Façade: Trip and Grace in Equestria
It was a lovely Saturday in the small town of Ponyville. For the residents, it had been an uneventful week, which was wonderful considering how frequent the town seemed to plunge into chaos several times a year. The market was especially lively, as harvesting season had just began, leaving plenty of healthy and organic food to be sold. One of the stalls in particular belonged to Carrot Top, one of the local farmers. For the past few years, she had grown nothing but carrots: Yayas, White Satins, and even Chatenays. However, it was becoming pretty clear to her that growing a single crop wouldn't produce as much income, and after a suggestion from Applejack, decided to start growing varieties of melons as well. It was very worrisome to her at first, tending to something that she knew so little about, but in the end it was all worth it. There was no feasible way that Carrot Top could possibly regret the decision.
She was casually counting the bits she had earned the day before a tall, lanky shadow loomed over her. Her eyes looked upward, and looking back down at her was a man wearing the ugliest and drab clothes one could hope to find. Despite the mild gusts of wind, the creature's combed ginger hair made no movement, nor did the fabric on his clothes flap in the breeze. The yellow pony and the lanky man seemed to be stuck staring at one another for the longest time. But it soon became obvious that it wasn't Carrot Top the mysterious man was staring at.
It was her melons.
Specifically, the melons she had laid out in wooden crates and baskets around her stall.
"Can... I..." Carrot Top tried struggling to force her words out of her mouth, but she immediately went silent again. Ponies had begun gathering around the stall, all trying to get a glimpse at the strange (mostly) hairless ape. Conversations with family and friends came to a halt, pegasi halted in the air to get a better look, and even Ditzy Doo had both of her eyes focused on him. The typically vibrant air of the Ponyville market had gone silent, giving way to hushed whispers from onlookers. At least, that's how it was for ten seconds until the man finally made a scowl that one would make if one saw their wife sleeping with another person.
The man suddenly bent forward with his arms stretched out like an automaton as he grabbed a crate filled with Cantaloupes and lifted it into the air. Thanks to Carrot Top's knee jerk reaction time, she managed to duck behind the wooden counter just as the he tossed the entire crate into the stall without any noticeable effort, causing the entire tent to collapse inward, and also causing multiple ponies to gasp. They all breathed a collective sigh of relief when Carrot Top emerged from the orange and white fabric that was once her market stand, unharmed.
"Okay, Carrot Top, that's it, I think you need to leave," the man said.
"Wait, what?"
The pony found herself lifted up into the air kicking her legs as the man suddenly did a full turn and began stiffly walking away from the wreckage, ignoring the mare's screams. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what the deal is with you tonight."
"Tonight?! It's 9 o'clock in the morning! Let me down! Help!" Carrot Top kicked and screamed, but the small crowd watching the events unfold simply stepped away.
The short trek quickly ended at a house located just across the dirt road, one that had recently been on sale after its previous inhabitants moved to the city of Trottingham. The man marched up to the door, which had mysteriously opened on its own without any form of visible magic, and took two steps inside as he carried a screaming and panicking pony in his death grip.
"We'll be fine, you should just go."
Without warning, the man once again spun around, lifted the pony over his head, and quite literally threw her out of the house's entryway. As the door slammed shut, Carrot Top found herself flying over a crowd of stunned ponies before landing face first into the hard, loamy street, sliding several feet before coming to a stop. The somewhat stunned mare was helped up by a few onlookers, two of which included Big Macintosh and Applejack. As the mare was lifted back up, she only uttered a single statement.
"I'm never growing anything else other than carrots in this town as long as I live, Applejack..." Carrot Top muttered before fainting, in a trivial fashion, into Big Macintosh's forelegs. (The saucy minx!)
As Big Macintosh, who cheeks were as red as a boiling kettle, held the mare like a white knight, a woman wearing an ugly brown bowl cut hairstyle walked by, stopped, and gave him a very menacing glare that easily said "I will murder your entire family" before marching towards the house that the man had entered only a few moments before. Instead of using the door like any regular pony would, she instead opted to simply pass through one of the plaster walls as if it wasn't even there in the first place, must to the shock and confusion of several onlookers.
"Can somepony please tell me what in Celestia's mane happened?"
"Should we call the royal guard?"
"My eyes! They're back to normal!"
"Why were its clothes so ugly?"
Ponies started chattering among one other like a flock of birds perched on a single tree, all of the discussion focused on the two strange bipeds that had just taken up residence in a two-story home that was supposed to have been on sale. The ponies in town were more used to having their lives endangered by giant monsters that cause insurance companies to label Ponyville as a "no-go zone" on their maps; in this case, there was simply a man who seemed to have an extreme distaste for melons and a housewife who seemed to have a noticeably large rear end.
"Listen, Big Mac, ya go take Carrot Top here to the hospital. I'mma go try to see if Twilight knows anything about what happened here, alright?" Applejack instructed her older brother, who gave a stern nod as he tossed Carrot Top onto his back and trotted off towards the town's hospital. The farmpony sighed as she glowered at the seemingly innocent home, already aware that it was going to be a long day. "Just as I thought I had seen enough with my own two eyes..."
Author's Note
This is probably gonna be one of those stories where updates will come whenever I feel like updating the story. This fanfiction is meant as a way for me to get some words and whatnot onto paper before working on more serious stories.
I'm definitely planning to continue writing, and I'm also hoping to have an actual plot to it as well, but at the moment I'm sure you'll all enjoy the story. Hopefully the next few chapters won't be as short as this one!
I also wasted half of an hour on the cover art, but I think it was worth it.
Note that the chapters may be edited at any time, and that I also welcome constructive criticism so that I can make the story looks it best!
