In Northwest Fillydelphia Born and Raised...
Right, right, so this is the story of how I got my cutie mark, but if you read the title, you already know that. I hope you read the title. Why would you not?
Anyway, picture this: the year's 1347, and I'm your typical snotty bratty angsty teenager. All three of those things. Typical conversation went something like this:
"Mom, take me to Trot Hopic!"
"No dear, I'm making dinner."
"MY PARENTS HATE ME AND NOPONY UNDERSTANDS ME!"
Then I'd barricade myself in my room and listen to Gerard Neigh caterwaul about this or that. Their early stuff's better by the way, you pleb.
I was what, 14? Second year of Secondary school, when most the kids already have their cutie marks and are busy trying to figure out how they're going to monetize them, and stupid me is still a stupid blank flank. Look, I'll be real, I was an asshole in secondary. I mean, I still am an asshole, but I'm a refined asshole. Let's not let that metaphor go any further.
I didn't hate school or anything. I mean, I did, but less than most my peers, surprisingly. I was third from the top of my class in home economy and impressing my teachers in photography class with my "knack for balanced composition", what ever that meant. I liked sewing stuff and designing stuff and also accidentally setting fire to the stuff I was sewing. That's probably why I got kicked out of said home ec class.
But on the less fashiony side of things, I also found many interests. I wasn't anything special with my horn (and still ain't, if you want to know the truth--it's probably my greatest combat weakness), but I was doing a number on potion-mixing (six, as in the number of times I had set off the fire alarm), and really getting into alchemy and sigils. My greatest achievement in the former was turning lead into uranium (fortunately in a contained environment) and I think I accidentally summoned some weird ape thing with the later. I've really poured a lot of time into symbol-based magic, actually; runes, sigils, arcane circles, you name it. Great for boiling your enemies' blood and stuff. Don't get on my bad side.
Anyway, the point is, I couldn't cast a spell to blow stuff up, but I could find 18 other ways to do it indirectly, more or less. my pupils quickly learned to have a healthy fear/respect of me, and my parents quickly learned the telegraph extension code for my school counselor. Good thing I turned out chaotic good instead of evil.
So here I was, 14-year old filly on the cusp of becoming a mare, puberty, blank flank, first heat, secondary school, blah blah blah. I'm really just making this up as I go along. Not the story I haven't seem to have gotten to yet. The telling of it.
I should mention that my family's pretty well to do. Are we rich? Actually, yeah I guess we are. Well, I'm not; I spend all my money on clothing and overpriced cocktails, but I mean back when this took place, I found my basic needs more than taken care of, and the Fillydelphia Metropolitan School District found itself with a quite generous check each June on account of successfully putting up with the little terror called Princess for another year. I lived in Fillydelphia by the way; I guess I hadn't really mentioned that yet. If you make a Fresh Princess joke I'll kill you. Figuratively speaking, that is. I don't believe in petty assassinations.
Anyway, and I find myself saying "anyway" a lot, the reason I mention the relative wealth of my parents is because we had a nice split-level apartment in Chestnut Hill, you know the kind that end up on the cover of those real estate mags, fresh paint, flowers in the yard, the whole kebang. And it had a basement. That was convenient for me, because my parents in their wisdom designated it my "Kaboom Room". Though I'm not sure how wise it was having me blow stuff up underneath their house, I was there last week for Hearths Warming, so obviously I didn't do too much damage.
It was 28.5 feet by 43 feet (I know because I measured it), and once I made it clear I was going to seriously study this whole pyromage business, they cleared out all the junk in a hurry. After the first time I cracked the foundations, they retrofitted it with a lot of concrete, ventilation (don't want your daughter dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, do you?), fire suppression systems, and enough magical dampening to make a changeling sneeze in an even bigger hurry. On account of me being an only child (their "Darling Princess". Eck.), I basically had the place to myself, and it became my room away from my room. I don't want to bore you with more extraneous details than I already have, but that's where I really started to hone my skills with casting circles and all that other sketchy magic. Get it? Sketchy, because you draw it? Nevermind.
You may be asking yourself if this story has a point. Relax, it does; I just love exposition. So I was getting pretty good with my runes and sigils and all that stuff. After school each day I'd race down to the basement to figure out new ways to melt, incinerate, explode, etc. There's a reason my fir's all fuggly on my rear legs, but that's another story for another day.
