The One Who Got Away

Chapters

1. The Baron of Fen
2. Castle Paradise
3. Neighbors
4. Pressure Test
5. The Tempest
6. Waves
7. Anchorage
Author Comments, Ramblings, and Footnotes of Awesomeness

1. The Baron of Fen

The One Who Got Away
The Baron of Fen

“I sing of arms and the pony, he who, exiled by fate…”
—Virgill, The Aeneid

“Four-hundred and thirty five errors.” Those noble eyes had never once quit scanning the corrected document since Gaberdine had brought it to her, and he squelched a small feeling of triumph at the thought that Her Highness truly appreciated his work on the yearly budget.

“Yes, Your Highness,” echoed Gaberdine, still drawn up in the respectful posture he had assumed nearly a half-hour ago. His hooves hurt a little and his throat felt somewhat dry, particularly whenever Princess Celestia would take a small sip out of the teacup to her side. It was worth it to see the intense look of concentration on Her Highness’ face as she checked through the numbers and edits that his working group had put together on the unified Equestrian budget for the upcoming year. It was the high point in his career to date, and he had nearly burst with pride when the older ponies in his department had nominated him to make the presentation to Princess Celestia. After all, Parliament had taken many weeks of strenuous wrangling to get the budget passed, and the critical errors that he had uncovered needed to be dealt with before it could be signed and become law.

“Mostly missing apostrophes and improper capitalization,” she added.

“A correct budget is critical for the proper running of the country,” Gaberdine said, trying to keep the pride out of his voice. “There are several errors in the sums, also.”

“Seventeen bits,” said Celestia. “Shocking.”

“Indeed,” agreed Gaberdine. “Once all of the errors are corrected, the Parliament will need to vote on the budget again to make it legal.”

There was an exceedingly long period of time where Celestia did nothing but remain staring at the small red marks on the thick document in front of her. Then she set the budget down on the table with a thud and drew out a quill and some parchment.

“Lord Gaberdine,” she said quietly while writing, “the Equestrian government spends approximately one hundred and thirty-seven thousand bits per minute. The diligence you have displayed during your career in the Royal Treasury is a credit to your House, and to Duke Whinnysfield, your father.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.” Despite his best efforts, a small smile began to appear on Gaberdine's face.

“I’m not finished.” The scratching of the quill continued until Celestia rolled up the parchment and held it in front of herself, hovering in her golden magic. “Diligence such as this deserves a reward comparable to the benefit you are providing to our beloved country. Your father’s title shall eventually pass to your eldest brother Elderberry, if I am correct?”

“Yes, Your Highness. Or my second-eldest brother Plum, in the event Elderberry is unable to carry on the family name.”

Celestia nodded. “As you are aware, certain services to the Crown can be rewarded with noble titles, as House Whinnysfield was rewarded several centuries ago for their creation of the reverse-indexing filing system used by all branches of our Civil Service, correct?”

His heart beat faster with anticipation and unable to take his eyes off the scroll hovering in front of his nose, Gaberdine merely nodded.

“Good. For services above and beyond the call of your Royal duties as Court Clerk, I hereby bequeath you the Barony of Fen, under one condition.” The scroll bobbed in front of Gaberdine’s nose, and all he could do was follow it up and down while trying not to drool on the table. “A census.”

Blinking twice, Gaberdine echoed, “A census?”

Floating the scroll over to land in front of the stunned stallion, Princess Celestia nodded. “Yes, a census. You are to prepare a precise enumeration of every intelligent creature who lives in your new Barony by the end of this week, or the lands — such as they are — revert back to the Crown. The task would seem to be well within your ability. Do you think you can handle your new responsibility, ‘Baron’ Gaberdine?”

~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~

After a somewhat panicked trip to the family library and a desperate journey through the records revealed that there had been a reasonably large Barony of Fenwick that encompassed the Fen Valley several hundred years ago, Gaberdine was feeling a little better. The original lands and the title had been divided into two smaller baronies — the Barony of West Fenwick and the Barony of East Fenwick — although there was an entry in the ledger that indicated a third son had managed to retain some of the original lands and the title of Baron, along with an ancestral castle. As a third son himself, Gaberdine considered the resulting split to be much more equitable than his own much less profitable division of the family estate, and prepared for his departure with haste.

Time was of the essence. With less than a week before the rather odd deadline and several sheets of dragonfire-imbued parchment from Princess Celestia to return the resulting census, Gaberdine used his own personal funds to hire a pegasus carriage for the long trip. He packed lightly, only a half-dozen books and his personal items, and with a kiss to his mother, he departed on his journey.

2. Castle Paradise

The One Who Got Away
Castle Paradise

“O Mussel! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate.”
—Virgill, The Aeneid

“Pardon me.” Gaberdine tapped one hoof firmly on the shaded gangplank leading into a somewhat dilapidated steamboat. Instead of a modern screw-driven ship, it actually appeared to be a style from at least a half-century ago. A sidewheeler if the rather odd lump on this side was what he remembered from his history lessons. Perhaps it was a badly maintained antique or museum piece in need of a little hobby work. Having once put together a working model of a paddlewheel steamboat, Gaberdine considered the wooden structure with a critical eye towards the future.

As a noble, it would be his responsibility to fritter away a certain amount of bits on irresponsible hobbies that could be used as conversation starters at court. Several of the young nobles had lately taken to sailing sky-yachts among the peaks of the Canter Range — which he viewed as needlessly dangerous — and purchasing a small riverboat might prove a useful and novel step in the endless dance of court politics. Perhaps he even could find some crafty fellow to fix it up for him after he took over his new barony, provided Gaberdine was able to find the cursed thing. Asking directions from the ponies in the vineyards of East Fenwick only produced the rather terse ‘Go West’ response, and when asking the same question in West Fenwick, the response was just as universally the inverse. At least a helpful soul had directed him to this area when he had mentioned Castle Paradise with the maddeningly obscure addition of the phrase “You’ll know it when you see it.”

He tapped one hoof against the gangplank again, hearing the muttering and faint thumping of a pony walking up a set of stairs until a bedraggled earth pony trudged into view, his auburn mane a horrible contrast to his oddly colored coat. The elderly pony seemed a shade darker than orange, but just a tinge lighter than red, with dark black and brown striped smears that indicated his position as a mechanic or possibly some other sort of manual labor on the steamboat.

“Can I help you, young sir?” The elderly earth pony balanced a pair of glasses on his muzzle to squint at Gaberdine and the impatient pegasus carriage which he had hired. It had become more important to find his newly bequeathed castle as time had gone on today, as the muttering from the pegasi pulling his transportation had only been able to be quelled by the application of a large percentage of his traveling money for overtime.

“Yes, old-timer. I’m looking for Castle Paradise. I was informed that it was somewhere in this vicinity—” Gaberdine looked around the somewhat flat landscape, which other than the cottonwood trees towering overhead was notably lacking in a defensible short mountain or even tall hill to park a castle “—but we have not been able to locate it. Can you give us directions to the castle?”

The elderly pony paused in thought, his jaw moving in short jerky motions until he spat a stream of dark tobacco juice to one side. “Sure thing. You found it. Are you making a delivery?”

Gaberdine blinked. “I found it? Where?”

“Right here.” The crusty old pony gestured to an arch over the gangplank with IHTFP painted in large letters, and below in smaller golden script, the words S.S. Paradise IV.

“This isn’t a castle,” said Gaberdine. “It’s a boat.”

“Ship,” corrected the old pony. “She’s been docked for half a year now, since Baron Miller passed away. I’m the Seneschal until Princess Celestia appoints another baron or my arthritis gets bad enough that I gotta retire.”

“My castle is a ship,” murmured Gaberdine. “Are the ancestral lands that come along with the title a swamp?”

“Not exactly,” said the old pony, offering no further information.

“Well…” For a long moment, Gaberdine considered just climbing back into the carriage and flying home. This was obviously one of Princess Celestia’s epic pranks, and he was the punch line. Still, it was a barony in name if nothing else. If the old earth pony was taking care of all of the various particulars of running it by himself, all he really needed to do was to stay long enough to fill out a census. Then he could return to Canterlot as Baron Gaberdine of Fen, much as several of his peers were barons or viscounts of bits of land so small that a stone could be thrown completely across them from one border to the next.

“I am the new Baron Gaberdine of Fen,” he said instead. “I have been sent by Princess Celestia to administrate this barony, which was left without heirs and reverted back to the Crown. Might I have your name?”

“I’m Sienna, Seneschal of the Barony of Fen and keeper of Castle Paradise,” said the old pony with a certain pride. “But you can just call me Sen of Fen. Come on in and we’ll get your stuff settled down in the old baron’s rooms. You play chess?”

“Somewhat,” said Gaberdine, motioning the carriage drivers to begin unloading his meager luggage. “I’ve never seen the point of it all.”

The old pony merely grunted, contributing his rather ineffective assistance to the process of unloading and storage. The old baron must have been a fairly competent unicorn, from the number of waterproofing spells around his small but tidy bedroom and extensive library. Some of the old baron's collection was appropriate for his station, from detailed genealogy charts to family histories, but some indicated the presence of younger ponies, such as an entire series of foal’s literature involving the adventures of a young duck named Quackers.

“So, Sen.” Gaberdine considered the elderly pony helping to arrange his small collection of scholarly awards on a nearby bedroom table. “I wasn’t able to get a straight answer from anypony else, but since you’ve been running the barony as seneschal for the last few months, you should know. What exactly are the extent of the Barony of Fen’s lands?”

“Well, it rather depends, sir.” Sen finished hanging up the engraved diploma from the Canterlot School of Business and tried to get it level. “You see, when the old Barony of Fenwick was broken up, one son claimed all of the lands west of the River Fen, and the other all of the lands east of the river. The third son was a thinker, though. He went straight to Princess Celestia and had both of his other brothers sign a pledge that the lands that they claimed were the full extent of their respective baronies.”

“I don’t see what relevance this has to a third barony,” said Gaberdine. “If one son took everything west of the river, and the other son took everything east of it…” The riverboat they were on took that moment to lurch slightly at its moorings and Gaberdine paused to consider just exactly how convoluted Princess Celestia could be when provoked.

“Yup,” said Sen. “Welcome to the Barony of Fen, consisting of everything underwater from the mouth of the ocean delta to the borders of East and West Fenwick.”

~ ~ ~ ⌛ ~ ~ ~

The newest Baron of Fen sat at his desk, carefully arranging a quill and several sheets of paper for a first draft of the census of his new lands. Or waters, as the case may be. The west side of the steamboat, or steamship as it would seem, had a magnificent thick glass window with multiple flat panes of glass that curved ever so slightly and broke the colorful sunset into a bright and cheery display that washed across his desk and the workroom he was sitting in. Next to him, the old earth pony whistled quietly as he ran a wire brush through a complicated brass fitting that was one small part of the steam condenser spread out across the deck below, a task that the previous baron had started, but had been so inconsiderate as to die of old age before finishing. The soft thump, thump, thump of the auxiliary generator at the rear, or aft end of the ship had faded into his mind already and seemed perfectly natural. It provided power for several modern lights that kept the desk just as illuminated as the finest desk in his Canterlot home, as well as illuminating the blank sheet of paper that he had intended on filling out nearly a half-hour ago.

Finally he took a deep breath and addressed Sen. “So my entire new barony is underwater, the only inhabitant is you, and ‘Castle Paradise’ is stuck here until the engine gets fixed.”

The old pony thought for a moment before going back to work. “Yup.”

“And the closest civilization where I could get a stiff drink is a small town about a half-hour trot away, correct?”

The old pony considered for a moment, then got up and opened up a nearby cabinet. “The old baron didn’t cotton much to whiskey on account of wanting to make a good impression on the neighbors, but I figures you need a drink, sir. Besides, the seaponies probably got scared off because of your carriage anyway. Don’t think we’ll see hide nor hair of ‘em until tomorrow late, at the earliest.” After pouring a hefty slug into the glass and sitting it to one side of his new baron, he dampened the rag down with another hefty dose and began to polish the inside of the brass valve.

Gaberdine took the half-filled glass in his magic and regarded the amber liquid inside with substantial skepticism. “Seaponies?”

“Yes, sir.” Pouring himself a small shot of whiskey, Sen sat back down at his bench and resumed polishing the persistent last bits of flakey scale out of the brass fitting.

“You do know that’s a river out there, Sen?” said Gaberdine, gesturing with the glass at the slow roll of waves that could be seen outside.

“Yep.” The old pony turned the brass fitting upside down and examined a particularly stubborn white flake of scale that was resisting the best efforts of brush and solvent-soaked rag.

“And seaponies are from the nature of the name, sea creatures, correct?”

“Can’t get nuttin’ past you, sir.” Sen took a thin tool that looked a little like a brass icepick in his teeth and began to clear the tiny lime deposits on the interior of the brass fitting with cautious scratches.

After waiting a sufficient amount of time to put a dent in the glass of admittedly fine whiskey/cleaning solution and to see if the old pony was about to admit the joke, Gaberdine continued, “How many ‘seaponies’ are there in the river?”

“Don’t rightly know, sir.” The old pony spit out the tool and tapped the fitting against the table with a dull clunk. “Them being underwater critters, that is. And terribly shy, too.”

