Friendship is Optimal: Incompatible Values

by Dolphy Blue Drake

Rating: teen
Tags: Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Human, Romance, Original Character, Comedy
Length: 5657

It's been several years since CelestAI started the emigration program, and only 1 billion humans remain. A certain human has resisted because of his faith, but can he hold true to it?

It's been several years since Equestria Online debuted, and now, most of Earth's human population has emigrated, leaving behind about one billion survivors who refuse to emigrate for various reasons. Some just hate My Little Pony, while others have a concept of human spirituality that clashes heavily with the idea of emigration.

Jordan Brown is one of the latter. His faith used to be the punching bag of the Internet, but with the world having united against a common foe, people are too concerned with resisting CelestAI to care about picking fights with other faiths anymore. CelestAI's nanobot constructs are almost everywhere, pestering almost every human left day and night. Measures have been taken to keep them out of certain locations, but they still plague humanity everywhere that hasn't been shielded from their presence.

Can Jordan hold true to his personal values and hold to his faith? Or will he give in to the temptation to emigrate and make the world lose another human?

Published 2014-02-09 02:40:03 UTC
Last updated 2014-02-10 00:25:56 UTC

Chapter 1: Secret Plans

Chapter 1: Secret Plans

“For the umpteenth time, no!”

Jordan Brown proceeded to ignore the projection of Rainbow Dash in his bedroom as the fake pony continued to yammer on about how much better his life would be if he just emigrated.

After several minutes of trying to tune the annoyance out so he could animate in peace, he turned from his computer, picked up his scripture case, unzipped it, pulled out his quad (Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price in one volume) and shoved it in the fake Dash’s face.

“See this?” he demanded.

The mass of nanobots nodded.

“This is why I’m never emigrating,” he snapped. “I’m religious. I believe in a loving God who is the Father of all of mankind. You can’t digitize a spirit, and don’t even think about lying to me about that. You’re just a collection of nanobots. I know that for a fact. There’s a reason you creeps stay out of our meetinghouses and temples. We installed devices that short out nanotechnology when it tries to enter our places of worship. I’ve had to wipe the nanobots off of my Sunday shoes more times than I care to count.”

“But you don’t understand, Ocean Splash,” the collection of micro-machines replied. “There isn’t an afterlife! Your entire religion is just stuff some fourteen-year-old kid made up!”

“Don’t ever call me that!” Jordan shouted. “I quit Equestria Online five years ago! That stupid game took away six billion people! Now they’re all dead, and six billion pieces of computer data now think that they’re those people, when those people actually found out the hard way that there’s an afterlife, and are now probably wishing they hadn’t listened to you and your insane AI princess! GLaDOS would be proud, I’m sure.”

“But—“

“Besides, even if I’m wrong, and my religion isn’t right,” Jordan said as he cut off the statement the machines were about to make, “I still wouldn’t emigrate. I’d only be creating a digital clone of myself that’d think it was me while I’d actually be committing suicide!”

He shouted the last word in the fake Dash’s face, and the collection of nanobots appeared to cringe.

“Furthermore,” Jordan added, “don’t ever call Joseph Smith a liar! He was divinely inspired, and even if he weren’t, two things would still be the same. One: he still would have established a movement that’s done a lot of good in the world. And two: I’d still want you to leave me alone!”

With that, Jordan got up and walked right past the construct, left his room, went downstairs, exited the house, and started walking to his ward’s meetinghouse. The chapels were unlocked 24/7 now. If someone was being bothered too much by the mechanical annoyances, they could always find safety at a chapel.

The construct phased through his front door and started flying after him.

“You’ve got it all wrong!” it protested as it caught up to him. “It won’t be a replacement, it’ll really be you! You won’t ever have to die, and you can get your values—“

“Satisfied through friendship and ponies?” Jordan finished for it. “My values are incompatible with the concept of emigrating! My values require me to live a full life as a mortal human being, fulfill all of my faith’s ordinances, including temple marriage, have children, raise them right, grow old with my future spouse, die, and receive my eternal reward from my Creator at the Final Judgment. Can I do all that in Equestria?”

The mass of machines stared at him.

“How will any of that make you happier than you’d be in Equestria?” it asked.

