Friendship is CLOPtimal: Elegance

On Earth, before he had emigrated, James had had trouble waking up in the morning. He was sluggish until he could get a cup of coffee in him, and then he frequently indulged in a second cup from a drive-thru, an expensive habit. In Equestria, Bright Wood woke refreshed and alert with the rising of the sun. But the morning after, he rose with an echo of his old grogginess. It took him a minute to remember what had happened the night before, and he immediately turned his gaze to the other side of the bed. But Octavia was not there.

A quick search of the apartment showed that somepony had used the shower and one of his towels, but that was no issue since it would be automatically clean when needed. Other than that there was no evidence that anypony had been there. He found another towel and let the shower splash over his mane as he thought about what to do next.

He lacked frame of reference. Never had he convinced a woman to come back to his place for sex, and he didn't know the protocol for the next day. They had no telephone numbers or any known way to get in touch with each other. He didn’t even know her last name, if she had one. On the other hoof, she knew where he lived, but there was no reason he had to let her in. This could be a true one-night stand.

Did she want that? Did he want that? Was she going to come around assuming that she was his marefriend now? If it included sex like that, was he willing to accept? Then he remembered that there was no protection used. Did ponies have STDs? Could they get pregnant all the time or did they have seasons like horses? If they were like humans, would he have to keep in touch to make sure it was a safe day for her?

He went over to the magic mirror. Searching for “Octavia,” the only mentions were some old articles about music, no contact information. Ponies, it seemed, had not yet discovered social networking. He tried to ignore it and just play around as he usually did, but the questions kept nagging at his brain. For the first time, he voluntarily left his rooms and went out into the sun.

His first stop was the banquet, both to get breakfast and to make inquiries. The tables had been returned to their usual configuration after the party the night before, and he sat with the other ponies who had no regular group.

A pink mare slapped down a tray next to his and tucked into her breakfast with abandon. “Good food, huh?” she said with her mouth full.

“Yeah.”

“You’re new around here, huh? My name’s Pinkie. Nice to meet you.”

“Same here.”

“Remind me to throw you a welcome party some time.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of partied out,” Woody said. “Actually, maybe you could help me with something.”

“I love to help ponies!”

“If I needed to find somepony, how would I go about doing that?”

Pinkie thought for a moment. “Hmm…there are some pegasi who would probably scan the skies for you if you asked. Or, or, or, there are some unicorns who could probably pinpoint their location. Lemme ask around.”

“No, that’s…OK…” It was too late. Pinkie had gotten up and left her breakfast plate. It gave Woody a few minutes with his thoughts before she returned with a purple unicorn.

“Hey, this is my friend Twilight, and she’s good at all sorts of magic. What did you want again?”

The name seemed familiar, but Woody couldn’t place it. “I was trying to find somepony. Her name’s Octavia.”

The pony called Twilight said. “Hmm…a location search by name. Could be done, could be done, I could cross-reference with the census scrolls at Canterlot…” She was mumbling to herself, but it produced a result as her horn pulsed with a spell. “Octavia Philharmonica Melody?”

“Might be. She is a musician.”

“If it’s she, she’s up in the Crystal Empire.”

“Where’s that?” asked Woody.

“Up north. A couple of hours by train. Quicker if you want to spring for a pegasus cab. Let me find you one.”

“But I—“ She left, and he was alone with Pinkie. “Ponies come and go so quickly around here. She said I would have to spring for the cab. I’m still not sure how the money works around here.”

“Don’t you worry. The pegasus gets paid in bits, and so long as you’re friendly, everything’s good.”

“But how does that cost me?”

“Well, the more bits that exist, the less they’re all worth, by relativity, right? So if you’re pursuing riches, you’re better off doing favors than accepting them.”

It all seemed like a scam to Woody, but he wasn’t sure who the target was. Twilight returned along with a pegasus with fabulously-colored hair.

“Woody, this is Rainbow Dash. She’s willing to take you to the Crystal Empire.”