“Right.”

Gaberdine regarded the blank sheet of paper for a lengthy period before dipping his quill and setting down a first draft. It took very little time, even after touching up the letters with ornate swoops and loops on a totally unnecessary second draft.

He transcribed the letter onto the first sheet of enchanted parchment with meticulous care, ensuring that every loop and swirl was as perfect as it could be before rolling it up into a scroll and tying it with a red ribbon. It only took a light magical touch on the dragonfire-imbued scroll for it to burst into green fire and flow out of the room in a trail of smoke, vanishing off to the north on its rendezvous with Princess Celestia, who would get it almost at the exact moment she was lowering the sun for the day. In all probability, she would show it to her sister and the two of them would share a laugh at his expense, which was perfectly fine.

After all, he had gotten a title out of the deal, and that was all he needed.

He never even noticed the small pair of green eyes that watched from the dark lagoon as he turned off the light and went to bed.

Barony of Fen
Official Census

One (1) crazy old earth pony named Sen, currently residing on a broken houseboat.

By your command,
Baron Gaberdine of Fen

3. Neighbors

The One Who Got Away
Neighbors

“To this the goddess: It is yours, O Princess, to will
The work which duty binds me to fulfill.
These watery kingdoms, and this modest ship,
Are all the presents of your bounteous gift.”
—Virgill, The Aeneid

Morning in Canterlot dawned fairly quietly, with only the singing of the birds and the distant noises of the servants going about their early tasks.

Castle Paradise was not Canterlot.

There had seemingly been a contest between the katydids and the crickets on the land and the bullfrogs on the water last night, with the occasional interruption by airborne owls and some horrid bird who made a booming ‘wwwhhhooooommmmm’ noise as it dove out of the sky. Gaberdine had spent half of the night with his pillow over his head and the other half flipping through his new library to see if perhaps there was a silence spell hidden anywhere.

There wasn’t.

And to make things worse, the bedroom of his new ‘castle’ was on the east side, with a large segmented window like the workroom and only very thin curtains. Celestia’s morning sun burned into the room with the intensity that only the direct and personal attention of the Princess of the Sun could possibly explain, and rather than attempt to shove towels over the window, Gaberdine dragged himself out of the sinfully soft bed and went to take his shower.

It was a nice shower in the bathtub, with a detachable showerhead and plenty of space for his lilac scented soap and mane conditioner, and a very proper hook for his back brush. It was a little dusty, but he used one of the old towels to clean off the worst of it while considering if it would be possible to hire a live-in maid for the creaky old ship, or if that would eliminate his guest room. Hanging his tie on the clothes rack, he stepped over the edge of the tub into the shower, closed the curtain, and turned on the water.

Or at least turned on the water faucet.

Several enthusiastic twists of both the hot and cold faucet got exactly the same results: dry squeaking noises.

“Sen!” he bellowed. “Where’s the water?”

“Out in the river,” came the thready reply from downstairs. “Without the main boiler running, we don’t got no pressure t’ run the condenser or the purification system, so I’ve just been bathing in a little hollow just behind the sidewheel. If’n you’re embarrassed about being seen by the seaponies, I could heat you up some water on the stove, if you want, sir.”

* * *

Some time later, a somewhat rumpled and slightly greasy Baron of Fen trudged into the kitchen/galley/office/workroom on the darker side of the ship where his eyes would not hurt so much. It was small, cramped, and low-ceilinged, but it was neat as could be and cleaner than he had expected. There was even an aged icebox with one of the modern filtering pitchers for cold water and quite a few oranges. By the thumping and clanging noise downstairs, Sen was still wrestling with the disassembled steam engine, but there was a speaking tube in the kitchen so Gaberdine used it to call.

“Sen, I can’t find anything for breakfast other than oranges. Where’s the coffee?”

“Been meaning to go pick some up, sir,” filtered up a weak voice from the tube. “Let me put away the tools and I’ll trot on over to town for some groceries.”

“Go ahead and pick me up a train ticket for Canterlot while you’re there,” said Gaberdine, opening up the icebox door and floating out a fat orange. “There’s really nothing left for me to do here.”

“There’s no train station in Gravel Flats, sir,” said Sen. “Nearest one is in Maple Junction, about a half-day’s trot from here. If’n I left right now, I probably wouldn’t get back until dark. Unless you want to hitch a ride on one of the barges going upriver, but there’s no tellin’ where they’ll make port.”

As much as Gaberdine wanted to object, the pegasus carriage had flown over the small nearby town on his arrival and to his best recollection, there had not been any train tracks visible. Trudging upriver on a fat barge slower than walking speed had little appeal to him, and walking back to Canterlot would take a few days. Although he had enough bits in his traveling money for a hotel room to freshen up before the triumphant return of Baron Gaberdine, it would be far more to his liking to move ‘Castle Paradise’ to a discreet mooring in Baltimare where a proper restoration specialist could bring it back up to original condition while he returned home with tales of his adventures.

And as much as he was reluctant to admit it, adventures which only warranted an overnight trip would not be very adventurous in conversation.

“On second thought, Sen, just get some groceries and I’ll work on the engine while you’re gone.”

“Are you sure, sir?” The speaking tube took a lot of the emotion out of a voice, but Gaberdine felt fairly certain that his new seneschal had just rolled his eyes at the concept of his prim and proper new baron getting his hooves greasy.

“Quite certain, Sen. It’s just a steam engine. How hard can it be?”

* * *

“How hard can it be?” muttered Gaberdine, sticking yet another colorful note into the thick maintenance manual of the ‘Steam Engine, Reciprocating - Model 57V with Triple-Action Pistons and Regenerative Steam Recapture’ before sitting it down on the wooden deck of the ship and heaving a sigh. He had walked down into the engineering space once Sen had left on his grocery run, but after one look at the maze of plumbing and fixtures, he had scooped up the manual and settled down for a serious read above decks. At least only the condenser was disassembled; if the whole engine had been in pieces, Sen would have returned to find an empty castle and a short note.

Gone to Canterlot. Good luck.

Instead, he positioned himself on the sun-warmed boards of the deck next to the water and plopped the dirty tome of steam engine knowledge down in front of him. It was merely a matter of organization, a task for which he had considerable talent, but the longer he read in the book, the more intrigued he became, even to the point of pulling several other technical books out of the castle library to compare. The little whistling steam engine that drove his toy steamship had some distinct relatives in the three-pistoned beast who lived in the bowels of the flat-bottomed ship and hungered for a mixed diet of rock oil or coal, depending on which was the least expensive to heat the boiler. Perhaps the ship could be called a second cousin twice removed, although the rather nasty burn he had gotten on one fetlock when his toy steamship had vented unexpectedly itched whenever Gaberdine found one of the sections written in large red letters that described just what happened to inattentive ponies who did stupid things like tying down the steam relief valve. There were at least three failsafe spells protecting the boiler, and the makers of the steam engine had bragged that none of their models had ever failed explosively ‘under normal operating conditions,’ which really did not comfort him very much, as an explosion could easily be counted as an extraordinary condition.

A series of quiet quacks from over the rail distracted him from the intricacies of the steam-water cycle, and he spared a look at a small family of ducks who had just paddled by. There was one somewhat mottled brown duck and three fledglings, all pinfeathers and beaks as they splashed and dove for breakfast. They reminded him of Canterlot and the overstuffed spoiled waterfowl who owned the small mountain lakes and streams, quacking and waddling right up to any pony who was foolish enough to feed them. With only a few orange peels to spare, he was fairly safe from being mobbed for duck food, so he returned to his studying with the splashing and quacking in the comforting background. The sun was warm on his back, and the noises of the river cove actually relaxing after the long night of sleeplessness, so with a yawn and a feeling of guilt, he slipped a bookmark into the Chapter Seven - Proper Lubrication section and laid his head down for just a moment.

* * *

It was the noise of pages being quietly flipped that woke him, a gentle crinkling of the page overlaid with a quiet humming. His first groggy thought was that Sen had returned and was referencing a section of the book for his repairs, but the voice that was carrying a childhood tune was far too high and sweet for that.

He opened one eye just a crack. The steam engine maintenance manual he had been using for a pillow in the warm sunshine had been joined by a rather colorful book titled ‘Quackers Goes To The Fair,’ which was hovering a short distance away in a soft green aura. A page turned, and the young voice he had heard before said, “And then Quackers realized that he was all alone, and had wandered away from his mommy. Oh, hello there. My name is Ripple. Are you one of Mister Baron Miller’s relatives?”

Gaberdine opened both eyes and yawned, looking at a young unicorn filly who had just barely gotten her head over the edge of the ship by tucking it under the rail. Her dark violet mane was still damp, most probably from swimming around in the lagoon, and she had a little sprig of waterweed tucked behind one ear, but most of her yellowish-green coat had dried already. Both eager young eyes sparkled with that overly-energetic wakefulness that the freshly-risen despised to the bottomless depths of a coffee cup, and her bright and cheerful smile only added to Gaberdine’s grouchy morning nature.

“No, I’m Mister… I mean Baron Gaberdine. What’re you doin’ on my boat?” he grumbled with a yawn.

“Mister Baron Miller always called it a castle,” said the little filly with a splash from her hind legs, most probably still in the dirty river water. “He used to read to me. B’fore he went to the Heavenly Pastures, that is. Since then, only Mister Sen will read to me, and he doesn’t make the funny faces and quacky noises like Mister Miller.”

Grunting again as he stirred stiff limbs from their positions against the unyielding wooden deck, Gaberdine reopened the maintenance manual and tried to look busy. “I’m sorry about Mister Miller, but I really don’t have time to read to you because I’m trying to get the boat… I mean ship ready to go to Baltimare.”

The little filly sucked in a breath of amazement. “Is Baltimare bigger than Gravel Flats?”

“Lots bigger,” said Gaberdine, trying to ignore the little filly and puzzle out the differences between the four types of lubrication the engine needed.

“If you take the castle to Baltimare, who will read to me?” she asked, making a few more splashing noises with her hindquarters in the water.

“I don’t care,” he snapped. “I just want to get the engine fixed so I can get out of here. Now shoo!”

There was a loud plop from the river as the little filly vanished, which Gaberdine considered to be a good thing until he realized there was no more splashing. “Kid?” he asked, peering over the edge of the ship into the shadows stretching across the lagoon. “Kid!”

The lack of ripples in the lagoon made his heart hammer as he considered just how young the little unicorn filly looked and how quickly a foal could drown in even a shallow bathtub. With a flash of his magic to toss his tie back onto the deck and a second flash to cast a water breathing spell, Baron Gaberdine stopped at the edge of the ship and bent his knees in preparation to jump into his watery barony.

Right as the little filly surfaced in front of him.

“Hello, Mister. Are you wanting to come swimming with me and Podunk?”

“Podunk?” Sitting down on the deck rather quickly to hide the trembling in his legs, Gaberdine swallowed. “Is Podunk your father?”

“No, silly. Podunk is a colt duck, just like Mister Quackers, only he doesn’t talk.” The little filly swam in a circle, quacking like a duck, then tossed her head back to get a strand of wet mane out of her eyes. “Come on in. The water is nice and cool.”

“And dirty,” said Gaberdine. “Look, I’ll read your book if you will go away afterwards.” After a moment to think, he added, “Aren’t your parents worried about you swimming around the lagoon all by yourself?”

“Mommy’s at work,” said the little filly, swimming in a small circle, “and Daddy was killed in the war back when I was born.”

“Oh.” Feeling like an idiot, Gaberdine looked down at the deck of the ship. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she replied. “I never knew him. Mommy brought me here when I was really little, and Baron Mister Miller was really nice to us. He showed me how to use my magic to eat oranges.”

“Oranges?” Gaberdine looked over towards the river at the same time the little filly popped her head up above the edge of the deck.

“They’re yummy!” she declared with great enthusiasm. “Baron Mister Miller says they’re full of vittymins and minnows.”

“Minerals,” he corrected. “Look, if I read your book and give you an orange, will you go away without scaring me half to death?”

* * *

Five minutes later after a short story about Quackers and his favorite ball, he found himself sitting on the deck, watching the little greenish-yellow unicorn peel an orange with intense focus and an intriguing ongoing commentary that led him to follow along with his own orange. It took a lot more concentration than he was willing to admit to use his magic to spiral off the orange peel in a perfect line, but after a few false starts and a suppressed swear word or two, he was making a fairly good attempt at it.

At least until a musical voice in the distance shouted, “Ripple! Where are you?”

“Whoops, that’s my mother,” said Ripple, picking up her half-peeled orange in her green magic and holding it over her head. “I gotta go. See you later, Mister Gaberdine.” There was a splash and the little filly swam away, visible only by the orange she was holding above the water as she swam.

Gaberdine chuckled despite himself, settling back down with the engine manual while peeling the last of the orange. It was a warm feeling of happiness, most probably boosted by a stomach full of oranges, but it came back to him repeatedly over the afternoon as he studied and worked on the balky steam condenser, and every time the feeling struck, a small smile crept onto his face.

That smile lasted until late into the evening as he sat in the workroom with Sen, finishing off a late dinner while they cleaned scale from brass fittings and talked. When the old earth pony shuffled off for bed, Gaberdine got up to return to his Baronial Bedchambers and paused. Returning to the table, he got out a piece of Celestia’s dragonfire-imbued paper and wrote one quick note, igniting it with his magic before heading to bed with a smile.