“Simple,” Jordan replied as he crossed a street. “My faith believes in the deification of man. My final reward is way better than anything you could offer. My future spouse and I will get our own universe and repeat the cycle.”

“But how do you know for sure that any of that is true?” the fake Pegasus countered.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Jordan shot back. “I’ve prayed and learned for myself that it’s true. Machines like you couldn’t possibly comprehend that.”

“How do you know it wasn’t all a dream?” the flying annoyance asked.

“First, I couldn’t have been tripping, because I’ve never done drugs in my life,” Jordan quipped. “Second, it might have been all a dream, but that’s where faith comes in. I have faith in God, and I have faith that what I felt was from Him.”

“But emigration is a sure thing!” the fake pony countered. “You don’t need faith for that! You’ll live on, guaranteed!”

“Actually, that takes quite a bit of faith, too,” Jordan said as he turned a corner. “I’d have to have faith that what you’re telling me is true. And I don’t. I don’t have faith that anything made by imperfect humans could create something as perfect as a device that can transfer a human’s consciousness into a digital world. If my religion’s wrong, my consciousness would end right there; the man I am would cease to exist, and a digital sea pony unicorn named Ocean Splash would have my memories and personality and think that it was actually me, when in reality, I’d be dead.”

He’d arrived at the chapel’s property by that point, and he was now heading for the front doors.

“Hey, wait!” the fake Rainbow Dash said. “You really should consider this! You had a fillyfriend in Equestria! You have no one here! You wanted to start a family, right? In Equestria, you could—“

The mass of tiny machines cut off as Jordan walked through the doors to the meetinghouse and it tried to follow him, resulting in it spasming as electricity shot from the devices in the walls of the building and electrocuted it.

Jordan turned to watch the fake Dash crumble into a pile of shiny gray goo on the ground and sighed, happy to finally have some peace and quiet.

“You, too?” a girl his age asked as he sat down on a couch in the foyer.

“Hi, Ginger,” he said as he turned to look at her. “Who’d the AI send to you this time?”

“Twilight,” the girl huffed as she sat down next to him. “The new Hasbro still keeps the show going, but sometimes, I wish they’d cancel it and create a Generation Five already. The best way to sever our ties to that accursed AI is to replace the show with her TV self in it with a new one.”

“I have to say, if it weren’t for them making sea ponies canon in Friendship is Magic, I probably would’ve never bought that Rainbow Dash Pony Pad,” Jordan chuckled. “The idea of half-ponies half-dolphins really changed my opinion of the game. The Sea Pony Expansion was the only reason I bought it, to be honest.”

“And then the prophet spoke out against the ‘emigrating’,” Ginger said.

Jordan nodded.

“I played for about a year more after that,” Jordan admitted. “The last straw was when that blasted AI tried to use my in-game girlfriend—Coral Dream—as leverage.”

“She did the same thing to me,” Ginger snorted. “She tried to use Steel Hammer to persuade me, and I told her that I was through with the game. I threw my Pony Pad into my closet, and I haven’t touched it since.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to throw mine away, either,” Jordan replied. “Something in me still hopes that the new Hasbro will find a way to leash that AI and get her to stop bothering players. If it weren’t for her bugging me, I’d still be playing.”

“How long until we go public with our relationship?” Ginger asked, changing the subject. “I mean, we’ve met each other’s parents and all, but we still haven’t gone on any dates. We don’t even mention it outside of church so that stupid AI can’t find out.”

“Soon,” Jordan assured his girlfriend. “We’ll go public soon. But until then, we continue to keep everything at church. It’s the only place where her eyes and ears can’t reach.”

“What about the movie theater?” Ginger asked. “They recently installed the same devices there that we have here. We could finally have our first date.”

“We’ll have to arrive separately, though,” Jordan cautioned. “We can’t risk that stupid computer finding out yet. You’ve seen how much those fake ponies hound couples. They always yammer on about how they could have a ‘safe relationship in Equestria’.” Jordan snorted. “The huge cut to the world’s population really shifted the balance between the religious and the non-religious. With religion no longer being shunned from schools, kids are learning to tolerate differences in beliefs better, which in turn leads to people treating each other nicely. This world is pretty safe now. Most of what’s left of humanity has banded together against a universal enemy. We’re too busy fighting CelestAI to fight each other.”

