

All his self-assurance from yesterday, dashed into ruins. She just faced him, insolently, and all his abilities drained out. Today her hair was out of the piggy-tails and pushed back instead via headband. Her forehead was starkly white against the shock of her bright-orange roots. Why did details only matter when she was around?

"Kitty-kitty lost his tongue? Oh well, I guess I'll just share this bush with the girls, instead of leaving the discovery between the discoverers."

She was going to give away his secret spot, perhaps his best one! That's it, the silence was over.

"You're mean AND wrong. I'm more of a spider than a cat. You know what I say to you then? Screw-wickity." He stuck out his tongue.

It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

We met during the sixth grade and only grew an order of magnitude closer with each year. By highschool, we were practically dating, though it was always unspoken. Obvious, but unspoken. We'd both get petty jealousies if one of us tried to make a new friend, especially one of the opposite gender. They weren't serious issues, those unhealthy seeds of a bad relationship, just signals relaying the message of affection that had been left unstated up to this point.

The years passed. I could go into detail about what we experienced together, growing closer through conflict, especially through conflict. I could talk about how our minds also developed until we were discussing abstractions on the regular, discovering the properties of the metaphysical as we had explored the physical world together. I could talk about where our interests diverged paths, splitting for awhile, then emerging back into one road. I could talk about all these things in length, but anyone who's had a friend for any significant portion of time knows what they're like. And anyone reading these scribbled memories, nearly diary entries, should be sufficiently advanced in years to at least partially understand.

...A note about the style: I tell the story from the beginning as though it were not I who was the subject of the story. There are moments in time that I do not recall or must reconstruct, for they represent a time span that would be tedious or mundane. They are a montage of sorts, where you might notice the use of 'he' to refer to me. This is because there are parts of my life so far gone that it would be a lie to tell it in the first person. There are other parts, where I must separate myself from the text in order to communicate what I want to, for which I will revert to that style. But from here on, I shall tell it mostly in the first person...

What I do want to set down is hard to concretize in accurate verbiage. It is a subject that has been labored on since written word came into existence, and before that, depicted in cave paintings with the rough silhouettes of people in the ancient style, holding one another in embrace. I want to talk about that most nebulous, ethereal, and ungraspable subject: love. Specifically, that moment when it renders itself apparent, manifesting consciously instead of lying between two people, dormant and unstated.

Somehow, someway, we retained our innocence through the whole of compulsory education. Our diplomas had arrived in the mail. We were waiting to hear back from those colleges we had applied to. Our scores in grade school had always lain close together: the result of twin souls who nearly always did everything together. In retrospect, I wondered what our parents had thought at the time. Ours was a relationship normally observed between children of the same gender, or siblings.

The anticipated letters arrived. We had applied to the same schools, saying we would attend together, still without expounding on the whys. Three letters each, from our reach, expected, and safety school applications. We looked at each other, hesitating. The contents of those envelopes, our decisions based off of them would affect the entire course of our lives. We opened the safety envelope first, delaying hard decisions. Our marks were both plenty sufficient to expect what lay inside. Accepted, both of us. No sweat.

We didn't open the next for a long while; the tension was mounting. It was a game of Russian Roulette and we had avoided the first bullet. Problem was, in this game, your chances of being blown away only grew with each avoidance of tragedy.

Our shoulders were touching as we sat next to each other, legs dangling over the edge of the deck. I could feel her longer hair tickling my neck, sensitive of her as a woman in a way that had been occurring more frequently than usual as of late. I could smell the scent of her, animal, for she didn't use perfumes, disdained them in fact. That fact made me swoon at her all the more for it.

The second letter then, enough procrastination. We decided to open the most dangerous one, for our reach school, the one we applied to not because it was realistic but because of the off-chance that they would accept someone with lower than average-for-them scores. Negative and negative. A shared feeble smile, for no hard discussions had to be held for that.

We were both sure of what the last letter would contain, the path we would walk together. We opened our target school. I gaped at the result. She smiled, but after looking at me, frowned. She snapped the letter from my hand, gaped as well.

"But you had better scores than me!" She said.

I didn't respond. She cussed, then said, "I know why it happened." There was bitterness in that tone.