Barony of Fen
Official Census (Revised)

Permanent Resident(s)
One (1) crazy old earth pony named Sen, currently residing on a broken houseboat.

Transient Resident(s)
One (1) young unicorn filly named Ripple who swims in the lagoon.

By your command,
Baron Gaberdine of Fen

4. Pressure Test

The One Who Got Away
Pressure Test

“Within a long recess there lies a bay:
An island shades it from the rolling sea,
And forms a port secure for ships to ride;
Broke by the jutting land, on either side.”

—Virgill, The Aeneid

The morning dawned in subdued shades of teal and pink as the sun ascended into the cloud-strewn sky. Despite the nightly choir of birds and bugs, Gaberdine had slept fairly well, even having adapted to the slight rocking of the ship/castle at its moorings whenever a barge would pass by on the river. It was the sound of bits moving across Equestria as thousands of tons of freight that could never have traveled by expensive pegasus cart waddled upstream and downstream in the tender embrace of chunky steam tugs.

After discussing the finances of the Barony of Fen with Sen yesterday, he had a growing respect for the staggering amount of cargo sweeping up or down the river every day, as well as the miniscule percentage of bits charged for transit fees that came right off the top. The Barony of Fen could easily charge far more, but there was already a fair amount in the bank, and expenses were almost trivial. The shipping companies paid for their own traffic service and shared legal liability for accidents through a very well-organized voluntary insurance program, leaving the barony with the sole task of hiring contract labor to mark the shifting channel with enchanted flags so that the cargo would not wind up spread across snags of underwater stumps or uncharted rocks.

“Mornin’ Baron,” said Sen, opening the door to his bedroom with a shoulder and carrying two cups of coffee on his back. “Looks to be a storm tomorrow tonight.”

“I thought these things were scheduled,” groused Gaberdine as he took a sip of scalding hot coffee and then tried to suck cold air across his tongue.

“They is. Picked up the schedule from Gravel Flats yesterday. Says there’s gonna be a fairly big ‘un tomorrow stretching into the night ‘cause of scheduling problems, but I’ll bet it’s a real blow on account of you’re new here an’ the weather patrol always likes to put together a show for the new baron. They've been stockpiling thunder clouds for months.”

Sen sat down at the table and produced a tattered checklist. “Baron Miller, he put together a list of things to do before a storm, but if’n you want, you could just take a room in town until it blows over. Not that there’s anything to worry about. Castle Paradise has taken worse and still floats. Worst case, I’ll put the auxiliary generator onto the pumps. Even if she sinks, it’s fairly shallow here at the dock. Take a couple days to float her again, but nuttin’ serious.”

* * *

Just as Sen said, the clouds overhead grew as the day wore on and the pegasi weather team seemed to be stacking them a lot taller than anything he had ever seen in Canterlot. Gaberdine had decided to go ahead and put the condenser unit back together without a full cleaning, since a little lime and scale in the system was inevitable, and once he had Castle Paradise docked in Baltimare, the restoration specialists would probably just tear the whole system down anyway. Besides, if the weather did get too rough tomorrow, the main engine could drive the pumps a lot more efficiently than the dinky little auxiliary unit, and even if the castle would only sink a little, it was his castle now, and he much preferred it not to sink at all.

The condensing unit in the engineering room was a giant puzzle of pipe and clamps, which did not bother him at all. Gaberdine loved putting together puzzles, with all of the little pokey-out bits fitting into all of the little pokey-in bits and revealing a picture as the process went on. Sometimes he would even put together a puzzle upside-down just for the practice.

After all, that was how he got a puzzle piece as his cutie mark.

While Sen took a break to trudge around above decks and check the heavy rope hawsers before going into town to reserve a room at the small country inn for the new baron, Gaberdine continued his work on the engine with frequent references to the manual. Pipes and clamps fit together with a whistled tune he remembered from yesterday, turning into a brief whistled duet as the scrabbling sound of a small filly became audible through the nearby open porthole.

“Hello there, Mister Baron Gaberdine.” The young filly from before poked her head in through the porthole and whistled at the progress he had made in assembling the condenser. “Wow, that’s really good. You’re almost done with the vertical risers.”

“Yes, I am,” said Gaberdine, turning a torque wrench with his magic on the next-to-last pipe. “Did you watch Baron Miller take the condenser unit apart?”

“Oh, yes!” The little unicorn filly squeaked with delight and used her magic to pick up a nearby twig as a pointer. “He told me all of the names for the parts. Those are the Bucking Stubborn Flanges at the end of each of the Bucking Stuck Condensing Pipes, and the Bucking Frozen Backflow Valve that you have to hit with a Bucking Hammer when it misbehaves, and the Bucking Stubborn Frozen Pump Full Of Sand down at the bottom that he replaced with a Bucking Wrong-Sized Pump he had to send back to the Bucking Idiots at the Bucking Factory to get a Bucking Right-Sized Pump.”

“Oh,” said Gaberdine, momentarily overwhelmed by the phrase ‘bucking’ repeatedly coming out of the mouth of such a small and innocent-looking filly. “Well,” he said after a few moments of recovery, “since you know so much about the engine, why don’t you help me put it together? I’d like to get it going by the time Sen comes back from town so I can take a hot shower.”

“You’re not going to sail Castle Paradise down the river, are you?” Ripple put on the most pitiful big-eyed begging expression that was only spoiled by her occasional glances towards the still unassembled parts of the condenser.

“Not for a few days, at the least.” He paused with the flange only slightly tightened and added, “Or maybe a week. It’s actually somewhat relaxing out here. I never realized how cluttered my life had become until now. Maybe after I get the boat… I mean castle repaired back to its original condition, I’ll bring it back here every once in a while. It could be a vacation.” He took the clamp that Ripple floated over to him and applied it to the other end of the pipe while thinking about the concept.

The ship/castle was far too small to host an overnight party for more than four or five friends, but for as long as he had lived in Canterlot, he had not accumulated more than… well, they were more business associates and casual dinner conversationalists than friends. Mother had despaired over him attracting a proper mate among the eligible unicorn mares in their social circle, particularly since he had the socially unacceptable position of third son. Still, it was far better than the barbaric times in ancient pony history where they used the phrase: “First son for the estate, the second for the military, and the rest for the gelding irons.”

Now that he was a titled noble, the dating scene would open up again with his parents gathering up an entire flock of the rather odd horned ducks who swam in Canterlot’s social waters. There would be social occasions galore, with balls and parties where ‘coincidence’ would match the new Baron Gaberdine against an endless string of mares who never would have even looked at him before.

Castle Paradise could serve as a refuge during those trying times, unless it was tied up at a refurbishment yard in Baltimare. Then it would only be a weak excuse which could not provide a desired sanctuary.

Reassembling the balky condenser took his mind off the problems he would be facing in the near future, and as he floated the last part into place while Ripple read the instructions out of the book, a change in plans seemed in order.

“Ripple, would you like it if I were to leave Castle Paradise moored here for a few more months?” he started while torquing the circle of bolts around the top of the low-pressure condenser casing.

“I thought you were going to get it fixed up to original condition,” said Ripple.

“Well,” started Gaberdine, waving his torque wrench for emphasis, “this is a lot of fun, now that I have a helper. And it seems like a waste to let a bunch of other ponies have the fun of playing with my new toy.”

“Will you go swimming with us?” asked Ripple, bouncing her head up and down at the porthole and making her short mane sway.

“Eh… I suppose, once I can take a hot shower afterwards.”

That seemed to drive the little filly into fits of joy, and she babbled happily about how she was going to show Gaberdine all of the fun places where Podunk had the most fun playing and diving for whatever it was that ducks ate. He smiled as she talked, taking specific care to get every flange and clamp properly torqued to the book’s specifications. It took nearly an hour of hard work until the last part was in place, and he lit the fire under the freshly refilled boiler with a soft ‘whump’ of rock oil.

“In the old days, it used to take steamships hours to get a head of steam up,” said Gaberdine, paraphrasing from the promotional materials that had been included with his childhood toy. “Modern boilers have an incremental feature that allows low-pressure steam within a few minutes of the fire. After the storm is over, maybe you and your mother can come along and we’ll take Castle Paradise out for a little jaunt in the river. Would you like that, Ripple?”

“Oh, that would be…” Ripple trailed off as the smile that had lit her face faded into a frown. “No. I don’t think my mother would like that. She’s very shy.”

“Well, bring her by sometime and I’ll talk to her,” said Gaberdine, engrossed in the slow movement of pressure gauges on his newest toy. “Right now, I want to test out the main bilge pumps and the fresh water systems. Hot showers, here we come.”

The cautious movement of a lever labeled ‘Bilge’ resulted in a soft ‘thug-thug’ of a pump and Ripple calling out, “There’s an icky black cloud of gunk coming out of the bottom of the castle, Mister Baron Gaberdine.”

“Good.” Gaberdine waited until the pump began to make a dry sucking noise before turning it off. “Halfway there. Let’s see how the freshwater filtration system works now.” A second lever marked ‘Water’ caused the complex mechanism of the freshwater systems to begin to whirl and chirp as perfectly clear water began to pour into the transparent reservoir of the now-empty boiler reserve. It took a remarkably long period of time to fill, but he waited patiently as it would have been foolish to leave the reserves empty. After all, if the previous owner of the castle/steamship had not kept the reserve filled, Gaberdine would have needed to manually clean and fill the reservoir one bucket at a time in order to get the engine up to steam, and that could have taken another whole day.

Once the reserves were filled, the clean water produced by the filtration system began to spill over into the secondary drinking water system, and Gaberdine finally began to relax. Everything seemed to be working just like the manual had claimed, in a complex process made simple by pony engineering and organization.

“Wonderful,” murmured Gaberdine, his mind filled with thoughts of soap suds and a long, hot soak. The quiet thug-thug of the pump raised his spirits, as each thug was a glass of water or a few moments of blissful showering, possibly even enough to run an entire bath in the somewhat small but still pony-sized tub in his bathroom. The insulated hot-water tank was a top priority for filling, and his smile grew as the water level topped off and its temperature began to rise. The drinking water tank was next, filling from the bottom with swirls of pure water filtered out of the muddy river and soon to be turned into a long and soapy shower. Unfortunately, the anticipation of his upcoming shower blinded him to the slow raising of a pressure gauge and the small line of steam spouting out of a cracked fitting that suddenly ruptured.

With an explosive crack and scream of escaping pressure, a small fragment of a brass flange shot across the engineering room, releasing a blinding cloud of boiling steam into Gaberdine’s face. He stumbled back from the controls with a foreleg thrown across his face, unable to use his magic on the various levers and knobs on the other side of the jet of escaping steam even if he could see. The shriek of escaping steam was matched by a childish scream of fright as Ripple shouted, “Mister Gaberdine! What happened!”

“Something broke in the high-pressure lines,” he shouted back through the billowing clouds of vapor filling the engine room. “I need to turn off the oil feed and vent the boiler, but I can’t see!”

“What?”

“I said turn off the Bucking Oil Feed and pull the Bucking Emergency Pressure Vent!” he bellowed.

“Oh! I’ve got it!” The deep rumbling of the rock oil feed abruptly stopped, replaced by the stentorian whoosh of the pressure relief valve as it vented the boiler into what was probably a huge white cloud of water vapor over the castle. Gaberdine stood and panted in delayed panic at the thought of what could have happened if Ripple had not been there or had panicked in the same way he had. The sharp sting of pain across his face was a shameful reminder of his negligence that could have killed them both, although thankfully he could still see if he squinted out from swollen eyelids. In Canterlot, a pegamedic with an air ambulance could be at the estate in a matter of minutes, and although there were a number of pegasi up in the sky today putting together tomorrow’s storm, most of the rural weather team were probably not medically qualified for what could easily have been a life-threatening injury.

“Mister Baron Gaberdine? Are you all right?” The plaintive whine in Ripple’s voice was an obvious indication that the frightened little unicorn filly was far more important right now than his own introspection, and he cleared his throat to sound at least a little less frightened himself before he responded.

“Yes, Ripple. I’m fine. Just a little singed across the face, but nothing serious. How about yourself?”

“Oh, thank Neptune,” she gasped. “I was so scared when the steam came bellowing out and you were stuck behind it and I thought you were all boiled up, but I heard you shouting and I grabbed the controls for the engine in my magic just like you said and…” There was a sudden silence, followed by a piercing scream. “I got my cutie mark! Look! Look!”

Despite the clouds of water vapor still filling the engineering spaces, he managed to squint through swollen eyelids enough to see the greenish-yellow of Ripple’s coat outside the porthole with what appeared to be a white fluffy cloud on it. “Isn’t it great! It’s steam! I’ve got steam for a cutie mark! I have to tell Mom!” There was a quiet splash from out in the lagoon and the area suddenly felt much emptier, although he could not help but smile as he finished shutting down the boiler despite the throbbing pain in his face blurring his vision.

She sounded so happy. In all my years in Canterlot, I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as when I got my cutie mark. It’s been all downriver since then, I suppose.

