The Steel Beasties

What makes a morning better than one where you see your little sister smiling? A morning when your sister is smiling while playing with her new birthday present seems like good competition. It is truly delight to see such a foal play with a rolling toy by sliding back and forth with no apparent goal while giggling at your watching it. It makes one, in some ways, forget what the true relationship between the two is like. You may believe it to be a life long friendship. I merely see this as a ceasefire, nothing more, and nothing less. It's hard to find friendly ground when the title, "Overlord and Goddess of Equestria," can be easily transferred from a parent to her instead of me from even a cuter smile. I have a cuter smile. What makes this cute imp any better than me? She has one lone tooth sticking out of her lower jaw! Out of all jaws to start growing teeth in, she decided to start on the lower jaw? Sure. She looks like the stars of the night sky. I look like the bloody sun! She was even potty trained at the age of three! How does that make her any better than me? Mom even gave the analogy of the sun being able to roast an ant to a crisp, but the moon only bringing beauty in the sky! Besides, I made her birthday present.

The birthday present is an adorable little thing. I made it out of pure steel! Name some other big sister who makes their toys out of steel. She hasn't cut her mouth yet, except one time I will refuse to go into detail about. It looks like a little motor carriage with a belted track around the wheels. Being a pony who represents the sun, I have a strong interest in combustion, so I added a little turning turret and a teeny gun onto it. It was an adorable little thing, because it looked like a tractor you could laugh out loud to! I told little Luna about it, and she painted a name on it spelling "Loltraktor." It was cute, but it only made me more furious when mom commented on how Luna was finally knowledgable in literary arts only by the age of four. I learned how to spell "ant" at age......seven. To avoid any suspicion about my intelligence quotient, I shall conclude that this toy was cute, given a cute but ugly name, and only cause one maj----minor injury.

I like that toy. There would be times that i would try and grab at it to give it a spin myself. At least I wouldn't slide it up and down aimlessly. I would at least put it on imaginary adventures, like driving it through a canyon to defeat Stuff the Magic Dragon. But little Luna wouldn't share (more evidence why I was more responsible than her), so I decided to make another toy. Mine was going to be bigger and better than her little "leichtraktor." I crafted a bigger chassis, without the skirts this time, added more wheels and a larger belt, a more sophisticated looking turret, and then a longer gun. It was so much cooler than her little tractor. I even gave it a cooler, longer, and more scientific name: Pandycampywagon 2. It weighed more, so I could even slide it, let go, and the toy would drive by itself. While little Luna fiddled with her obsolete junk, I took my Pandycampywagon 2 to a spin through the mystical Everfree Forest! Ooooh! But, as expected of a little tyrant, Luna saw how much fun I was having and wanted to play with my toy!

Luna approached and asked, "May I play with that tank?"

"It is not a tank. It is a Pandycampywagon 2!" I replied, "And if you can remember the name, or even these instructions, you can play with it!"

"May I play?" asked Luna again.

"What is the name of my toy?" I quizzed her.

"It's, um, uh, a Panzerkampfwagen II Ausf. C! Yeah, that's what it is!" answered Luna confidently.

"No it isn't, so you can't have it!" I replied greedily.

"But you called it a Pandycampywagon 2, and it is supposed to be a Panzerkampfagen II Ausf. C exactly! You're wrong big Celery!" insisted Luna.

"Mom! Luna keeps mispronouncing the name of my toy!" I maturely yelled to Mom.

"Um," Mom replied, "Your sister is right. You are saying it wrong. Look in this encyclopedia, because Luna is exactly right!" I took a look at the book to find that the name was, oddly enough, 100% correct.

"How was I supposed to know the name of an other-worldly machine, or even verbally pronounce the Roman numerals and italics!? What are even Roman numerals?" I ranted and complained.

"You are eight years, so you should know. I wasn't the one to keep you held back in 2nd grade," Mom replied.

"How do I get held back in home school?" I asked in a surprised manner. "Honestly, 'Mother,' you prefer Luna over me just because she knows more 'encyclopedic' material. At least I am practical! I don't practice five instruments into 1:00 in the morning and wake up at 5:00!"

"You don't even do anything!" argued Mom. "I still love you as much as I love cute and intelligent little Luna here."

"Do you love me Mom?" asked Luna in an irresistibly adorable manner to Mom.

Mom whispered, "You, more? Oh yeah, big time!"

"I totally heard that!" angrily I replied. "I will get the crown someday! Someday! I will rule Equestria, and you cannot stop me!"

"Whatever. You will be arrested - oh excuse me - 'grounded' unless you play with your superiorly cuter sister with your tanks."

"Fine!" I shouted.

Luckily Luna forgot about wanting my tank (Darn! I have that name stuck in my head now!), so one problem was eliminated. The other problem, unfortunately, was that I was ordered to play with Luna in a coordinated game. Hmm. Was it possible to use this 'game' to prove, at least to teeny Moona, who was the superior alicorn? While thinking, I pulled out an empty table, and a little gridded landscape map to make what looked like a board game setup. I got two toy flags and placed them on two spaces on opposite sides of the map, and then I got some dice to make the idea of random chance. I also magically built some extra playing tanks, which Mom ordered me to name intelligently: the MS-1, T-1 Cunningham, Renault FT, T-26, BT-2, PzKpfw 35 T, T-1 Med, and the M-2 Light. The game was to go like this: We would each have 5 tanks on each side of the board, and we could take turns moving tanks while moving all our tanks in one turn to different spaces. Tanks like the BT-2 were faster, so they would get to move more spaces than the Renault FT in one turn. We would role dice to determine damage dealt by and to the tank, with more powerful guns being able to role more dice for a better score. Defenders would role dice to determine armour effectiveness. I thought of all these rules in less than 10 minutes, so that should at least account for something.

As expected, Princess Tuna picked all the cool tanks while I was stuck with the crappy ones, but I managed. The first game was a victory by the one and only me! And so was the next one, and the next one, and the next one! Even though my tanks were ugly, they seemed to be more powerful. I won about 23 games before I lost to one surprising move on the board.

"Hey Celery, look what I made!" she announced enthusiastically.

I looked to find a hideous looking tank. It didn't even look like a tank. It looked like a bloody stool on wheels. It had tracks, at least, but it didn't even have a turret. It had a long gun sticking out the front, so I insisted that Luna was cheating.

"I am not cheating," explained Luna, "I made a new tank like you. I made a Marder II. I call it a Tank Destroyer. Celery, if you wanted to win, you should have driven around it with the T-20 to the back to shoot its behind."

"But no level 2 tank can survive it!" I cried.

"Exactly, it is level 3!" giggled Luna. She showed the Marder II, as well as some level 2 tank destroyers she had made over the course of the games. What first seemed like an easy win turned out to be a neck-to-neck challenge. As frustrating as it seemed, it also looked like loads of fun. Luna and I were now in the field of battle, trying to craft a better tank than the other. Only one question remained: Who would win?