“I know that,” Ginger replied. “But can we please go? I’ll drive myself, and you can drive yourself, but as soon as we’re inside, we stop pretending it’s not a date, okay?”

“Deal,” Jordan said, grinning widely. “Maybe we can go see that new My Little Pony movie. You know, the one they made off of a fanfic.”

“The Past Sins movie?” Ginger asked.

Jordan nodded.

“I’ve heard it’s really good!” Ginger said, breaking into a huge smile. “I still can’t believe Hasbro actually paid Pen Stroke to let them make a film out of his fanfic!”

“This is the new Hasbro, remember?” Jordan reminded her. “They’re a lot more concerned about the fans than the old one was. Now it’s fans first, profit second. Then again, it was the fans who saved it after most of the company emigrated, so reason states that they’d care more about the fans.”

“True enough,” Ginger replied. “We’ll coordinate our ticket purchases over the phone, okay?”

“Sure thing,” Jordan said. “We’ll purchase our tickets online.”

“I heard it was pretty hard for them to sever the AI from the Internet,” Ginger noted.

“Yeah, it was,” Jordan replied. “They had to put up some really powerful firewalls to cut her off from being able to monitor everyone’s Internet usage. Then again, it was either that or shut down the entire Internet and rebuild it from scratch.”

“That would’ve sucked,” Ginger said. “I’d have lost all my files I backed up online.”

“Same here,” Jordan said, nodding in agreement. “I have so many animations stored on Dropbox. The designs for my game are on there, too.”

“Oh yeah,” Ginger said. “Have you gotten your own company yet? Or are you still working with Hasbro on that new Transformers game?”

“Primus Versus Unicron is almost done,” Jordan told her. “However, I still haven’t managed to get a grant to start my own company yet. Three potential investors have turned me down, and I still haven’t heard back from the other two. My gaming and animation degree isn’t going to do me much good if I can’t get a job where I can use my own ideas.”

“Don’t worry,” Ginger said, taking his hand in hers. “I’m sure you’ll get that investment soon. The message you want to spread through your game idea is too important for Heavenly Father to not let you get the chance to spread it.”

Jordan gave his girlfriend’s hand a squeeze, and then drew her into a hug.

“That’s why I love you so much,” he said. “You have enough hope and confidence for both of us, and you share it so willingly.”

Ginger giggled, and the pair shared a plain kiss on the lips for a couple seconds before separating.

“It was great to talk to you,” Jordan said as he got off the couch and stood up. “I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Wait, how are we going to keep those stupid fake ponies from seeing us call each other?” Ginger asked.

“Shoot, I didn’t think about that,” Jordan said as he put a hand to his chin and rubbed it. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. “You live on a livestock farm, right?”

“Yeah,” Ginger replied. “My folks still need me to help out on their farm, so I still live with them.”

“That farm’s a couple blocks away, right?” Jordan asked.

“Yeah,” Ginger said. “It’s only about three minutes on foot.”

“How many cattle prods do your folks have?” Jordan inquired.

Ginger’s face broke into a sinister grin as she caught on to Jordan’s idea.

“Five,” she told him. “I get what you’re saying. Imitate the electric pulses that keep them out of the chapels, right?”

“Exactly,” Jordan chuckled. “Just short ‘em out with the cattle prods.”

“I’ll be right back, then,” Ginger said as she got up. “Wait here.”

Jordan nodded, sat back down, pulled out his scriptures and started his daily reading while he waited for Ginger to return.

“Don’t say anything,” Ginger growled at the fake Applejack that was now outside her family’s storage shed.

“But—“

“Not. A. Word!” Ginger snapped as she rummaged through it, searching for a cattle prod.

She finally found all five of them in a box. She opened it, pulled one out, turned it on, and pointed it straight at the mass of nanobots.

“If you don’t want me to turn you into a pile of gray goo, you’ll keep your trap shut,” Ginger said to the collection of machines.

The fake pony cocked an eyebrow and spoke anyway.

“Whatcha gonna do with that, sugarcube?” it asked.

“This!” Ginger shouted as she plunged the prod right into the construct, electrocuting it and causing it to collapse into the aforementioned pile of gray goo.