As I went about playing with fire, though, I always felt a little guilty. After all, while other fillies and colts were learning useful skills like bricklaying and herbal medicine, I was destroying old dress forms and leftover fabric swatches. I didn't think I was actually doing anything good. Turns out I was just training for my future job. Woah, foreshadowing!
So one night in late February the radio announcer guy lets us know that the blizzard that's been terrorizing the place is only going to get worse. Weather ponies had lost control of the cloud, and it had gone rogue or something. Downtown was getting half a foot of fresh snow every hour. What had been an inconvenience had become a problem, and folks were starting to get worried. Our family was fine, mind you; we had more than enough provisions and with school cancelled I could scarcely care less about the 10 foot drifts piled up halfway up our raised doorway. But I knew that surely there were other ponies less fortunate than me, and that's when I got an idea.
See, the primary use of my sewing machine was for making dresses. They weren't all that good, and that's why I don't have diamonds on my ass. But I also knew well enough how to make blankets, and figured there were probably some ponies who could use them.
"MOOOOOM, If I were to make some blankets, who would need them the most?"
"Aww, that's very thoughtful of you, Princess. I'm sure the homeless shelter on 13th and... Vine (I think) could use some. But there's no way I'm letting you out in this weather. You'll freeze to death."
My mom was very doting like that. She still is. I love you mom.
So anyway, I found my rolls of fabric and set about making a dozen blankets. I picked the number twelve because I figured it was about the most I could make before I got bored. Sure enough, two hours later I had twelve two-layer stuffed blankets, and I was very bored. But the exciting part came next.
One of the things I love about my skill set is that it has that sense of rebelliousness and recklessness to it. That appealed to me more as a teen than it does now, but the thrill remains. This thrill is redoubled when dark or "forbidden" magic is involved.
Now my mom was no dummy. She made it very clear that if she ever found a book on dark magic in my possession, I was hyper-grounded for life, which is like regular grounded but with more chores and eating porridge involved. It was very quickly driven into my head not to fuck around with that stuff, through a variety of guest lecturers at the Toadstool residence (I hate my family name) and a litany of newspaper clippings about dead and maimed kids who had been messing around with stuff beyond their ken. Even now as a licensed mage, I still only rarely call upon the dark arts, and only if there's no other way around a problem. I don't want to accidentally destroy the world.
As I was saying, dark magic was a no go, but having made clear to my mom that I was taking these things seriously and dropping hints that maybe there was a cutie mark or even career in pyromancy in my future, my mom relented and on my behalf checked out from the library Grey Magic: Its Practice and Uses, Practical and Arcane. I want to point out it was on my behalf because it was the part of the library kids weren't allowed to check out books from, you know, where they also keep all the steamy romance novels and smutty comics. And advanced magical tomes, because Faust forbid our kids read about sex or how to time travel. Anyway, the book was super dusty and stodgy and probably written several hundred years ago, but I didn't care, because it was a font of knowledge and I was devouring it. With adult supervision, though, because that was one of the caveats for me getting to read it (which I followed for the most part, because at heart I wasn't really a particularly troubled youth, and I recognized that if I was going to accidentally summon any demons, it was probably worth having my mom around to banish them.). If only she could banish my dad's personal demons, but that's another sob story for another day that I don't really feel like relating anyway.
So this grey magic grimoire basically had lots of spells and sigils that were kind of sketchy but ultimately mostly harmless. And seeing how I had been tearing through it the past few days, it was fresh in my mind as I looked outside at the falling snow. And I knew just what I could do.
"Mom I'm taking the grey magic book thingie downstairs; I'll let you know if I need help, k thanks bye" I yelled in rapid syllables at my mom quietly crocheting in the living room. I raced to my parent's bedroom where we both knew I knew it was sitting on the armoire, the idea being that I wouldn't try anything stupid at night if my source of idiocracy was in their possession. I poofed it down to the basement where I already had plopped my twelve maroon blankets. I went with maroon because it just feels like a blanket color, you know? Anyway I teleported it down, grabbed the hot coffee my mom had made me in all her motherly wisdom in my field, and myself headed down into the basement to...
Okay now I get to the part I meant to get to like an hour ago, and it's going to be really anticlimactic given all this build up, but oh well, here goes. In that book, I had been reading, there were instructions on how to summon "Fajro, the Apathetic Demon". Now most fire demons were high level stuff, you know, on account of the fact that they very easily could burn shit down, but according to the text, this Fajro character was just really not feeling it; he was defective or some junk like that. So I figured he'd be a pretty safe creature to summon.