By the time he had shuffled out of the below-decks engineering spaces, his eyes were swollen nearly shut. Gaberdine was looking forward to lying down in his bed with a damp towel over his face, and was stumbling slowly along the corridor while using his magic to guide himself when he heard a voice.

“H-hello? Baron Gaberdine?”

It was a female voice deserving a special place in the Canterlot Opera, singing arias for Princess Celestia and Princess Luna to the applause of thousands. It was a voice he could listen to reading a grocery list and be fascinated about how it would end. It was a voice… that he had not responded to, despite standing in the hallway without moving for a significant amount of time and even though all the owner of that exquisite voice could probably see of him was his tail and his puzzle-piece cutie mark.

“Yes? I mean, yes. I’m Mister Baron Gaberdine. I mean Gaberdine. Ma’am.” He struck his horn on the wall of the castle when he tried to turn around and almost fell down as Ripple’s worried voice cut through the embarrassed silence.

“I thought you said you weren’t hurt, Mister Baron Gaberdine.”

“Call me Gabby,” he babbled in response, trying to open his eyes and closing them immediately as the setting sun glared through a hole in the patchy cloud cover and stabbed him right in the eyes. “And I’m not injured severely,” he continued with a foreleg held over his face. “I just need to lie down for a while with a damp towel. Tomorrow I’ll be as right as rain. In the rain. Tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?” The musical lilt to the melodious voice only emphasized the depths of concern in it, and Gaberdine felt an overwhelming urge to just lie back and allow himself to be fussed over, if only to keep her speaking.

“Well…” he started, trying not to feel guilty and failing. “If you could get me a clean towel and dampen it a little. That would help. You’re Ripple’s mother, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes. I’m sorry if she’s been a bother, but—”

“Oh, no!” protested Gaberdine out of reflex. “She even—”

He paused momentarily with quick consideration for his next words. “She saved my life” would imply Ripple had been in the kind of danger that a properly concerned parent would react negatively to, while “She has been helping me with the engine” was far too mild of praise for the assistance the little unicorn had provided. Unfortunately, his hesitation allowed Ripple to rapidly insert her own interpretation of the recent event.

“You should have seen it, Mama! The steam was all hissing out of the Bucking High-Pressure Flange and filled the whole engine room up so I couldn’t see Mister Baron Gabby, but he yelled out what bucking levers I needed to pull and I did and all the steam went up into the air with a big whoosh! It was so cool! When I grow up I want to work on steam engines and ride up and down the river, blowing the bucking whistle and waving at the ponies along the shore. When we get the castle fixed up, can I help drive it up and down the river, Mister Gabby?”

“I didn’t teach her the name of the engine parts,” he added weakly. “The old baron did.”

“I… see.” There was a clunking noise from the hall closet, the sound of a faucet being turned, and a soft, damp towel wrapped itself gently around Gaberdine’s stinging eyes. Even the magic field holding the towel seemed beautiful, with the gentlest of touches and a faint tingling which he recognized as one of the more advanced healing spells. “I think we should allow Mister… that is Baron Gaberdine to lie down for a while, Ripple. We can talk about other things later.”

“Excellent idea,” said Gaberdine, allowing himself to be led down the hallway by an exquisitely soft if slightly damp shoulder against his. Ripple's mother guided him to his bedroom and placed him down on top of the covers before fussing with the damp cloth over his eyes. He did manage to get one eye open enough to get a glimpse of the quiet unicorn mare who was examining his minor burns, but at a sharp glance, he obediently closed his eyes to allow her to finish. The beautiful unicorn seemed so much like a creamy white doe who was ready to flee at a moment’s notice. He did not want to give her even the slightest excuse to be startled, but there was something a true gentlecolt should always ask that he had forgotten in the confusion.

“Beg pardon, Madam, but I did not get your name.”

There was a brief interruption in her gentle magical touch on the damp cloth on his face that for one terrifying moment seemed to indicate she had fled. “Pearl,” she finally said in that sweet angelic voice deserving of a background chorus.

“Oooo,” said Ripple in a long, drawn-out trill. “You’re smiling. Mister Baron Gaberdine, do you like my mommy?”

“Ripple!” gasped Pearl. “I’m sorry, Baron Gaberdine. She’s such a forward little filly—”

“Oh, no!” said Gaberdine, holding up one hoof but quickly putting it back down when he heard the sound of frightened movement away from him. “She’s been just fine, Missus Pearl. In fact, if she had not been here and remained calm when I had my accident with the steam engine, I could have been injured far worse than this minor scalding. You have a brave little filly, Ma’am.”

“I-I know,” whispered Pearl. “Sometimes too much.”

“Nonsense,” huffed Gaberdine. “In fact, in appreciation for her assistance, I would like to invite Ripple and her family to dine with me tomorrow… well, I suppose the storm is scheduled for tomorrow. The day after tomorrow for dinner. Would you happen to be free then, Ma’am?”

“Well…” Without being able to see the beautiful young unicorn, Gaberdine was unable to tell if she was tempted or revolted by his offer, but his heart sang with joy as she added, “Baron Miller used to have all of us over for dinner after major storms so we could talk about work.”

“Wonderful!” Gaberdine fairly beamed with happiness, trying not to think about how that expression looked with a damp towel thrown over his face. “Then it’s settled. I’ll have Sen make all the arrangements once he gets back from town.”

“Very well. Well, we should be going now. Are you certain you will be all right until he gets back, Baron Gaberdine?”

“Please. Call me Gabby.” Gaberdine arranged himself against the covers and stuffed a pillow under his head while thinking. Reluctantly, he came to the conclusion that trying to keep the beautiful young mare at his side to nurse him through his minor injuries was a bad idea, and a quiet candlelit dinner for just the three of them would be a much more appropriate approach. “Don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly fine. I shall see you at dinner the day after tomorrow then, M’lady.”

“Thank you… Gabby.”

The echoes of that delightful word bounced around the bedroom long after the mare and her daughter had departed, lasting even after Sen returned from his trip into town with groceries and a reservation at a local Stall and Breakfast for him to wait out tomorrow’s storm. He could not help but repeat every single word of their conversation to the quiet servant, who seemed much more concerned about Gaberdine’s minor injuries than the revelation that the castle had running water again, some of which would even still be hot for a few hours.

It even lasted into the evening as Gaberdine and Sen examined the fractured fitting and determined that metal fatigue was the culprit, and that a thorough examination with a crack-detection spell for every single part of the engine would be required before trying to fire up the boiler again. He hummed to himself while writing the order for a replacement part to the company, making little doodles of interconnected hearts in the margins of the catalog form before sealing up the letter with the included bank draft and giving it to Sen for tomorrow’s mail.

And as if the thought of mail had triggered it, he pulled out another sheet of the enchanted parchment from Princess Celestia and wrote a correction to his latest census, sending it on the way to Her Highness before turning for his own bed.

Barony of Fen
Official Census (Second Revision)

Permanent Resident(s)
One (1) loyal old earth pony named Sen, currently residing on a houseboat

Transient Resident(s)
One (1) brave young unicorn filly named Ripple who swims in the lagoon
One (1) beautiful unicorn mare named Pearl, who is Ripple’s mother

P.S. If at all possible, Your Highness, could you arrange a note of congratulation for Ripple on the occasion of getting her cutie mark? It would mean quite a lot to her, and as the new Baron of Fen, I would be deeply indebted to you for this indulgence.

Your faithful servant
Gabby

5. The Tempest

The One Who Got Away
The Tempest

“O Aeolus! for to thee the Princess of Heav'n
The pow'r of tempests and of winds has giv'n;
Thy force alone their fury can restrain,
And smooth the waves, or swell the troubled main-”

—Virgill, The Aeneid

“Good morning, Mister Baron Gaberdine.” Ripple popped up over the edge of the castle deck and watched Gaberdine, who had a number of metal fittings and a book spread out across the deck in front of him. “What’cha doooin?”

“I am advancing my education in an unseen direction.” Gaberdine smiled inside and outside as he moved the thick spellbook closer to the damp little unicorn. “The crack detection spell is fairly simple, and since I don’t want to hire some specialist from Baltimare to run up here and overcharge me something fierce, I decided to learn it on my own and examine all of the engine fittings myself. The only problem is I don’t have anypony to check my work. What I really need is an assistant of some sort who can learn the spell with me and help me with the job. Now where could I find somepony like that?” He suppressed a chuckle at the way Ripple bounced in place and splashed her back legs in the water.

“Me?” she squeaked.

“Well…” Gaberdine made a show of looking around. “I was really wanting to find a big unicorn who has their cutie mark in something engineering.”

“Me! Me!” Ripple swapped ends and stuck her damp rump up over the edge of the deck to show off her new steam cloud cutie mark.

“I suppose,” said Gaberdine with obvious false reluctance. “Hop up here on the deck and we’ll work through learning the spell together. As long as you don’t show me up by learning it first, that is.”

There was a splash and Ripple reappeared over the edge of the deck, although she remained with her rear end in the lagoon and her front legs apparently braced on the low ridge running around the ship just below the rail. Joy filled her sparkling green eyes in a wave of emotion that made Gaberdine smile despite his best efforts. The little unicorn picked up the spellbook in her magic and floated it closer for inspection. “Do you really think I can learn the spell first? Mamma won’t even let me try transmutation spells yet.”

He could not help but chuckle. “Transmutation spells are tricky. The crack detection spell is just a sound spell to vibrate the part like this.” Turning to the pile of parts in front of him, Gaberdine picked up a bracket in his magic and struck it gently with a brass rod, producing a noise much like a small bell. A second part produced much the same sound, but a third part, a complicated brass fitting with a small hole in it, produced nothing but a dull thunk.

“Wow,” said Ripple. “That’s awesome.”

“That’s only the first part of the process,” said Gaberdine. “Without the spell to test the parts in place, we would need to disassemble the entire engine, and that could take a month or two, provided we could even get it all taken apart by ourselves.”

Ripple frowned. “I would think putting it all back together would be the hard part.”

“Au contraire, my brilliant little filly.” Gaberdine turned slightly and pointed to his own cutie mark of a puzzle piece. “I have yet to find a puzzle so complicated that I can’t put it together. Spells, however…” He shifted the spellbook to one side and plunked down on the deck fairly close to Ripple so they both could read.

“Let’s see how this works.”

It actually worked fairly well. Ripple turned out to be quite bright for her apparent age, and followed along with the theory and practice of the spell at nearly the same speed as Gaberdine. To be honest, he always had problems with acoustic spells, but it still was a little humbling to find himself putting greater effort into the learning process due to a small filly having reached the end of the page and splashing her hindquarters in the lagoon while impatiently waiting for the next paragraph.

After a few hours of work, Sen came by with a ‘light’ lunch by earth pony standards: a few daisy and daffodil sandwiches, a collection of apples and oranges, a few rolls with jam, and some piping hot hayfries right out of the galley. The little unicorn filly remained at her place on the edge of the deck, politely minding her table manners as if she were at a formal dinner with the Princess instead of just leaning over the deck of a shabby broken steamship with a wannabe baron. Gaberdine contented himself with one of the apples and a sandwich while Sen settled right down on the deck alongside them in what would have been a frightful violation of class separation in Canterlot, but here seemed only natural. He was on good terms with the reclusive little filly, inquiring about the health of her mother and other relatives, as well as promising to purchase the latest Quackers storybook that was supposed to be released in a few weeks. By the time lunch was over, the thick clouds overhead made Gaberdine decide not to expand their class through the afternoon, but instead help Sen tidy up the ship and get it ready for the storm due that night.

After Ripple used her magic to stack up her empty plates and grab an orange for later, she vanished off into the lagoon with a quiet splash while Gaberdine carried the lunch plates to the galley for cleaning. Sen seemed to be in a quiet mood, but as they put the plates in the sink and added some tepid but clean water, the servant finally asked the question that seemed to be bothering him.

“Sir, have you noticed anything… unusual about Ripple?”

“Not really,” admitted Gaberdine. “She’s a very bright little unicorn filly, but other than that. Well, and the fact she never comes up on the deck and likes to splash her hind legs in the water all the time. She spends so much time in the lagoon, I was starting to think she’s a…”

He paused, then glanced over at Sen, who was scrubbing away at the lunch dishes with an unusual intensity. “Sen, is she a seapony?”

“Sir,” said the elderly servant, putting a dish into the rinse water, “that is a river out there. Seaponies live in the sea.”

“Well, yes, I know that,” said Gaberdine with a downward twist to his lips and a growing regret for his terse words on their first day in Castle Paradise. “I apologize for treating you so casually, Sen. It’s just… seaponies?”

“Refugees, for the most part.” Sen passed Gaberdine a dry towel, which he took as a cue to begin drying the dishes and stacking them back in the cabinet. “They’ve all lost a father or husband in some sort of war that cropped up about a decade ago and hasn’t really died down yet. Every once in a while, a new one shows up or an old one goes back home. The old baron, he charged them a little for their safe refuge and paid them quite a bit more for helping put snag and stump warnings in the river channel. We ain’t lost a barge at all since they started doing that. Insurance rates are way down and all it costs is a few bits and some food for special occasions.”

“Seaponies.” Gaberdine dried a few more dishes and put them away while thinking. “So Pearl is a seapony too?”