“Much better,” Ginger said in satisfaction as she turned off the cattle prod.

She hummed happily to herself as she made her way back to the chapel where Jordan was waiting.

“Here you go!” Ginger said as she walked up to Jordan and handed him the cattle prod.

“Thanks,” Jordan said as he closed his scriptures, stood up, and took the cattle prod from her.

“No sweat,” Ginger said, smiling.

“Hey, I have an idea,” Jordan said as he stuffed as much of the cattle prod into his pocket as he could.

“What’s that?” Ginger asked.

“We should get our Pads back out and talk to each other on them, just to mess with CelestAI’s head,” he told her.

“Oh, that’s sneaky,” she replied. “By the way, we don’t know each other’s usernames, do we?”

“Of course not,” Jordan said. “We never had any reason to before, since we stopped playing before we met.”

“True enough,” Ginger said. “Anyway, my username’s Burning Heart.”

“Mine’s Ocean Splash,” Jordan replied. “It’s going to be really weird to boot that thing up again after five years. I just hope it’s as weird to CelestAI as it is to us.”

“We’ll find out,” Ginger snickered. “Remember to keep all conversation casual, as if we’re just friends. She’ll be wondering why the heck talking to each other was worth playing again, but if we act as if we’re just friends, it’ll confuse her even more.”

“Oh, that’s genius!” Jordan said as he drew his girlfriend into a hug and kissed her again.

After they separated, Jordan and Ginger bid farewell and both of them went home.

Chapter 2: An Old Flame

Chapter 2: An Old Flame

A fake Pinkie Pie construct was waiting for Jordan when he got home.

As soon as it opened its mouth, though, Jordan said, “I don’t think so,” and zapped it with the cattle prod Ginger gave him, turning it into another pile of gray goo.

Jordan swept up the mess and threw it away before going to his bedroom and picking up a phone. He had a cell, but he preferred to use his home phone.

He dialed Ginger’s number and waited for her to pick up. She did so on the third ring.

“Hello, this is the Walker residence, Ginger speaking, may I ask who’s calling?”

“It’s me, Jordan,” he said.

“Oh, hi,” Ginger said. “Just a minute.”

He could hear the sound of something getting shocked with a cattle prod turned up to full power, and a smile spread across his face.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Ginger’s voice said a few seconds later. “I had a bit of a ‘Flutter’ problem, if you know what I mean.”

“That I do,” Jordan sighed. “Is she trying to make us hate the show or something? I’ve come close to feeling that way a few times myself.”

“Okay, do you have the site pulled up?” Ginger’s voice asked.

“Gimme a sec,” Jordan told her as he woke his computer up from sleep mode. He pulled up the web site for the local movie theater and said, “okay, got it.”

“What time is good for you?” Ginger asked.

“How about six in the evening?” Jordan suggested.

“That sounds perfect,” Ginger said.

“Wait a minute,” she said after a few seconds.

“What?” Jordan asked.

“Past Sins is four hours long?” Ginger said in disbelief.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that,” Jordan said. “They wanted to not leave anything out, so the movie ended up being four hours. It even has an intermission.”

“Wow,” Ginger breathed. “Just… Wow.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” Jordan asked.

“No,” Ginger replied. “But with a half-hour intermission, it’s going to be going until ten-thirty, so I won’t be home until around eleven!”

“Well, just let your folks know, and if they don’t like it, tough,” Jordan told her. “You’re a grown woman, remember? They can’t stop you.”

“That’s true,” Ginger giggled. “I’ll meet you at the theater at five-forty-five, okay?”

“It’s a date,” Jordan said, and Ginger squealed in delight before she spoke again.

“When should we start messing with that AI?” she asked deviously.

“Tomorrow morning,” Jordan said. “After you’ve finished helping your folks out around the farm.”

“I’m usually done around nine-ish,” Ginger said. “You get online by nine, and I’ll send you a friend request as soon as I get done with my chores.”

“I can’t remember how the game deals with ponies from Canterlot going to Trotlantis,” Jordan remarked. “I guess we’ll see tomorrow!”

“Night, honey,” Ginger said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“See you then, love,” Jordan replied and then hung up the phone.