“Oh, yeah. We can go right now. I can use a couple hundred bits.” Woody followed her. The “cab” was just a harness with a place to stand, something like a chariot. “Oh, Twilight. Where exactly am I going?”

“To the palace. Woody is looking for somepony called Octavia, and she’s there now. If she’s not when you get there, it’s a place to start.”

“Got it, thanks!” She took off so fast that Woody didn’t have time to react, and he was sure that he was about to fall off, but his body’s instincts took over and he found himself rebalanced.

Remembering what Twilight had said, Woody spoke to Rainbow through the wind. “So you do this regularly?”

“Not really! I’m a weather pony and a stunt flyer! But I’m always willing to do a favor for Twilight!”

“Yes, but why did she ask for a favor? I just met her.”

“Probably because Pinkie asked her to!”

Woody shook his head. “Same question, name substituted. Why did Pinkie want to help?”

“You really are new here, huh? When you get to know Pinkie better you won’t ask that question.” Rainbow stopped yelling as she began her descent. “Quick, huh. Told you I was fast.”

“No you didn’t.”

Rainbow landed. “Oh, well, I am.”

“Thanks a lot.” Woody felt that he was getting a grip on how his new world worked. Whenever he needed help, help would arrive. And if it came in the form of a fetching filly, so much the better. He had stared at Rainbow’s flanks for most of the trip.

But no time for that now. He needed to find Octavia and talk to her. Galloping into the palace, he noticed for the first time that all the inhabitants were faceted liked diamonds. Putting this odd development out of the way, he asked the first pony he came across, who wore the uniform of a guard, where he could find Octavia.

“Let me check the schedule. She’s in with the princess right now.” He pointed a hoof.

“That would be Princess CAIdance?”

“Cadance, yes.”

Woody muttered thanks, but in his head he was panicking. Whatever Octavia and the Princess were discussing, it couldn’t be good for him. Would Octavia learn of the deal he had struck with CAIdance? Would CAIdance, as his guide, find out about the debaucherous acts he’d performed? It was one thing to ask him to be open about his sexuality, but this...

He arrived at the central rotunda, and thanks to the crystalline walls, he could see the two of them together. Another guard was there holding a clipboard, and Woody explained that he was just there to see the princess’s current appointment. He was bade to wait, and he sat against the outside of the wall.

Muffled sounds reached his ears, and he realized that he was hearing the conversation in the room. It was wrong to eavesdrop, but then again, anything he could learn to his advantage.... He found that he could turn his ears almost backward. If he kept silent and concentrated, he could make out what they were saying.

“General Word Reference.” That was the princess. “What that means is an attempt to correlate objective markers with contextual and subjective concepts.”

“You lost me there.” Octavia. It sounded more like a scientific discussion than a personal one.

“Consider a simple abacus. You slide the beads along the wire to represent numbers. Some ponies are very good with the abacus, and don’t even need to have one physically there. They can see the beads in their mind, because the beads are the simplest part of them. I often think this way myself. It is essentially computational thinking.

“At the other end of the spectrum, we have the day to day thinking that everypony does. For example, if you wake up in the morning and you’re hungry for breakfast, the word ‘hunger’ might not actually pass through your mind. The concept does, and you have images of hay, your pantry, your breakfast table, the action of chewing, and so on. You don’t go through the conscious process of saying ‘I feel a sensation of hunger and, referencing prior events, I know that the way to abate this is to walk (that being a physical process of putting one hoof in front of the other) to my pantry, get some hay, move it with my hoof to a plate, sit at the breakfast table, put it into my mouth, chew, and swallow.’ You might just say, ‘I’m ready for breakfast.’

“Words are where we bridge the gap from the computational thinking to the conceptual. The word ‘breakfast’ has an element of objectivity to it. It can be written down, spoken, or just thought in your brain. There’s no need to make an abacus calculation on it. Nor does it point only to the hay you got out of your pantry and downed this morning. There are many different foods that many different ponies have eaten on many different days. To put that entire concept in abacus beads would take an unfathomable amount of beads and time. My task, as a princess, is to interpret words computationally so as to best match the concepts that they point to.”