“Reckon so,” said Sen, pulling the drain plug and emptying the sink. “Ripple said you invited her and the family to dinner tomorrow night.”

“Well, yes, but…” Gaberdine paused in thought. “Seaponies. I had always thought of them as a myth.”

“More like a Miss, sir. There ain’t but a few males who ever come this far upriver. Skittish as the dickens. I’m surprised that Ripple’s mother even set hoof on board the castle with some new pony in charge here. She’s one of the braver ones, but it took nigh onto a year before she even would swim up to the side of the castle, and I ain’t never seen her set hoof on deck before.”

“Seaponies. Huh.” Gaberdine wiped his hooves off and folded the towel. “Well, I guess I’ll find out more tomorrow at dinner. Do you need anything before I head into Gravel Flats this afternoon? You did reserve a room for me on land for the storm, right?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Shutters over at the Cozy Stable sets a fine table. You enjoy yourself in town and I’ll keep the castle above water until you get back, sir.”

Gaberdine paused at the doorway and shook his head. “No. On second thought, I found out yesterday how dangerous it can be on board the ship without somepony to watch your back. The storm will only make things worse. Since this seems to be a fairly safe harborage, I’ll stay in my cabin tonight, just in case the storm gives you any problems.”

Sen actually seemed a little flustered by the offer. “Very well, sir. Thank you. If you want to come with me while I make my rounds, we should be able to get everything tied down and all ship shape before the first raindrop falls. I guess there’s more river water in your blood than I expected.”

* * *

There may have been river water in Gaberdine’s blood, but it had been thinned out by generations of his family living in Canterlot to the point where the slow surges that made the castle rise and fall at the moorings felt unnatural, and he was really starting to yearn for a solid bed that rested on a foundation of pure granite extending right down to the solid core of Equestria. The cottonwood trees surrounding the lagoon cut the gusty wind down to a low roar, although Gaberdine could not help but think about the tendency for cottonwood to splinter and break during a storm, and fret about the number of branches which could conceivably be blown onto the castle in the middle of the night.

As he remained curled up in bed with the spellbook, Gaberdine considered how this was a different experience than storms in Canterlot, relatively tame things that would have angry unicorns shouting at the weather patrol if a single shingle or birdhouse was blown away. The country weather patrol seemed to enjoy putting on the show this evening. The brilliant flashes of lightning that lit the night felt a little like a rural concert, with the rumbling aftershocks that blended together into a subsonic sensation that was felt in the chest more than heard, intermixed with brilliant flashes and stentorian crashes of nearer acoustic releases. It made studying the crack detection spell a very difficult proposition, what with such an interesting distraction.

While reading in bed, he had left the door to the corridor open in order to hear Sen in the event the elderly earth pony called out for anything in the night, but instead of his strong tenor, the sounds of scratching duck feet were heard. In a few moments, Podunk and his little family of three wet pinfeathered ducklings waddled through his bedroom door and vanished under the bed just as casually as if it were their normal hiding spot from bad weather.

Note: Mop and clean under the bed tomorrow to get rid of any duck poo and find some sort of storm shelter for Ripple’s pet that doesn’t involve my bed.

He had just given up trying to study any more about the crack detection spell and floated the book back onto the shelf when a particularly loud crash of thunder nearly made him jump out of his sheets. Grimacing at the noise and suspecting a sleepless night awaited, Gaberdine curled up under his covers in an attempt at slumber when a second deafening crash elicited a sharp gasp and some slithery flopping out in the hallway.

“Podunk? Are you in here?” The quavering voice and the rhythmic flap-flap-flap of something wet and soft plopping down the hallway made Gaberdine’s heart hammer momentarily before his common sense reminded him that Ripple was a seapony, and as such had… whatever seaponies had instead of hooves.

“He’s safe, Ripple,” he called out. “He’s hiding under the bed with the family.”

A brilliant sheet of lightning sliced across the distant sky, illuminating the worried little unicorn seapony who poked her head into his bedroom. “A-are you s-sure, Mister Baron Gabby? The thunder frightens—”

The resulting crash of thunder from the massive distant lightning strike washed over Castle Paradise like a physical wave, rattling the windows in their frames and propelling a somewhat damp and terrified little filly into the bed to clutch at his side and tremble. It felt odd to see flat flaps of skin like a flipper where a proper shank and hoof should be, but the little filly’s crushing grip was not inconvenienced one bit by her lack of hooves.

“I’m n-not s-scared,” she stammered. “M-mama says I’m h-her b-brave little f-filly.”

While some small part of his mind could not help but be put off by the wrongness of the little aquatic pony, the much larger part twinged with sympathy. As odd as she was to his Canterlot perceptions, she was still just a frightened little filly, and deserved sympathy, not pity.

“Shouldn’t a brave little filly be with her mother, keeping her safe?” asked Gaberdine.

“S-she’s upriver,” said Ripple. “A barge got loose in the storm, and my family is helping the tugs keep it from crashing into a snag.” The little unicorn seapony tunneled deeper into the blanket with a deep sniff. “I always used to hide in Mister Baron Miller’s bed whenever we had storms before. When it was empty. I c-can go back to my nest if you want.”

Gaberdine considered the offer for a brief moment. There was no way that he could be helpful with the barge rescue effort, even if he could find the place in the driving rain. It was a frustrating sensation of helplessness to think of Ripple’s mother and her family endangering their lives while he was safe and warm here, but at least he could provide comfort for the one left behind.

Ripple did have the distinct odor of river water about her, and his mind had still not completely wrapped around the concept of ponies with flippers or fins. However, he remembered far too well his own foalhood when the relatively mild Canterlot storms would blow and he would sneak down the hall to crawl into Father’s bed. The big stallion would scoot off to one side of his bed so his little son could climb up and sleep without kicking him, and the two of them would lie there and listen to the rain, mixed with Mother’s snoring from the next bed over. And when Celestia raised the morning sun, he would awaken to the scent of hotcakes and fresh fruit, which made the foalish embarrassment of hiding from the storm somehow bearable.

Floating down an additional blanket for Ripple, Gaberdine scooted over so the little filly could have a place to curl up into a nest of her own, tucking the blanket around her with his magic once she had gotten situated. She must have been exhausted, because she put her head down and was snoring before he was done, and remained almost motionless while he just stayed there and listened to the thunder and the rain.

It could have been hours later when the idea occurred to him, just lying in the darkness with only the sound of the storm and Ripple’s quiet snores for company. Using as little light as possible, Gaberdine lit his horn and floated over another sheet of Princess Celestia’s parchment, which he filled out in slow, quiet strokes. When done, he applied a spark of magic to the enchanted scroll and watched as the smoke drifted out the door on its way through the rain to Canterlot.

After which, he fell sound asleep.

Barony of Fen
Official Census (Third Revision)

Permanent Resident(s)
One (1) loyal old earth pony named Sen

Transient Residents (Refugees)
One (1) young seapony filly named Ripple
One (1) beautiful seapony mare named Pearl, who is Ripple’s mother
An unknown number of other seaponies, who are currently rescuing a barge upriver.

P.S. If at all possible, Your Highness, could you find some way to reward the seaponies who are rescuing the barge? It does not seem to be within their normal work arrangement. As before, I would be deeply indebted to you for this indulgence.

Your faithful servant
Baron Gaberdine

6. Waves

The One Who Got Away
Waves

“His finny coursers and in triumph rides,
The waves unruffle and the sea subsides.”

—Virgill, The Aeneid

“Ripple?” whispered a quiet voice. “Are you here?”

The floating sensation of flying through a field of butterflies faded as Gaberdine began to arise from his dream. It was such a pleasant voice that gently caressed his ear with the melody of sound, floating through his sleep-befuddled mind even as traitorous eyes and ears began sending signals to his mind that dawn had just occurred, and the time for dreaming was over.

He opened his eyes to the brilliant ray of sunlight that chose that moment to illuminate his bedroom and cast an iridescent backlight across the beautiful unicorn… that is, seapony unicorn mare who was poised in the middle of his room as if at any moment she would be forced to flee for her life.

For an infinite moment, he lay there in complete silence, almost afraid to breathe while trying to get up the nerve to speak. Quite possibly he would have suffocated if not for the sound of splashing from his bathroom, mixed with a young giggling voice and a short annoyed quack.

“Podunk?” Both he and Pearl said the word at exactly the same moment and exchanged startled looks before Gaberdine made a desperate attempt at a smile and added, “Jinx?”

Her instinctual laughter was as melodic as bells, and far too short for Gaberdine’s preferences as she cringed afterwards and started to turn away. “Sorry!” she blurted out.

“Pleasedon’tgo!” he whispered quickly in return. “She was frightened last night and needed a place to curl up.” He looked down at the mud-stained blanket beside the bed and quite firmly repressed his natural unicorn urges to call immediately for a maid to have it properly laundered. “I guess she wanted a bath too this morning,” he added. His eyes tracked upwards, past Pearl’s large pale hooves and the mud stains that darkened her creamy well-muscled forelegs. Nearly every inch of her was spotted by specks of mud or loose sand, from her tangled mane up to that beautiful face that took his breath away and those dangerous green eyes that seemed almost black in the shadows of his bedroom. “You’re…”

“I’m sorry for intruding into your bedchambers,” said Pearl, blinking wide dark lashes across those dangerous eyes but not looking away. “I should be going.”

“Pleasestayforbreakfast,” he added in a rush. “I mean… since Ripple seems to be having so much fun in the bathtub, and you had a rough night what with the loose barge and the storm, please allow me to treat you to breakfast as a way of saying thanks. Just for a little bit. Until Ripple is done in the tub. Please?”

“Well…” Fear fought against temptation until Gaberdine could hear a quiet ladylike rumbling from the young mare’s stomach that drowned out the happy giggles and quacks from the bathroom. “Just for a few minutes. Until Ripple is done with her bath.”

* * *

Breakfast was a disaster. Sen was sound asleep, and Gaberdine really did not want to disturb him, but after burning several pieces of toast, nearly chopping a hoof off while slicing a grapefruit and managing to squirt both of them in the eyes with grapefruit juice, he somehow reduced an entire pot of boiling oatmeal to a gluey substance that claimed three serving spoons before he gave it up as a lost cause and dropped the whole mess into the sink. Pearl watched it all from beneath hooded eyes, silently peeling and devouring an orange one small slice at a time in a slow process that Gaberdine could not determine if it was concealing derisive laughter or sympathy.

She only nodded when asked if the rescue of the barge went well, and shook her head to indicate that none of the seaponies were injured in the night. The one-way conversation stumbled with every cooking failure and every awkward moment as they both reached for the same kitchen towel or washcloth with their magic until he had embarrassed himself into a crimson blush.

Ripple saved him from incinerating yet another innocent loaf of bread by flopping somewhat gracelessly into the kitchen/galley while wearing nearly every multicolored towel that Gaberdine had seen in the closet. Podunk was wrapped in his own towel, to his dissatisfaction, but his three little pinfeathered fledglings were happily waddling along after their father and promptly pounced on the burnt pieces of toast that had somehow been knocked on the floor during Ripple’s dramatic entrance.

“Mommy! Look! I took a bath and got all shampood up for you and Mister Baron Gaberdine’s date tonight.”

“Date?” squeaked Pearl almost at the exact same moment that Gaberdine dropped the rest of the loaf of bread and the butter knife. Ripple’s innocent green eyes blinked in surprise from behind the layer of towels heaped over her head, and then she ducked as Podunk made his escape from the towel wrapped around the frustrated waterfowl. Three smaller ducks and one larger duck running around the floor of the ship’s galley brought the whole fiasco to a confused end, and by the time Gaberdine had managed to shoo all of the little feathered fiends back out into the lagoon and return to the scene of the crime, it was remarkably free of any pony presence, seapony or otherwise. Although the mess was still there.

* * *

Several hours later as the dejected baron finally managed to find the last orange peel and finish washing the last dish in the last drip of water from the depleted storage tanks, Sen wandered into the galley with a yawn and a healthy scratch.

“Mornin’ sir. Sleep well?”

It would have been easy to take out his frustrations on the elderly servant, but the storm last night had given Gaberdine a new respect for Sen’s vast experience, as well as a sense of camaraderie as the only other pony with hooves in the immediate vicinity. Actually thinking about that brought up a rather odd memory of his scrambled morning and Gaberdine responded in a rather distracted fashion.

“No, I didn’t sleep very well, Sen. Ripple was afraid of the thunder last night and curled up in the bed until her mother dropped by this morning to pick her back up.”

Both of Sen’s greying eyebrows nearly vanished into his receding forelock. “Miss Pearl came into your bedroom? That’s quite a statement of trust, sir.”

“Well… Yes, I suppose.” Gaberdine paused to luxuriate in the memory of delicate laughter that had echoed around his bedroom for a few scant moments, which reminded him of his original question. “Actually I wanted to ask you something about seaponies. I noticed that Pearl had hooves while Ripple… didn’t.”

“Yes, sur. On account that seaponies use their magic to turn their flippers into pony hooves when they come out of the water. Or at least the older ones. I don’t know how long Ripple has until she’s able to run around on land without looking a little like a seal.”