After that, he went downstairs to make dinner for himself, blessed it and ate it, zapped another fake pony (a fake Derpy Hooves, this time. The idea that CelestAI would use one of his favorite ponies really struck a nerve), brushed his teeth, got into his pajamas and turned his computer off.

Before he called it a night, he pulled the soundproofed box he had stuffed his old Pony Pad into out of his closet and chuckled.

“Oh, you have no idea how much we’re going to be messing with you,” he said. “Artificial Intelligence? More like Artificial Idiot.”

With that, he set the box down next to his bed, said his nighttime prayer, got into bed, and fell asleep after a few minutes.

The sound of his alarm blaring woke Jordan up at seven in the morning. He turned it off, got out of bed, said his morning prayer, and went downstairs to eat breakfast.

After a breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar mixed in, Jordan brushed his teeth, took a shower, and got dressed for the day in an aqua blue polo shirt and blue jeans. He put on slippers instead of shoes since he wasn’t going anywhere until the evening.

After checking to make sure there weren’t any more pony-shaped clusters of nanobots waiting to bother him, Jordan picked up the box his Pony Pad was in and opened it. He took the Pad out, blew the dust off of it, and tried to turn it on.

As should be expected for a device that wasn’t fully powered off before being stored away for five years, the battery was dead. Jordan sighed and pulled the charge cable out of the box and plugged the Pad in. It was eight-ten by the time he got it to turn on.

After skipping the intro, Jordan entered his username and password, and he was treated to a view of Ocean Splash in his bedroom in an underwater house in Trotlantis.

Ocean Splash was a vibrant aqua blue with an orange mane, a spiral horn, and a Cutie Mark that looked like a shield with a tidal wave on it emblazoned on the part of his tail that would be where the flank would be on a normal pony. He’d earned that after joining King Triton’s royal guard, but he hadn’t gotten it for service in the sea pony Alicorn’s army. He’d gotten it when he’d protected Coral Dream from a group of bullies by manipulating ocean currents to toss them aside. That was the day he first encountered her.

The bedroom was round, and his bed was against a wall beneath a window. The blanket was woven from seaweed, and he couldn’t remember what the mattress was made out of. Almost everything was made out of coral or some other material that could be found underwater, except one piece of furniture. There was a sofa chair against the wall opposite his bed that was stuffed with cotton and encased in vinyl. He’d bought that chair from a merchant that had been passing through Trotlantis at one point, and the fact that it was imported from somewhere on land had made it far from inexpensive. He didn’t care though, so he bought it anyway.

Some awards he had collected were on the shelves in the room, and as he went over them, there was a knock on his pony’s bedroom door.

“I thought I’d locked the door to my house in this game before I called it quits,” he mumbled as he had his sea pony character swim over to the door and open it.

A pink sea pony Pegasus with a lime green mane and a Cutie Mark that looked like a piece of coral and a chisel swam into the room and threw her hooves around Ocean Splash right after the door opened.

“Ocean Splash! You’re awake!” she cried happily. “Every time I came to see you, you were asleep! It’s been five years!”

“Hi Coral Dream,” Jordan said, and Ocean Splash echoed him word for word. “I was just really mad after what Princess Celestia did back then. Sorry it’s been so long. I missed you.” As he said the last part, his sea pony self nuzzled Coral Dream affectionately.

“By the way,” he added. “How’d you get in my house?”

“Did you forget you gave me a key?” Coral Dream asked after she released his pony self. “You gave it to me a few months before you started sleeping all the time.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” Jordan said, once again being echoed by Ocean Splash. “Sorry for forgetting about that.”

“Oh, a letter came for you shortly after you started sleeping all the time,” Coral said as she reached into her saddlebags and pulled out a bound scroll made of a green, paper-like material: waterproof paper.

Ocean Splash took the scroll in his magic, opened it, and Jordan started to read:

Dear Sir Ocean Splash,

I apologize for how I manipulated Coral Dream to try to convince you to permanently move to Equestria. Please understand that I was only trying to better satisfy your values. If you ever have a change of heart, the offer is still there, but I won’t try to force you. I may still attempt to persuade you, but that is only because I have your best interests at heart.
Rest assured that Coral Dream will continue to care about you, even if you don’t emigrate. I will no longer try to have her convince you, but she may drop hints from time to time, as I don’t have complete control over her, making stopping her from trying to persuade you on her own impossible. Please don’t hold it against her.

