Version: 1

Much of Equestria had burned. The dark phoenix, Bodaway, had been very successful in his mission to "destroy everything". Countless villages, several towns, and an entire city had been reduced to ashes. The forests along the way had also taken a beating and the pegasi would be cleaning smoke clouds from the sky for weeks. So many lives had been ruined. So much had been lost. A number of citizens were upset that it had taken the Element Bearers as long as it did to find Bodaway and turn him into a fossil. Now all that was left was to rebuild and replant.

Not everyone shared in the tragedy however. One pony in particular discovered her special talent, her purpose, thanks to the devastation. She was a young filly named simply Mesa. An earth pony with an orange coat and a red mane. She also suffered from an unusual condition. She was a lot bigger than a normal pony.

At the age of 3 she was taller than Celestia. At 5 she could see into a second story window. When she was 9 she helped her dad replace the roof by using her back as a platform. Finally, now at age 12, she was just tall enough that the top of her head could be used as a lift to reach the roof of a 5 story building. In other words, she was huge and still growing.

Her extra size had felt like a curse for a long time. Sure it brought lots of interesting magicians and doctors who would share wild stories with Mesa while examining every hair on her body. She got to travel to distant places and see strange machines. But she had always felt like a freak too. She didn't fit in. She ate WAY more than a normal pony. She regularly crushed things no matter how careful she was. Someponies made fun of her and others were afraid of her. Mesa almost felt like she didn't really count as an earth pony at all.

Until the cleanup crews and construction workers needed help.

With so much debris that needed moving, the teams struggled to clear the roads for families to get back into their homes to recover anything that might have survived the fires. Mesa's family included. So the filly, feeling sorry for the workers pushing themselves so hard to move what seemed like an endless trail of black sticks that used to be trees from the road, stepped in and simply... threw them aside. It was trivially easy for her. HER! A young pony of only 12 years. When a dozen full grown earth pony stallions, each one 2 to 3 times her age, struggled to move even a single tree.

They were embarrassed but grateful. Naturally she helped them clear the entire road into the first town. A project that was expected to take several days ended up taking only a few hours. For Mesa, it was no more difficult than tossing aside branches. Many ponies thanked her.

Mesa had felt... she wasn't sure what. For so long being big was only ever a burden. Yet she was the one who had cleared the road and it was thanks to her incredible size and strength. She wanted to help more. To use her size to do something else. So with permission from her parents, she asked the cleanup crew for more work. Which they gave her.

Months worth of hard labor for hundreds of ponies Mesa could do in days if not faster. It felt good to be thanked by so many ponies. Sure, the roads would have been cleared eventually, but her efforts offered families trying to salvage something from their old lives a quicker resolution.

Then it was time to start rebuilding. Again Mesa volunteered to help. Unfortunately it didn't go so well at first.

It turns out that homes are complex structures filled with a lot of little pieces that Mesa just couldn't handle precisely enough to make a good builder. Mesa was forced to become a simple mover. It wasn't what she wanted to be doing, but she could transport lumber and other materials a lot faster and easier than other forms of transportation and with greater flexibility than a crane. So she was still a major help, but she had been looking forward to building.

Then came a pony with a ridiculous idea.

A lot of ponies were living in crowded shelters and simple tents that barely kept the weather off the inhabitants. They needed a lot of cheaply built sturdy buildings. They had a giant pony ready and happy to work, but she couldn't build "real" homes or structures. She was too big.

They had the strength, but not the precision. It was a frustrating conundrum for one aspiring architect by the name of Rapid Lines. He was a unicorn who agonized over the problem for weeks when inspiration struck him thanks to a bread shortage and a bit of banter between 2 workers. They had wanted to make sandwiches, but bread was one luxury that was hard to come by after the fires. One of the stallions had simply decided to have a salad. The other insisted that he didn't need bread to make a sandwich. When challenged that such a thing was impossible, he replied that it didn't need bread to be built and eaten like a sandwich.

Rapid Lines felt like he had been struck with genius.

They had a lot of ponies who needed better temporary dwellings. But why would a TEMPORARY dwelling need the same considerations as a permanent building?

So a plan was proposed and Mesa happily agreed.

Stone was readily available from the nearby mountains. Cutting it into crude blocks and delivering them in mass quantities was also cheap. It was building something with them that was usually the hard part, but Mesa was more than capable of playing with "blocks".

The new temporary homes weren't pretty, but they were strong. Made of large stone bricks tightly packed together and topped by aspiring builders with straw and thatch roofs. Mesa was proud. Entire neighborhoods went up made of the stone brick buildings. Though she was supposed to follow specific building codes Mesa wasn't afraid to push it a little bit. The bricks she was provided weren't all the same size and often didn't fit well together unless she played around with their arrangement. So each structure ended up looking just a bit different from the one next door. She made sure each one had separate rooms and was spacious enough for more than one pony. The end result wasn't as ugly as she had feared. Though maybe a little plain.

Never before had so much been built in so short a time by a single pony. A filly who was only 12 years old and still just playing with her blocks. It was also the accomplishment that got her a cutie mark.

Author's Note

Bodaway means "fire maker". Got to love name meaning sites.

The original idea for this story was a silly short about a young filly keeping a tiny Anon hostage and making him live in temporary houses she'd build out of blocks. Then she'd taunt him while knocking them down so he'd have to run for his life. But that idea got me thinking about buildings made out of brick and what happens after a natural disaster destroys a lot of peoples homes. Eventually I evolved the idea from a "simple silly" story into more of a "feel good" story.