You know how summoning works, and honestly I don't remember the exact details, since it's not a circle I need to use very often. But I can relate the generalities: I grabbed some chalk (I've always liked holding it with a hoof rather than telekinesis. I just feel more connected to what I'm doing that way.) and drew a big circle; got some candles and put them here and there; a pinch of salt; a dash of sulphur; drew a bunch of smaller circles and lines and a couple matrices, and bam! Summoning circle complete.
I trot up to mi madre. "Yo mom, you should probably come down for this part. You know, just in case."
"Of course, dear." Seriously, in retrospect, my mom supported me so awesomely. My dad just stayed out of things. As long as I didn't get hurt, he didn't care what I did.
So we both go back down to the basement and she does her usual "Oh, what's all this?" and I explain what I'm about to do and she gives me her vote of confidence, so I go ahead and recite the magic words, which were something like
"Fearest not the fire hot
That bubbleth beneath my soup pot
Bring me the spirit named Fajro
Who lights up apathetically..."
Yeah I don't really remember the rest.
But I was reading from the book at the time, so I said it correctly, and lo, the smoke from the candles starts swirling about and this vortex forms and there was a little bit of lightning but not much like it was more like the type where you rub your hooves on carpet and then touch a doorknob and then *POOF*, there's this ball of orange flame, 'bout the size of a hoofball, just floating there a few feet above the center of the circle. And this thing has a face, and its face turns towards my mom and I, and in this voice that sounds just like Cob Kernel, he (I'm going to assume it was a he based on its voice; but honestly its gender isn't that important to this story) groans "Ugh, summoned again? What now?", as if annoying teenagers summoned him on a regular basis.
My eyes lit up, because, well, you know, successful casting, and I said "Fajro! What's up?" and he was like, "Nothing much. Just burninating stuff with my friend Trogdor. Lo, for what purpose have you summoned me?" His voice is really full of ennui. I just want to make that clear.
My mom at this point is like, "Okay Sweetie, it looks like you have everything under control. Yell if you need anything."
"Sure thing, Mom." So she trots back upstairs and goes back to crocheting whatever it is she's crocheting, probably a scarf or something. Fajro looks at me blankly and I'm like, "That's my mom. She's alright."
"Okay," he says listlessly.
"Anyway," I continue, "There's a Tarts wack snowstorm ravaging my town right now. I sewed some blankets; I was hoping you could maybe imbue them with your warmth without setting them on fire."
He raised a fiery eyebrow. "What's in it for me?"
This fire demon was a tough customer. Well actually he was my first experience with fire demons so all I knew was that he was more apathetic than most. "Well, sir, this part might not be very interesting, but the next part will involve you helping me make a dark wintery day a little brighter for some down-on-their-luck ponies. You in?"
"Yeah, sure, I can go with that. Not like I had anything else planned for today. How warm do you want the blankets?"
"Uh, I dunno," I reply. "Like eighty degrees or something. Neighreneheit. Not Centineighed. I don't want to burn any ponies."
"Yeah, sure, I can do that." Twelve little globules of flame lick off of him and float over to the blanks, which soon have a faint amber glow to them. I trot over and gingerly poke one. It's warm to the touch but doesn't burn me. Cautiously, I lower my frog onto the blanket. It feels nice. A shiver of delight flows up my spine. In merry abandonment, I whinny and jump into the pile of blankets. Mmmmmmm. I lay there in marshmallowy bliss for a good two minutes and probably would have longer, but Fajro made this wierd coughing sound. "Uh, Miss, was that all you summoned me for?"
"Look, mom, if it isn't working, I'll come back. I may be brash, but I'm not that stupid. Can you trust me? Please, mom?"
She had this really pained look on her face, but eventually she sighed. "You have been going about this all very methodically. I trust you to make good decisions and not let ego get in the way. I also trust you know enough spells and what not to keep yourself warm should something happen."
"Thanks, Mom, you're the best. I promise I won't let you down."
"By let me down you mean freeze to death?"
I'm going to need a lot of thermal energy. Like, a ridiculous amount. I didn't have any of those thermal conversion things for water memorized, because water is boring. Now I know that it takes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