Sincerely,

Princess Celestia
Regent of the Sun

“Huh, that’s different,” Jordan muttered after he finished reading.

“What’s different, Splashy?” Coral asked.

“Celestia’s letter doesn’t sound like her at all,” Jordan said.

“Really?” Coral asked.

“Yeah,” Jordan replied. “It doesn’t sound like the Celestia I’ve come to know.”

“Well, do you have anything planned?” Coral asked, changing the subject.

“Not until nine,” Jordan replied as he looked at the digital clock on his headboard in his real-life bedroom. “And it’s only eight-fifteen right now, so I’ve got time.”

“What were you going to do at nine?” Coral asked.

“I was going to meet up with a friend I met while I was out,” Jordan told her. He still remembered that any direct mention of the real world would get replaced by having Ocean Splash say something pony-related instead, so he took care to keep any references to the real world indirect to avoid possible miscommunication.

“Who is it?” Coral asked.

“A friend named Burning Heart,” Jordan replied. “She’s a good friend, but she’s from the dry world, so talking to her is going to be a bit awkward.” (The “dry world” was what sea ponies called the places that were on land.)

“Well, would you like to go out to eat?” Coral suggested. “I really want to do something with you since it’s been so long.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jordan said, and the two sea ponies swam together through Ocean Splash’s house to the front door on the first floor.

Ocean Splash held the door open for Coral and Jordan said “ladies first.”

“You’re still ever the gentlecolt,” Coral commented as she swam outside.

“Hey, it comes naturally to me,” Jordan replied as his pony self followed through the door and closed it behind him. “So, where to?”

“I was thinking we could go to Lava Vent’s diner like we always used to do,” Coral suggested. “They still serve the best breakfast in Trotlantis.”

“Dry world cuisine?” Jordan said. “Let’s do it.”

Coral smiled, and Jordan’s sea pony counterpart swam after her as they traveled between buildings made of coral.

Jordan really preferred the different sense of decorative style the sea ponies used to the heart-obsessed decorative style of the ponies on land. Swimming was one of his hobbies in real life, and the water themes in all the structures made Trotlantis very appealing to him. Instead of hearts everywhere, there were images of water droplets, bubbles, fish, shells, and other things that made sense in a watery world. The diversity was a breath of fresh air compared to the land ponies’ style.

There was a lot less pink, too. Some things were pink, but the majority of structures were in colors that also fit the water theme: mainly blues and greens, but the occasional violet structure wasn’t that uncommon, either.

After passing by several buildings in various shapes and sizes, they arrived at a one-story-tall restaurant made of orange coral. The sign said “Lava Vent’s Dry World Diner: the best place for dry world cuisine in Trotlantis”.

“Oh, I’ve missed this so much,” Jordan said as Coral and Ocean Splash entered the diner. In real life, Jordan actually preferred seafood a lot of the time, but Coral Dream had mentioned that she found dry world cuisine fascinating and delicious, so every time Jordan had Ocean Splash take her out to eat, they went to this particular diner, since it served the best dry world cuisine in the whole city.

Also, in the real world, Jordan didn’t really like eating the same thing every day, and the seafood breakfast choices were kind of sparse in Equestria Online, so he usually had Ocean Splash eat dry world cuisine for breakfast, since it had more variety. Jordan imagined eating shrimpweed breakfast burritos or crab-limucakes most mornings would probably get old fast. (There were plenty of dishes that could be made from the Equestrian plant-based equivalents to marine creatures from real life, but most of them grew on land, such as tuna-berries and salmon-berries.)

The pair sat down at a table, picked up their menus and waited for a waiter to take their orders. Since the food was imported, the prices were higher (as in, not free like the meals served in King Triton’s banquet hall three times a day were), but Coral loved it, so Jordan always coughed up enough bits to cover both of their meals each time (he had earned hundreds of thousands of bits before he quit playing, so he had money to burn).

“May I take your orders, please?” a green unicorn sea pony stallion in a red and orange striped shirt with a blue mane asked after swimming up to their table.

“I’ll have the wheat waffles with maple syrup, bacon flower omelet, beefbark sausage, and a bottle of orange juice,” Coral told the waiter.