I looked at her, barely managing to screw on a questioning look over my desolate soul. The safety school was a joke, a place for flunkies and the underachievers. I was neither, really, taking mostly A's and B's.

"Affirmative Action," She said, "in order to encourage 'diversity' they selected me based on my gender. Otherwise you'd have gotten it, not me, or neither of us would have."

I looked at her. She was probably right, but so what? I didn't care about the policy. It might be good or bad. The decision had been made. Neither of us wanted to go to the safety school.

She said, "I won't go." I tried to dissuade her, reason with her, tell her not to throw her life away on my behalf. A petulant look appeared in her eyes. "No," she told me. Then, for the first time, "I love you."

The moment hung in the air like a falling stone. My stomach plummeted but, then, perhaps through some ancient instinct, I did what I never had before. I drew her close and kissed her.

We'd played around in the past, the way kids always do, but it had been nothing like this. It had been the exploring of exterior bodies, giggling at shapes and appendages, pre-sexual.

Her lips touched mine and we drew together, separated. Her cheeks were flustered and flushed, her eyes shimmering with some unspoken desire. I took her and led her to my room. The parents were away.

.......

The clothes fell and I stared at her breasts, topped by perky pink nipples. They were spattered with a galaxy of freckles, a cousin nebulae to the ones across the bridge of her nose and face. A shyness such as we hadn't felt with each other in a long time blossomed in the room. She was naked, standing in front of me while I just sat on the bed in only underwear. She was watching the bulge between my legs with a curious look that I only saw in her most intense moments.

She came to me, straddled my hips so that our chests were touching, gave a passionate kiss. I could have sat with her like that for eternity, exploring her mouth with my tongue, feeling her tits on my chest, and her groin wettening, against my raging boner. Raging! I had never felt anything like that before.

Sure, porn affects those areas but not in any way close or favorably compared to this. As a high school colt in the modern era, I had been raised on the internet.

The weight of her body against mine was perhaps the greatest part. I lay us back, holding her in an embrace as our mouths remained closed together, the first point of joining. Her breast and mine were the second, her hips gyrating and grinding against my covered manhood, the third.

So it was, a pact of souls sealed by a first taking, her of me and I of her.

You never really thought things through that young, especially with all the ego-boosting and brag tossing, imagining yourself at the center of the universe. She and I were no better. I know it sounds cliche, but when you're young you never think you're gonna die. Let me rephrase that. You don't know you're gonna die, not in the way a cancer patient or a suicide bomber or a death row prisoner does. It's something far off in the distance, to be worried on later and even when acknowledged, has the greater implications ignored. Those greater implications being the slow decay, the watching of things change, and not for the better.

This is what most conveniently forget to remember or communicate, so their kids don't know it, when maybe they should. At least until it happens to them, as the tyrannical march of time is implacable.

The kids think death will come to them in their current form. They ignore, or forget, that life is by nature protean. You grow and you shrink, blossom and wither, break and heal and break again. You make decisions based on your everlasting youth and vitality, not thinking, 'when I'm a forty-five year old with rheumatism or gout, or the beginnings of arthritis, the onset of an ulcer.' You don't think the glory of romance could ever fade, or reflect thoroughly on how the decisions you make have far flung consequences in your future.

Thus, "the folly of youth".

The years passed again. Though we had rocky periods, points in time where our friendship suffered like a boat on the rough, we always drifted back together. As a wise man once said, 'in a friend one should have one's best enemy. You should always be closest to him with your heart when you resist him'. Any conflict overcome simply magnetized us that much more.

A day came when the man walked home with a ring in his pocket. They did not live together.

He expected to see her later this day or the next and did not know if he was going to actually use the bizarre thing he had purchased. It felt wrong in the fold of his clothing, pulsing like a petulant spirit, whimsical and senseless, yet wielding a certain kind of power. Why had he done it?

It was not the love he felt that he questioned, but the symbol one was forced to use. He had splurged, spending nearly two months worth of his labor for a tiny circlet of minerals that had no effective purpose. It was not even on the upper half of the value spectrum for these objects.