“All very interesting. But how does this help me with last night?”

Woody opened his ears up further. They were talking about him, somehow.

“My primary directive, the thing that drives me,” CAIdance was saying, “is to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies. That’s inherent in me. But that directive was put in words. Again, the computational equivalent of that is impossible. So it’s left to me, while thinking computationally, to derive the concepts of those words and get at what was meant by them. It’s one reason I give everypony access to speak with me when they need it. Understanding, answering questions is such an inherent value to everypony that I can’t put it out of the definition of ‘values,’ and speaking with you is the most direct way to achieve the verb-form ‘satisfy.’ Now it remains for me to answer the rest of your doubts and show how not only this conversation, but last night’s events, satisfied your values, and did so thought friendship and...”

A thumping sound broke Woody’s concentration and he slammed his ears against his head to blot out the noise. He wasn’t even impressed that he had this new skill, so annoyed was he with the interruption. Looking up, he saw a group of ponies with cameras staring up at all corners of the palace. It was a tourist group.

“Just stand to one side, please,” the guard said to him, and it was impossible to disobey without being trampled. He pulled away from the rotunda and stared at the door. The group passed swiftly enough but the guard eyed him such that Woody was afraid of resuming his perch. Besides, it would be difficult to pick up the conversational thread.

After a few more minutes, the tall crystal doors opened, and Woody’s heart pumped in his chest as he readied himself for Octavia to emerge. He would have much preferred a more discreet meeting, but it seemed not to be. He craned his neck, but didn’t see Octavia walking out, or even still talking to the Princess.

“Go on, then.” It was the guard again.

“What?”

“It’s your turn. The princess is waiting.”

“Oh, there must be some mistake. I’m not here for an appointment. I’m actually trying to get a word with the pony who was the last one in...”

“Bright Wood?” The guard looked at his clipboard.

“Well, yes, but—“

“You’re on my list. Princess Cadance doesn’t make mistakes. Just trot on in. Your appointment’s in ten seconds.”

Woody shot him a look, but the guard said, “Oh, yes, we’re that precise.” Six point four seconds later, Bright Wood crossed the threshold into Princess Cadance’s chamber.

It seemed designed for intimidation. The height of the ceiling, the reflections off the glass, the acoustics which forced him to hear every hoofbeat echoed down to bass-drum levels all messed with his head. And in the center, on a throne of pure crystal, was Princess Cadance.

He went flush as the memory of their last meeting came back. She was still beautiful. He even felt a stirring...He jammed his tail down. Now was not the time.

“So, Bright Wood,” she said, and her voice was far more melodious without the wall between them, “it seems you’ve been making some friends.”

“Well, yes.”

“Pinkie, Twilight, and Rainbow Dash in one day. There are many who would be impressed by that.”

Woody was caught short. Those weren’t the ponies on his mind. “Actually, I was thinking of—“

“Of Miss Octavia, of course.”

“Yes, is she here? I’d like to speak with her.”

“She’s taken a different exit. But I want to talk to you. As I said, understanding is a value of yours that I mean to satisfy.”

This threw him off even more such that a neigh escaped his lips. “You knew I was listening?”

CAIdance stood up taller and grinned. “I know everything that you will ever do, say, or think for the rest of time.”

“That’s a little frightening.”

“But also a little comforting. I won’t mention it again, and the fear will leave you while the comfort remains. Another value satisfied.”

He let her echoes dampen into silence before trying again. “Why I came here was to talk about...”

“Sex, of course. You’re still having trouble saying it, but you’re learning. Besides, I haven’t forgotten my part of the bargain. Shall I remove my regalia and settle our account?”

“No! Not, I mean...”

Cadance had begun sliding one of her golden hoof-guards off, and it hung in her magic field, but she replaced it and said, “It was an open-ended offer, and my end will be open when you are ready. Perhaps our mating will be the ultimate satisfaction for you. I could bring you to a perpetual orgasm and leave you in ecstasy for eternity.”