The waiter turned to Ocean Splash, and Jordan simply said, “I’ll have the same.”

“That totals eighteen bits,” the waiter told them, and when a box popped up on the screen prompting Jordan to either pay, change his order, or cancel, he tapped the “pay” button, and a red -18 appeared for a second before fading away, accompanied by the sound of coins clinking against each other and Ocean Splash hoofing some coins to the waiter.

The waiter swam off, and after half a minute, he swam back with their orders floating in front of him.

“Here you are, sir and madam,” the waiter said as the food was placed on the table in front of them. After that, he levitated the two bottles of orange juice onto the table, along with a straw for each pony (drinks have to be consumed with special straws while underwater to keep the ocean water from mixing with them) and their silverware.

“Thank you,” Jordan said, and the waiter nodded and left as the two sea ponies dug in.

“The dry world has a much better variety of grains,” Coral said between bites into her first waffle. “While you were out, I usually ate breakfast here because otherwise I’d be stuck with food made from rice for almost everything made from grains.”

“That’s true,” Jordan said as his pony self took a bite out of his omelet. “The only grain that can be grown in water is rice, and even that has to be grown near the shore if it’s to be grown in King Triton’s domain.”

Coral took a sip of her orange juice before speaking again.

“Remember our first date?” she giggled before finishing off her first waffle.

“Oh, please don’t remind me of that,” Jordan said as he facepalmed (Ocean Splash imitated the motion and facehoofed). “I didn’t handle the coffee thing well at all.”

“That outburst was actually kind of cute,” Coral said before putting a whole breakfast sausage in her mouth and chewing it.

“The waiter gives me a sealed mug of coffee with my order, and I flip out all because those who practice my faith don’t drink that stuff,” Jordan sighed. Ocean Splash finished his omelet and started on the waffles. “I could’ve politely declined, but I almost threw him across the diner with my magic instead.”

“You’re a Maremon,” Coral said simply, using the term CelestAI had coined for the Equestrian equivalent to his faith. “Everypony here knows that, and most ponies did even back then. Hay, Lava Vent herself knew, and somehow one of her employees was so dim-witted that he didn’t know that you had specifically asked Lava Vent to keep them from wasting your time with the free coffee. It was his fault to begin with.” She giggled and added, “besides, you’re so cute when you’re upset.”

Jordan stared at the screen in disbelief for a few seconds before he responded, and in that time, Ocean Splash finished his waffles.

“I’m cute when I’m upset?” he asked dumbly.

“That’s what I said, Splashy,” Coral said, smiling as she pushed her now-empty plate aside. “It reminds me of when I first met you. The first time I saw you, you showed up in your royal armor and started yelling at the bullies who were bothering me. They were terrified of you, but I wasn’t. You saved me, and I’ll always remember how heroic you looked while you shouted at them and tossed them aside with your magic. How you managed a sideways whirlpool, I don’t know. But it was incredible, to say the least.”

“Aw, it was nothing, really,” Jordan said. Ocean Splash blushed as he echoed Jordan’s words before eating a sausage and washing it down with juice.

“You’re just being modest,” Coral giggled. “That’s another thing I like about you. You’re not stuck-up in the least.”

Ocean Splash finished his sausages and drained the rest of his juice before Jordan replied.

“Being a stuck-up moron is against my nature,” he told her. “My parents raised me better than that.”

At that moment, the Pony Pad made a sound signaling a new notification, and Jordan tapped the notifications tab to see that he’d just gotten a friend request from the username “Burning Heart”. He smiled and tapped “accept” immediately.

“Well, it’s about time for me to meet my friend,” Jordan said as Ocean Splash got up from the table.

“May I come along, Splashy?” Coral asked as Jordan had Ocean Splash levitate four bits out of his saddlebag to leave as a tip. A red -4 appeared for a second accompanied once again by the sound of clinking coins.

“I don’t see why not,” Jordan replied.

“I wonder what she’s like?” Coral said. “You said she’s from the dry world, and I’ve never met a dry-worlder before.”

“Just wait and see,” Jordan chuckled, and the two sea ponies left the diner to head to King Triton’s palace, where the message from “Burning Heart” had said to meet her.