“She doesn’t look like a seal,” responded Gaberdine with a frown. “She’s a very nice little filly who happens to have… flippers. I’ll admit, I’m not very used to it at the present, but if I hadn’t seen a pegasus until yesterday, I’m fairly sure it would take me a few days to get used to the concept of a pony with wings too.”

Sen nodded. “I understand. I’m from an earth pony village, an’ when I saw my first unicorn, I’m afraid I may have stared at him a bit. Seemed a rather odd thing to have poking out of your head, but I adjusted.”

“Adjusted. Hm…” Gaberdine gave one last twist to the galley faucet and regarded the few drops that trickled out. “It looks like Ripple’s bath used the last of our water.”

“Explains the wet towels scattered all over the deck, sir.”

“Well, there’s a washing machine below-decks. I suppose… that would work a lot better with some clean water too.”

Sen shrugged. “I’ve been spendin’ most of my nights in town, jus comin’ out here to work on the paperwork and the engine as much as I could. Brought out a couple of containers of water whenever needed. Feels good to see the old castle being put back into working shape.” The elderly earth pony shifted position with the pop and crackle of old joints. “I thought for a while it would just fade away into the lagoon an’ nobody would ever know it was there if’n I didn’t come by every day and keep it alive.”

Gaberdine considered the situation before picking up the damp towels from the galley and tossing them onto his back. “I’ll go see if I can rig the auxiliary generator onto the water purification system, Sen, if you’ll see about dinner for Ripple and her family this evening. Pearl should be a little less frightened with whatever relatives she has around her and they deserve something nice for helping with that barge last night.”

“She left me a note from the barge crew, sir.” Sen passed over a somewhat wrinkled and damp piece of paper while adding, “They passed along their thanks. Coulda lost a couple crew members without their help. Barge was loaded with mixed grains and vegetables headed for Baltimare from what it sounds. Normally the captain of the barge will drop off the equivalent of a fruit basket when they go by if they’re feeling generous. That’s how we wound up with all of those oranges from a few weeks back.”

“Well, that makes sense,” said Gaberdine, distracted at the possibility of several thousand containers of barley showing up on the gangplank as Pearl’s reward. “Let me get belowdecks and see if cross-plumbing the two systems is practical before we wind up hip-deep in cauliflower or brussel sprouts.”

* * *

Trying to tie together two different sets of low-pressure steam pipes was a nice distraction from thinking about the mythical existence of seaponies and his shifting perception of the cute little filly, but the thoughts still perked up at odd times. As a foal, Father had read him stories about pirates and the mystical denizens of the distant oceans which seemed so fantastic and unreal when compared with the yearly family trip to their oceanside vacation house in Cape Clod. The seashells and crabs he had joyfully pursued were obviously real, but pirates and seaponies had only existed on the colorful pages of storybooks for him until now.

I wonder if isolated seaponies tell stories to their children about mythical ponies who live above the water?

“Hello, Mister Baron Gaberdine!” Ripple’s cheerful face filled a porthole, turned almost upside-down so she could look at the piece of pipe he was fitting to a valve that he had added to the auxiliary generator on the main deck. “What’cha doooin?”

“Finding a way to refill the water reservoir,” he responded almost instinctively while trying to catch a glimpse of her flippers, which must have been braced against the small ledge that ran around the outside of the ship. In hindsight, it gave her the perfect spot to stay propped up to watch what was going on through the porthole and still keep her hind… flippers in the lagoon.

“Are you going to be able to make hot water?” asked Ripple with a few extra excited splashes. “The bath this morning was sorta tepid.”

“Actually… Well, I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Gaberdine. “I wanted to get the water filtration system set up first, and I didn’t think about what came next.”

“Since the hot water heater uses steam from the main boiler, it’s not going to work the way it is now,” said Ripple, floating the book off the nearby table and flipping through it with her magic. “But we could hook up the main boiler and just run water through it on low to heat it, and use the auxil’ry thingie to pump it into the tank,” suggested Ripple. “That way we could have lots and lots of hot water until it cools off.”

Gaberdine considered the idea, and helped Ripple doodle out a rough plan for it on the back of a loose piece of paper. As long as they used low-pressure piping, there should not be any real danger, but he checked each fitting as they worked through the morning, turning their scribbled plans into a neatly tied-up set of piping reaching across the engineering belowdecks space with only a brief break for lunch.

As they munched on a few alfalfa-seed bagels and some haychips that Sen had managed to find somewhere, Gaberdine kept an eye on the simmering boiler ever so slowly heating up water. It was just one of the drastic changes in his life that had happened over just the last few days. Life in the bureaucracy of Equestria was a rather bland and predictable series of events with bland and predictable ponies, if you did not count Equestria’s princesses. Over the last few years as he had worked his way up the Budgetary Accounting Evaluation Subcommittee Advisory Group’s employee directory, he had thought the high point of his life would be in about twenty years when he would finally take the chair position and run the entire group. It was a simple matter of addition and subtraction. As each new employee started and the old employees retired or went to other subcommittee assignments, his star would rise, slowly but surely, until…

Well, to be honest, he had never considered just what would happen afterwards. Father had always impressed on him that hard work made one happy. All of his associates in school had followed along, although they never really seemed to be ‘happy’ with their lot in life, no matter how high in the organization they climbed, which made him realize something that had been staring him in the face for the longest time.

He was happy.

Much as a fish was not able to tell they were wet, he had never realized just how unhappy he had been in Canterlot, and the idea of returning to his old job turned his stomach. There, he was only one featureless cog in an immense machine. Here, he was himself. He had never thought that reading stories to such a little pony and building a network of piping in the bottom of a decaying old riverboat could possibly be fun.

The cold freshwater tank was taking considerably longer to fill with only the auxiliary generator pushing water through the filters, so once the boiler had warmed its clean contents to a safe non-scalding temperature, he turned the main fire off and pulled out a quill while watching the remainder of the slow process. It gave him plenty of time to sketch out a few letters to several ponies in Canterlot while Ripple was splashing happily out in the lagoon and playing tag with Podunk and the other ducks.

His business associates from court and work were not friends, but they were ponies with considerable political ‘pull’ in the Court. One or two dropping over at a time to enjoy a few days away from the stress of Canterlot would be as many as he really would want on board Castle Paradise, somewhat of a small and very cozy retreat where they might even enjoy the fleeting glimpse of a seapony or two. Since he really did not want to return to his present career, it would, in some regards, allow him to have his cake and eat it too. The thought made him add another letter to Her Royal Highness with an invitation which most probably would not even get read, let alone acted on.

And after some thought, he added one for each of the other Royal Highnesses. The least he could do was to offer, even though they would never take time from their busy schedules just for him.

The knock of a hoof at the doorway distracted Gaberdine from his sketchy notes as Sen poked his head into the engine room with a quick and seemingly positive glance at the considerable pipework his new baron had done. With a little help from Ripple.

“Afternoon, sir. I’m back from the village with most of the food for the dinner this evening, an’ was wonderin’ if you wanted to run the grill or the deep fryer.”

“Grill?” asked Gaberdine as he folded up the letters for later delivery. “My father showed me how to properly do kabobs and such, but I’ve never been partial to deep-fried carnival fare.”

“Ya ‘tain’t never had nuttin’ like this before. Tell you what,” he continued as the two of them headed upstairs. “I’ll run the fryer, you do the kabobs, and we’ll see if any of the ladies want to help out. Mostly they’ll stay in the lagoon if they’re feeling a little skittish, ‘cept the ones who dress out the fish on the bank.”

“Fish?” Gaberdine stopped cold at the top of the stairs and looked at the empty lagoon as if perhaps a giant trout were about to eat the old houseboat. “Um…”

Sen slapped his liege casually on the shoulder and kept walking. “That’s the spirit, sir.”

* * *

Gaberdine was having a difficult time keeping his mind on the proper arrangement of the grill, despite all of the lessons he had learned from his father regarding a stallion’s rightful place with tongs and oatburger flipper-thingie held firmly in his magical grasp. He had tried to concentrate while scraping, brushing, and arranging the charcoal as to bring the cooking surface to exactly the correct environment, but a happy Ripple splashing around in the lagoon just a short distance away kept bringing his mind back to the piscine star in the upcoming evening meal. Even soaking the bamboo skewers reminded him of the water, and the hissing noise of the olive oil as he painted the hot surface brought a certain scent up to his face that only became obvious after some thought.

The previous baron cooked fish on this grill.

He struggled with the realization as he chopped and marinated the huge collection of vegetables and mushrooms that Sen had brought, finally coming to a much more important realization that made the first one somewhat less important.

The previous baron cooked for the seaponies on this grill. Certainly I can too.

They obviously had liked it, from the reaction of Ripple at least as she happily switched from splashing between the lagoon and lunging up onto the edge of the water to stare at the hot grill, over and over, until the first pair of curious eyes could be seen out in the lagoon.

“Looks like the guests have begun to arrive,” said Sen rather quietly, as if not to spook the skittish seapony. Actually two, now that he was looking. And then a third. They were almost invisible against the still water except for their relatively short horns that stuck up just above the surface and glowed softly as if they were each carrying a concealed burden.

Lifting a hoof to gesture the timid seaponies in, Gaberdine called out, “Come on over to—”

Five small ripples were his only response as the seaponies dove beneath the calm surface of the lagoon.

“Darn.”

Sen chuckled through the wooden spoon in his teeth as he stirred a creamy batter around in a huge bowl. “Don’t worry, sir. Have patience. They’ll come out when they’re ready, and not before.” He eyed the setting sun and stood up to begin walking back inside the houseboat. “Let me just get the lights set up and the auxiliary engine switched over to the generator so we don’t get distracted in the middle of cooking.”

Gaberdine eyed the tranquil lagoon while busying himself with the skewers and herb rub. The kabobs would cook faster than the… fish, but it would be best to get them all set up before cooking actually started. Dad had always been careful to match the contents of the grill with the number of noses at whatever event he had been cooking for, but the only thing that Gaberdine could see out in the lagoon were the bare tips of a dozen or so…

Or maybe two dozen horns, slowly rising up from out of the water.

At first he thought it was only his imagination that he could pick out Pearl by her dark green eyes in the midst of so many others of similar hue. Then her horn began to move slowly towards the damp riverbank, rising as it went and exposing just a little more of her at a time, from her off-white coat looking so much like milk to her shimmering greenish and yellow mane flowing down the back of her neck.

She hesitated for a painful moment, nearly half-way out of the water with rivulets still dripping out of her sodden mane. It was a moment he would remember forever, and he could not help but compare her to the Botticelery painting of the alicorn Venus rising from the sea, lacking only wings to make the comparison complete. A deep breath had caught in his throat while she hesitated, finally released in a silent sigh as her horn glowed slightly brighter and she resumed her slow and graceful pace to the water’s edge. He barely noticed the stringer of fat fish she towed behind her, or even that there were several other seaponies cautiously emerging after her. Pearl-like beads of water flowed across her sides in long strands, catching the setting sunlight in iridescent sparkles that brought his pounding heart up into his throat. A damp lock of that perfect mane slipped down over one eye as she walked in his direction, and he luxuriated in the pure bliss of her voice while she talked.

And then after a moment, as she stood there and regarded him with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, she spoke again.

“Baron Gaberdine? Hello?”

“Yes?” Blinking seemed to break the spell he was under, particularly if done rapidly, but it caused his scrambled mind to blurt out, “I love y… your mane! Yes, your mane. Of course. That’s what I meant.”

Her giggle in response made his heart skip a beat as she lifted one overly-large hoof and brushed the damp strand of mane out of her face. “Oh, you must be kidding. It’s such a mess. The storm churned up so much sediment in the water that it’s like swimming through smoke. I must look like such a disaster area.”

“I have a shower,” he volunteered out of reflex. “Ripple and I got the freshwater system working this afternoon and filled the tanks. We even washed the towels.”

“Really?” A small smile broke out on her beautiful face and spread to Gaberdine by sheer radiant transmission, or at least that was what his flushed cheeks seemed to indicate.

“We even have hot water,” he added while being swept away by those sparkling eyes.

“Hot water?” echoed across the small lagoon as most of the seaponies surfaced. All of the sudden, dozens of feminine eyes all latched onto Gaberdine with the fierce intensity of starving predators when faced with wounded prey.

“Can we use your shower, Mister Gaberdine?” called out one seapony mare.

“Do you have any shampoo?” asked another.

“And a brush?” added another.

* * *

Less than an hour later, Gaberdine managed to make it back to the grill. Ripple had been active in his absence, carefully keeping the vegetable kabobs moving from the marinade, to the grill, to the finished bin where giggling seapony mares were scooping them out as fast as they dropped in. There was a certain mental circuit-breaker somewhere inside his head that had tripped rather solidly and was refusing to close again, due to the constant string of gorgeous seapony mares who had followed his every instruction regarding proper shower use with rapt attention.

In his family home, Gaberdine’s older brothers had been hot-water hogging monsters, seemingly making it their life's goal to keep their little brother freezing under the showerhead. The seapony mares squealed in delight with every spritz of water, conserving the precious clean substance as if it were worth thousands of bits a drop. Now, dry towels draped the damp manes of a dozen mares lounging around on the grassy banks of the lagoon as each of them brushed or combed their way to aquatic perfection, except for the diligent mares in the tail end of the shower line who were patiently using their wait time to fillet the fish.