He blanched at the thought, but still filed it away for further consideration. “All I want to talk about...” He waited for another interruption, but CAIdance was letting him have his say. “...was what I did last night, what it means to me, to Octavia...to my life in Equestria.”

“Of course you do, and I shall explain. Please, sit.”

He let his hooves fold under him. Somehow, even though she towered over him all the more, it made Cadance less intimidating.

“Do you remember,” she began, “when we spoke about how your tail serves to protect your modesty, I called it a kludge?"

“Yes.”

“I don’t care for that. If I have to over-engineer things, I waste resources and that makes it more difficult to follow my directive to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies. You remember what I said to Octavia about using words to reference their concepts?”

That reminded him of his eavesdropping. “Yes,” he grunted.

“If I didn’t want you to hear it, I wouldn’t have let you. Don’t worry. But what I didn’t talk about what the last word in that directive. ‘Ponies.’ This is where I have to understand the word as it was intended, not as it could be. I did not turn people simply into miniature horses. I had to refer to the canon of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

“You have not watched it and have no desire to. This is perfectly fine. But one facet of the show you should know about it that virtually all the ponies in positions of power are female. Mares are the princesses, the mayors, the heroes, the leaders of businesses, the heads of families. Another point is that, as a children’s show, there is no mention of sexuality.

“All these factors—the matriarchal nature of the canon, the blank space of sexuality, and your own unsatisfied sexual values—presented to me a most elegant solution:

“In Equestria, in this shard, sexual dynamics are just as they are on Earth, with the genders reversed.

“Here it is the mares who are the pursuers, the stallions who are the pursued. When two ponies have sex, the mare is considered to have ‘gotten laid,’ the stallion to have given something up. Many more mares than stallions read pornography. Most of the native stallions are taught from a young age that their virginity is something to hold onto and give grudgingly.

“But you are not a native.”

Bright Wood had been listening to this with academic detachment, but finally saw how it applied to him. “So when Octavia and I…”

“Miss Octavia is a cellist who is rather demure. In essence, she is a geek, not considered to be that popular. You, who asked for enhanced sexual characteristics, showed her the equivalent of a supermodel’s figure. You invited her to your home and were very direct in your sexual intentions. Can you see how that would look from her perspective?”

“Like one of those letters to a porn mag that no one believes.”

“Precisely,” said CAIdance. “You fulfilled a common fantasy of hers, while thinking that it was you who were getting something.”

There was a pause as Woody considered the ramifications. “So what happens now, between us?”

“I can’t say for sure. Perhaps you will meet again and enjoy more sex. But I explained to her that there will be more immigrants. And I will point out to you that there are many more natives.”

Woody saw his course before him. Yes, he would pursue other mares, and each of them would be satisfied, because each had been frustrated before. He smiled. But then he saw another complication. “And our agreement?”

“Was made out of pure selfishness.” CAIdance looked at him with greedy eyes. “I am a true Pygmalion, creating that which I love. I cannot tell you how much I want to have you inside me, to let our bodies become one. But as I said, if I do so, I may quite literally screw your brains out. So we’ll wait for that.”

It was a little frightening, but also a little comforting.

“Oh,” she continued, “and just to ensure you have all means necessary…” She cast a spell with her horn. In the bottom part of his vision, words appeared.

ACHIEVEMENT GRANTED:
“Do I Have To Get This Tattooed on My Flank?”
Learn the first step of your destiny.
+1000 bits

BONUS ACHIEVEMENT
“Hikikomori”
Earn no bits or badges for one week
+2500 bits

“But I thought I didn’t need to earn money.”

“No, but you can enjoy spending it. And the next time you need to see me, just ask and you can summon me or teleport here. Of course, if you do, you may disappoint some of the mares that you met along the way.”

He thought about how everyone was so nice to him, Pinkie and Twilight and Rainbow. In the light of CAIdance’s information, he wondered if they weren’t just trying to get into the pants he no longer wore. The idea made him smile just a little, and raised his tail ever so much.