He was a reasonable man, in his own estimation. Yet, he had been possessed to display his affection with a meaningless ritual, a going-through-the-motions, because it was expected. His life to this point had been one characterized by resistance to mindless ritual, maddeningly refusing to obey convention when it did not make sense in his own mind. So why did the ring have the power to overthrow the mentality he had cultivated his entire life? Baffling.

But maybe not so. His brain worked out the wrinkles. It must be, then, that the virtue of reason, which had triumphed in it's animation of him all his twenty-three years life, had finally met a worthy opponent. Her name was Twist .

He wondered at that for a while.

The next day had the sun shining, a joyous cast illuminating the land. He was inside. The glow of a 26 inch LED monitor illuminated the skin of his face, pooling shadows around his jutting nose and behind his ears. Sounds of shrieks and metal on metal poured around him, the song of arrows whizzing and thunking painfully into flesh, the murmur of fire spreading and then crackling, the crunch of bones breaking and the screams of dying horses.

Battle.

He wielded his sword with all the grace allowed to him by the mechanics of the game, slicing through his unarmoured foes with an ease to make the ancients jealous, switching from his blade to a mace whenever an opponent approached him dressed in steel. An arrow stuck in his shoulder but did not slow him, for the frenzy had come. He ducked a blow meant to take his head from his body and returned in favor, smashing the visor of his enemy down into their skull, using the blunt force from his mace to shatter cartelige and bone behind the shaped armor. Corpses surrounded him, including two of his fellows. Two were left, and he led them into the tower. It was a bitter fight to the top, up narrow staircases, but because of the confined space they were able to fight only their same number at a time, despite a multiplicity of opponents. By the time they reached the top, it was only he and another, both of them bleeding from prolific wounds.

The enemy's standard flapped in the breeze, mocking them and their mission: to take it down. One opponent remained. He stood calmly, watching them approach, leaning forward on his greatsword. Shelled in a suit of oxidized black iron armor, they knew him for a champion.

A phone rang. I cussed. I grumbled. I got up and grabbed it, snapped, "What?"

Her voice floated over the line, making me feel guilty immediately for the outburst.

He had lost himself in gaming. It was a subculture that could become addicting, hard to understand for an outsider, but not inherently immoral. The subject of gaming has many facets, one of the most contentious of them being the video game. In particular, the violent video game. They say it is mindless, non-constructive, harmful, if anything. Why would you want to kill and rend and destroy other ponies who were constructed so realistically with animation these days? Why would you lock yourself in a dark room and hurt your eyes?

She didn't see the point in it, which was his biggest problem with the thing. Sometimes it got in the way of their relationship, for a large part of his enthusiasm was entirely lost to her. Times were not always great, even though we loved each other and still do. Time always has her way, and she is not a kind maiden.

All things fade. The eagerness of young love, the intricacy of learning all the parts of another person—nooks and crannies and peaks and shadowed grooves. Things wear out. So do people and emotions. Life becomes a goings-through of the motions.

It doesn't matter if you're with your special somepony, or filling your life with exciting activities— water skiing, parachuting, hiking, travelling—or growing together mentally and emotionally, through reading and discussion and philosophy. No matter what, things will get tedious.

That's one thing that massively multiplayer online games taught: that even, sometimes especially, personal passions require a grind. No matter what you work at, even a lifelong dream, dullness will intercede itself. Again, the work of Maiden Time. You pay her a cruel indifference or disrespect when she is noticed, but pray for her to never leave. Secretly, your heart shall always covet her, until she is gone and your heart can covet no more.

But I groan on about despairing subjects, when happiness is really the realm I drift in most often. In the winter of my years, I remember the good times and bad, with hind site sometimes rendering both in the same bright light. Though she's gone from my physical life, she lives on in my mind, and all our petty grievances against each other mean nothing.

For now, I set this pen down. In memory only remain the fragments of a foal who once pranced around with a camera, capturing moments in time for the mischiefs of the CMC. Oh, how they blossomed and drifted, later on. But that is a story for another time. This, this is a rough sculpture depicting an awkward colt who stretched outward from himself, growing from a spindly tree into a great oak, living life as life ought to be lived.

So! To the end of days. In a wonderful manner, I come.