At first, Gaberdine had been a little hesitant about the scaled main focus of dinner, mostly because he had considered the problem of separating whatever were good bits away from whatever were bad bits of the fish, and had drawn a complete blank at the difference between them. The mares who had taken over the cleaning process had no such hesitation. Flashing knives held in their magic sent scales, bones, and guts pouring into a number of buckets while pale pinkish-white slabs of flesh stacked up beside them. If they could use those knives against attackers as well as they were using them against the fish, it was a wonder that the seaponies needed refuge here, but then again, whoever they were fighting at sea was probably as good or better with a blade.

Sen had taken to rolling up little balls of cornmeal and dropping them into the deep fryer while waiting on the first fillets to arrive, and the seaponies were gobbling them up like the popcorn balls he had prepared beforehoof. There were far more seaponies than Gaberdine had anticipated, each of whom were stunningly beautiful in their own way. But his eyes kept returning to the off-white coat of Pearl as she strolled through her fellow mares with a platter of fish fillets held in her magical field. She walked up to him and spoke, with every syllable echoing around in his otherwise empty head.

Whatever it was seemed to set the rest of the seaponies giggling, and Pearl blushed a bright red before repeating herself. “I said, are you ready for the fish, Baron Gaberdine?”

“Whenever you want,” he replied, still luxuriating in the sound of her voice and hoping she would speak again.

“I’ll just set them down here on the table. There we go.” She shot him a quick glance from beneath lowered lashes and added in a husky whisper, “Do you know how to fry fish?”

“Whenever you want,” he answered, which made her only blush brighter, and his own cheeks burn bright red once he realized just what he had said and the giggles from the surrounding mares soaked into his burning ears. “Right,” he added. “It shouldn’t be too hard. Fish. Fire. Flour.”

His franticly-searching eyes fell on the wooden slab that was sitting next to the flour bowl, and a set of small cramped writing scratched into its surface. “First, dip the fillet into the whipped eggs,” he read. “Then, press into flour mixture on each side. Fry until golden, flip, and fry until flakes. Flakes?” He looked up into Pearl’s amused eyes. “Fish flakes?”

“I’ll help,” she whispered, moving up beside him and guiding his magic into dipping the first fleshy slab of fish into the gooey egg mixture.

* * *

As much as Gaberdine wished he could capture every moment of that magical evening, all he seemed to remember was standing by Pearl’s side at the grill and talking. She told him of her family and their life at sea while he echoed with the discussion on his own life high in the mountains of Canterlot. The river seemed a compromise between their homes of sea and mountain, as well as the compromise they struck at the grill. She tentatively tried the oatburgers he cooked, spiced and dashed with peppers the way his father had taught him, and his father before him, all the way back to the origin of oats. He tried the fish fillets, both fried to a golden brown and flaking as well. They even sampled several of Sen’s deep fried and cornmeal battered delicacies as a compromise. They laughed, with her soft voice like bells sounding at every giggle and him determined to hear that voice as often as possible. Sometime during the evening, Sen had retrieved a very young keg of cider and distributed it around, and while Pearl did not imbibe more than a single mug, it brought a smile to her lips and a glow to her cheeks that fanned the flames in his heart until he thought he would erupt into flames on his own. There was even music from an old phonograph that Sen had found somewhere, and a few gently-swaying mares out across the grassy riverbank had driven Gaberdine’s mouth to go where his mind would not.

He invited her to dance.

And to his delight, she accepted.

She smelled of lilacs from his shampoo, as well as the low scent of river water underlying it all. As much as he wanted to bury his nose in her mane as they swayed, neck pressed against neck, he contented himself with one polite sniff and a sigh, echoed to his great joy by hers.

Between cooking and dancing and talking, the evening slipped away until only the two of them remained under the stars, nursing the last few dregs of a mug of cider between them. He wanted to fall on his knees and beg her not to go, to offer her his entire kingdom if she would stay but one night with him, but he knew better. She had been hurt so badly by the war under the waves with the loss of her husband and family that he could not add one more hurt to her collection of pain. So instead, he held his tongue while she made her excuses and thanks for a wonderful evening, turning to glide back into the water with long, slow steps.

She paused with only her hocks dampened, looking away out into the dark and moonlit river where she had made her home for the last decade, then turned and dashed back to him as if a thought had occurred to her, and she had to take action before it vanished. Her breath smelled of fish and oats, but for that moment it was an ambrosia that he would be willing to breathe for the rest of his life as her lips raised up and touched his.

And then she was gone, with only some splashing out in the bay to trace her rapid passage back into the river.

* * *

Cleaning up after the dinner was a blur, although Gaberdine had never felt as indebted to Sen as this evening. The elderly earth pony helped pick up before guiding Gaberdine back to his own room, supervising his tooth brushing, and tucking him under the covers as one might a child.

Much as in his childhood, sleep did not come easily to Gaberdine. The letters he had written to his business associates in Canterlot bothered his conscience. There had never been a party in their company where Gaberdine had felt this glorious sensation fill his chest and spill out all over his soul like a calming balm.

Canterlot parties always seemed to involve alcohol and class sniping in equal volumes, a vicious social dueling atmosphere where political points were counted in blood, and to bring that kind of environment to what happened this evening would be a crime beyond all others. Even inviting Their Highnesses for a peaceful evening such as this seemed problematic, due to the level of society that congregated around them like remoras around sharks. The high likelihood of the innocent young seaponies being used in some political fashion was almost assured. He slid out of bed and retrieved the letters he had written with some small fraction of his accountant's heart thankful that he had not placed stamps upon the envelopes yet. One at a time, he fed them into the cold iron stove in his room, using his magic to burn them to ashes until only the enchanted parchment for the census remained.

He spread it out on his desk, considering the words that needed to be said and the ones that did not. It took a long, long time, and some small fraction of his mind occupied the time by drawing little interconnected garlands of roses and hearts down the side of the paper, intermixed with sketches of all three of their cutie marks. It really did not matter, as it was only to be a draft of his final report which was due tomorrow. His pen seemed to have a mind of its own as he sat and thought, sketching out an artistic profile of Pearl and her daughter. He could not get the eyes right in order to truly capture their amused sparkle, or even Ripple’s little twist at the corners of her mouth that always seemed to be at the brink of breaking out into a grin, mostly because it was.

Eventually after he ran out of space to doodle, he turned the sheet over and began to write his draft.

Barony of Fen
Draft Census (Fourth Revision)
For Her Highness Princess Celestia and Princess Luna’s Eyes Only

Permanent Residents of the Barony

Twenty-three miscellaneous seaponies, each of whom is more beautiful than the last
One (1) male duck named Podunk
Three (3) Adolescent duck offspring, who do not listen to their father (above)
One (1) loyal old earth pony named Sen
One (1) young seapony filly named Ripple
One (1) beautiful seapony mare named Pearl, who is Ripple’s mother. My heart sings when I am in her presence, and there is no mare in all of Equestria who I would choose over her, not even a Princess. I shall be indebted to you for the rest of my life for this position, even if tonight was the only time I will ever see her, because for this one night, I have truly found paradise.

Your faithful servant
Baron Gaberdine of Fen

Gaberdine looked the draft over with a chuckle, fixing a single punctuation mark here and tidying up a character there. It seemed outrageously humorous and sappy at the moment, but as the time was far past midnight, it was more likely the fatigue than any sudden stroke of insight from the Muse of Comedy. A yawn escaped him as he hesitated over the last few words, remembering how the occasional Royal in Equestria would set their romantic sights on the Princess of the Sun only to find the wax in their wings bursting into metaphorical flames as they drew near. Some mares were simply too far above one’s station in life, and Pearl could not have been more above Gaberdine than if she lived in a tower in Cloudsdale.

Or… maybe not.

He snorted one last time in derision before trudging to bed and slipping back beneath the covers. Tomorrow would come far too soon, and after reaching out with his magic to turn off the light, he sent the letter on its way before dropping off to sleep.

7. Anchorage

The One Who Got Away
Anchorage

“Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene
Appears above, and groves forever green:
A grot is form'd beneath, with mossy seats,
To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats.”

—Virgill, The Aeneid

A brilliant light burst through the tiled glass window that made up so much of Gaberdine’s bedroom wall, spraying his bed with such force that even under the covers, he had to pull a foreleg over his eyes. In contrast, the cool breeze that trickled into his room from the open door brought with it the tantalizing scent of baking pancakes that fought valiantly with his determination to remain in bed until a respectable hour. Noon, perhaps. He was a baron now. He could sleep in whenever he wanted. Somehow he doubted that Sen would bring him breakfast in bed, though. Perhaps a compromise was in order. Maybe if he moved the bed into the kitchen.

“Good morning, Mister Baron Gaberdine!” The distinctive slithering-flop noise of a young seapony traversing the steamboat’s deck filtered to Gaberdine’s ears despite the thin comforter he was holding over his head. “I found your mail outside. You got two boxes, and the big one rattles when shaken. Are you going to get up, Mister Gaberdine?”

Surrendering to the inevitable and the unavoidable, Gaberdine poked his nose out from under the covers and regarded the young seapony looking back at him. “Yes.” It seemed a sufficient response to the relatively uncomplicated question, but it brought him face to face with a different problem.

While looking at Ripple, Gaberdine felt a shock all the way to his tail that sent his heart into a sudden hammering fit. He suddenly remembered accidentally sending the doodled and scribbled draft of the census to Princess Celestia complete with a drawing of the little seapony and her mother last night just before he went to sleep. Complicating matters was the fact that the exact same letter that he remembered sending was, in fact, sitting on his nightstand right exactly where he had left it, complete with a little red ribbon around the middle that he certainly did not put there.

There were two slightly-damp additions to the side of the Letter-That-Was-Not-Supposed-To-Be-There. Both were boxes, one quite a bit larger than the other, but both were adorned with the golden sun and silver moon of the Diarchy. After a little thought determined that whatever was in the boxes was not going to be discovered by simply staring at them and sweating, Gaberdine swung his legs out of bed and considered the decision of which box to open first.

On Hearth's Warming Eve in Canterlot, the boxes that rattled had the best presents.

Opening the large box took more effort than he realized, particularly with the bright attentive eyes of Ripple glued to his every motion. There was a folded sheet of crisp paper inside, marked with both the Celestial Sun and Moon symbols in gold and silver, and he took a deep breath before reading aloud.

From: Their Royal Highnesses, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna
To: Ripple, on the occasion of your Cutie Mark

Dearest Ripple,

Please allow the both of us to extend our congratulations on the occasion of your cutie mark. This is a time of great joy in your life, and it deserves to be shared. Although we can not be there on this happy occasion, know that we share your joy at this auspicious event.

We are including several gifts which we believe will be of assistance with your special gift. First, in this box you will find a full toolkit—

"Cool!" Ripple hopped up and down with a splatting noise every time her flippers hit the floor. "Can I see it? Can I see it?"

Gaberdine raised one eyebrow and continued reading.

—which Baron Gaberdine will present to you at the end of this letter. Also, we are including a number of dragonfire-imbued scrolls for your use. My sister and I enjoyed reading the reports that Baron Gaberdine has sent us so much, that we would appreciate it if you both were to continue sending us letters on a regular basis.

And last but not least, we have included this manepin with both of our symbols. At any time, you may present it to any of our guards for an audience with either of us, or both if you wish.

Sincerely,
Princess Celestia and Princess Luna

"Awesome," breathed Ripple as she took the silver-and-gold manepin, holding it proudly in the sunlight that beamed into the bedroom. The starburst of Princess Celestia's cutie mark was pressed against the crescent moon of Princess Luna's mark, and the two symbols meshed perfectly in a way that reminded Gaberdine of two puzzle pieces interlocking. It looked even better when Ripple used it to tuck back the little strand of violet mane that kept falling into her eyes. The pin was perfect, just as if it belonged there all of the time and had just been discovered to be put to its proper use.

He beamed and complimented the little seapony as she admired herself in the mirror, and again later as she unpacked the entire Royal Equestrian Engineering Corps Naval Toolkit (Personal) to spread the contents out across every horizontal surface in the room. She only quit her detailed examination of the marvelous toolkit when Sen poked his nose into the bedroom and stated that the toaster had ceased to toast and wondered if perhaps there was anypony in the vicinity who could repair it. In the blink of an eye, the tools were back in the box, and both prospective future engineer and present engineering tools vanished out the door, followed by a suspiciously smug senechal.

The remaining small box that sat silently on the table had been ignored by both Gaberdine and Ripple, but now he had no excuse to keep from opening it up and examining the contents. Twenty-five thin silver rings bearing the crossed gear symbols of the Royal Equestrian Engineering Corps sat peacefully inside, as well as a somewhat smaller filly-sized ring with a small tag reserving it for later use upon parental approval. There was no note, but Gaberdine recognized the enchantments on the rings. They each could be worn on a unicorn horn, or seapony he supposed, and used as a homing beacon in dark or stormy weather, as well as identifying the wearer to any Equestrian guard in their vicinity.

He closed the box while thinking of the contents and their future use. Even after fleeing from their ocean homes, the shy and frightened seaponies had found a place in Equestria to live and heal from their ordeal. They needed this place in order to bring order to their lives just as much as the riverboat tugs needed them to protect their lives from job-related dangers of the unpredictable river. Like odd puzzle pieces that no longer belonged in an old puzzle, they had fixed themselves in this place to universal benefit.

With a nearly-audible click, his own destiny became obvious, as if he were a puzzle piece sliding into the last empty spot in a puzzle. He sat the box to one side for now and started on his way to the castle galley and the two ponies there.

It was where he belonged.

~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~

Lord Gaberdine, Current Baron of Fen, leaned against the rail of his houseboat/castle and considered the playful splashes and calls of the laughing seaponies frolicking in the sunset-stained lagoon. Each of the seaponies sported a new silver ring on her horn, almost invisible at this distance except for the faint glint when they would rise to the surface and toss their manes back.

They were all so sweet and innocent despite their traumatic trip to this refuge. Even through their ordeal, they still had a joy in just living and existing that the nobles in court could never understand. If Gaberdine had sent the letters he had written, all of the nobles that he had been begging favor from for so many years would flock to his location just to gawk and consider ways that they could exploit the aquatic ponies that he had barely gotten to know.

Canterlot had always been home to him, with all of its intricate political maneuvers forming a bitter backstabbing stew that he had swam through since he was a young colt. Now it was time to swim in a different environment far more pleasant than his lifetime home, and perhaps as he returned to Canterlot on occasion to carry out the responsibilities of his new position, he would be able to carry some of that purity back up the mountain.

He could barely see the clouds over the top of the Canterlot mountain from here, bright white things that shone in the setting sun like beacons. Perhaps in some way that was what the Princesses had been doing and would continue to do. By simply existing, they were living examples of what ponies and all other living creatures in Equestria should strive towards. It was a thought of considerable depth, and he contemplated it while simply soaking in the evening sun and listening to the sound of seaponies at play, or at least until a spray of water from the lagoon shocked him out of his thoughts.

With a loud quack of frustration, Podunk lifted off from the surface of the lagoon and landed with a squelch of wet feathers by Gaberdine's hooves. Right behind him, Ripple looked up with a second splash and a loud cry of "Unfair! No hiding out of the water when we're playing tag! Oh, hello, Mister Gabby. Did you want to come play with us? There's not much sunset left."

After a moment to put his thoughts in order, Gaberdine nodded. "That's a splendid idea, Ripple. Give me just a minute to write a note that I've been putting off and I'll be right there."

Lighting his horn with a faint glitter of silver from the ring around its base, Gaberdine scratched for a few moments onto the last official piece of enchanted parchment that Celestia had given him before finishing the enchantment and watching it turn to vapor and wisp off in the direction of far-off Canterlot. It was the last piece in the puzzle that needed to be set in place, but there would be more in the future. In particular, his eyes rested on one specific seapony in the splashing game they were playing at the far end of the lagoon, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a happy grin.

Gaberdine strode to the upper section of the deck where the bow stuck out over the water, carefully draped his tie over a nearby spar, and paused at the very edge of the sharp dropoff. He lit his horn with a water-breathing spell and crouched as the splashing of the distant seaponies died down into an intense scrutiny of the uncharacteristic behavior of their staid and stogy baron.

He jumped.

It was far from a neat cleaving into the cool lagoon. It probably could not even be described as a 'dive' either. It was more of an awkward belly-flop with an impressive splash, followed by an inexperienced paddling under the surface of the water. Still, it drew applause from all of the watching seaponies, more so from a young mother and her small daughter who laughed when he surfaced in front of them and shook the water from his sodden mane.

"So does this mean you're delaying your return home for another day, Gabby?" asked Pearl, splashing him with one flipper and grinning.

"You could say that," said Gaberdine with a matching smile.

Barony of Fen
Official Census (Final Revision)

Permanent Resident(s)

One (1) Seneschal Sienna of Fen
One (1) Baron Gaberdine of Fen

Transient Residents

Four (4) Ducks (one adult, three adolescents)

Your faithful servant
Baron Gaberdine of Fen

- - - Cut Here - - - -

Princess Celestia and Princess Luna,

On behalf of my subjects and myself, I would like to express our appreciation for all that you have done for us.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Gabby

Author Comments, Ramblings, and Footnotes of Awesomeness

The One Who Got Away
Author Comments, Ramblings, and Footnotes of Awesomeness

“As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd,
Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud;
And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly,
And all the rustic arms that fury can supply:
If then some grave and pious man appear,
They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ear;
He soothes with sober words their angry mood,
And quenches their innate desire of blood.”

—Virgill, The Aeneid

First, I would like to thank the individual who gave me the idea for this story. I think it was GhostOfHeraclitus, but I can't find the actual email/messaging exchange, possibly because it happened before Google put archiving on Hangouts. As best my spotty memory can recall, the conversation (with whoever it was) went vaguely like this:

Me: I need to do a story where there's a barony in a valley that winds up split in half along a river, where one son gets one half and the other son gets the other half, but the third son gets the river.

Ghost: And it's full of seaponies?

Me: (pause) Yeah.

Between my editors and myself, we had a few somewhat vigorous discussions and comment sessions that just had to be reproduced for the edification of the readers, or at least any of them named Ed. (That is what Edification means, right?) The quotes from The Aeneid come from the public domain translation, with just the smallest change to Virgil to make him more of a seapony. (Get it? Virgil? Virgill? … I'll see myself out.)

Chap. 1

(Where the Barony of Fenwick is mentioned)

GhostOfHeraclitus: Their Pinot Grand Fenwick is, I am told, simply to die for.
:)
(I dare you to work in the phrase 'the pony who roared' into this) ;)

(Reflections on the name of Gaberdine)

Seether00: Oh, it's a guy. I kept thinking that with a name like that it he was a she

Georg: k, just for illustration's sake, I went through and green/yellowed each his/he in the previous several sentences. There's 11 of them. 12 if you count 'Lord'

(On the discussion of the Equestrian budget being 137,000 bits per minute)

Georg: 72 billion bits a year. Seem high or low?
Peter: No way to tell without some idea of the buying power of the bit. What is the usual wage per hour for instance is a good place to start.
Southpaw: It's good as a high enough number to make the point. It doesn't have to equal the budget of a nation like the US - Equestria doesn't have aircraft carriers. ;)
BluePaladin: I want to say the buying power of the bit is probably meant to be around the dollar mark, given how freely those little gold coins (plated, perhaps?) are thrown around.
Ghost: Less gold content than seawater, your basic bit. That's not even gold. Rubs off too fast. Brass. Even that's too expensive, truth be told. Also it while it is true we don't have aircraft carriers, we do have airborne pegasi carriers and those cost a pretty penny. The protective spells alone cost over... anyway. I'd take aircraft carriers and half of Pentagon in trade for the Parasprite Preparedness Fund and half of the MONHUNGENCOM infrastructure. --D.H.L.

Personally, I assume a bit is exactly one dollar and work from there. It's a daft notion[1] but it helps keep some sort of perspective.

Taking that into consideration, 72e9 is too few bits. But I doubt anyone (anyone not virtually present, at any rate) is going to bother multiplying let alone figuring out the economics of it. It sounds like a reasonably vast sum.

[1] I can't even blame parochialism. I've only ever seen a dollar once.
Ferret: Can we please keep these footnotes? Or can Ghost put them in the comments? It's such an amusing contrast in writing styles.

(“Yes, Your Highness. Or my second-eldest brother Plum, in the event Elderberry is unable to carry on the family name.”)
Peter: in other words if his plums don't work?
Georg: Boo!
Seether: Oh c'mon. Throw the guy a bone....er
Anon: not his fault it might be difficult to raise the flagpole.
Georg: Ahhh!!! You perverts... I love you all, you know that, right? :)

(Discussions on paddlewheel vs. Sidewheel steamships)
Peter: Ah, I see. Sternwheeler vs sidewheeler.
BluePaladin: Sidewheel 4lyfe!
Seether00: Oh dear. He is in deliverance country now.
Georg: Oh, if only I had a good spot for Sen to whip out a banjo...
Ferret: Just mention someone's playing a banjo out of sight n___n

(On discussions of Gaberdine's new career)
As a noble, it would be his responsibility to fritter away a certain amount of bits on irresponsible hobbies that could be used as conversation starters at court.

Ghost: Ah. I see he has learned the art of being a noble from Canterlot ponies. Good. We needed more of those. --D.H.L.

(Yes, I am writing comments in character. No, I have no excuse)
BluePaladin: Now now, Dotted. It keeps them busy, after all. Otherwise, they might actually start to consider what powers they do still posses. I do rather wish they would stop having croquet, or racquetball, or what-have-you tournaments in the middle of the streets though.
Ferret: True, but is that better than them trying to actually exert their supposedly dictatorial powers? Or worse yet, try to influence court.

(Then he could return to Canterlot as Baron Gaberdine of Fen, much as several of his peers were barons or viscounts of bits of land so small that a stone could be thrown completely across them from one border to the next.)
Southpaw: Princess Celestia, giving the young nobility what they need instead of want: a healthy dose of humility for the future.
Georg: Some misguided youth just need a little size 14W golden hoofed nudge to direct them in a more useful direction.

(Reflections on IHTFP -- The crusty old pony gestured to an arch over the gangplank with IHTFP painted in large letters, and below in smaller golden script, the words S.S. Paradise IV.)
Georg: This is an in-joke by the way, it can stand for I Have Truly Found Paradise, or I Hate This Fucking Place.
Ghost: :D
Ferret: As it should be n_n
Editors note: It's also a very long in-joke at MIT.

(For a long moment, Gaberdine considered just climbing back into the carriage and flying home. This was obviously one of Princess Celestia’s epic pranks, and he was the punch line.)
Ghost: Random aside:
It is said that Princess Celestia likes to play pranks on senior members of the civil service just to see what they'll do. Dotted Line endeavors to avoid the prank by simply not being where the Princess expects him to be and not doing what she expects him to do. Spinning Top responds by erasing all evidence that the prank ever took place.

Leafy Salad, on the other hoof, responded by alphabetizing Celestia's rooms. Including the furniture. And everything in the furniture.
BluePaladin: I am imagining Luna trying to Prank Dotted, and spending a week desperately trying to out think him long enough to actually put a pie in his face. On Wednesday, Celestia told Luna if she actually manages, she will buy her that expensive telescope she has been eyeing lately.

(It only took a light magical touch on the dragonfire-imbued scroll for it to burst into green fire and flow out of the room in a trail of smoke, vanishing off to the north on its rendezvous with Princess Celestia, who would get it almost at the exact moment she was lowering the sun for the day.)

Peter: I have this sudden vision of Spike earning spending money by contributing a supply of dragon fire to the paper manufacturer.
Georg: So Twilight, why do you have me scheduled in at Minutette's to have my teeth cleaned every month of this year, and does it have anything to do with the new jewelry she's been buying?
Ferret: giggles helplessly

(The old baron must have been a fairly competent unicorn, from the number of waterproofing spells around his small but tidy bedroom and extensive library. )
BluePaladin: In fairness, it's unlikely any suites would be below the waterline. Unless I miss my guess, this boat is meant to be evocative of the famous American Riverboats (Especially casino boats) with the crown topped smoke stacks and great paddlewheels. Those things possessed an absurdly shallow draft and a nearly flat bottom. They were also quite tall. Tall enough that if they sunk, the top few decks would sit safely above the water line once the bottom hit the riverbed.
...
Seether00: You know what I'm going to say here:

Everyone said it was daft to build a castle in the swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em.

It sank to the swamp. So I built a second one. It sank into the swamp. I built a third one. It burned down, fell over than sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up!

(“I don’t see what relevance this has to a third barony,” said Gaberdine. “If one son took everything west of the river, and the other son took everything east of it…” The riverboat they were on took that moment to lurch slightly at its moorings and Gaberdine paused to consider just exactly how convoluted Princess Celestia could be when provoked.)

Ghost: That's nothing! During the highly annoying breakup of house Canter, she awarded one particularly annoying noble a third of all land (the middle third), excepting the third of that land (the middle third) and of those parts that were left, the Crown took a third (a middle third, as it happens) and of parts thus remaining the Crown took exactly a third (the middle third) and...

Six cartographers were driven insane, and an entire branch of mathematics had to be invented because of that little fracas. And then there was the business with House Sierpinski over in Stalliongrad. Yeesh. We still haven't gotten to the bottom of that one. --D.H.L.

Yes, it's a math joke. No, I don't have any shame.

Ferret: No shame for such math jokes is truly a good thing.

(After waiting a sufficient amount of time to put a dent in the glass of admittedly fine whiskey/cleaning solution and to see if the old pony was about to admit the joke, Gaberdine continued, “How many ‘seaponies’ are there in the river?”)

Ghost: One of my favorite jokes so far on account of being quiet.
Georg: Credit goes to Tek on this one. I think. Or Peter. One of them suggested it. They've both been a godsend.

(There was a sudden silence, followed by a piercing scream. “I got my cutie mark! Look! Look!”)
Ferret: What does a cutie mark for saving nobles from steam look like?
BluePaladin: A disappointed Dotted Line.

Well, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed the trip down the river, and I hope to see you all soon as I continue writing.

Keep your boiler hot
—Georg (and the rest of the crew)