Chapter 1: Present Company Accepted
Chapter 1: Present Company Accepted
It was a good day. A great day. The day Quills & Sofas restocked its quill supply. Twilight Sparkle had a spring in her step as she returned to the library, her saddlebags full of pristine, never before used Number 2 quills. If she listened carefully, she could hear the feathers gently rustling with every step, just waiting to scratch out a letter to the Princess or inscribe the first bullet point on a very important list—
“I still don’t get why I have to carry all the parchment,” grumbled Spike, mostly hidden behind a towering stack of paper topped with five brand-new bottles of ink. “I mean, there’s plenty of room in your saddlebags.”
Twilight sighed and rolled her eyes. “I told you, Spike—quills are expensive and very delicate, a heavy stack of paper like that could easily crush them! And since I don’t want them burned to a crisp if someone trips—”
“One time! That happened one time!” The stack of paper leaned to and fro in agitation.
Twilight chuckled in spite of herself, steadying it with her magic. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, Number One Assistant, because we’re home.” She pushed open the door to the library.
“Finally!” The little dragon heaved a sigh of relief as he followed her in. “I can’t wait to set these things dow—”
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!” Pinkie Pie shrieked at the top of her lungs as she swung down from a banner unfurling from the ceiling. A volley of confetti exploded from a strategically placed cannon. Specifically, it had been strategically placed to target anypony coming in through the front door.
“AHHHHHHHHHH!!” Spike lost his precarious grip on his cargo.
“AHHHH—!!” Twilight Sparkle’s cry was cut short as parchment and ink crashed over her like a tidal wave. She struggled to the surface, hooves flailing, just in time to see a large present descending towards her, its ribbons whistling ominously. “PINKIE P—OOF!”
The pink pony giggled. “I’m not Pinkie Poof, you silly filly, I’m Pinkie Pie! Did we surprise you?”
Twilight slowly pushed the enormous box off her head, sending it skidding gently down the mountain of papers now littering the floor. Wiping the ink off her face, she glared first at Pinkie, then at the crushed and bedraggled quills falling from her saddlebags.
“Yes, Pinkie, I’m surprised. Very surprised considering it’s not my birthday.” She paused. “Wait a minute, did you say ‘we’?”
Just then resounding boom sounded from the other room, shaking the library and once more knocking Twilight off her hooves. A minute later a green pony with a pink and white mane stuck her head in from the kitchen. At least, she seemed to be green under all the soot.
“Pinkie, I think I fixed the other cannon! And, uh, just out of curiosity do you know anypony who’s really good with carpentry? Oh . . . oh hiiii Twilight Sparkle! Everything’s a-okay over here, ah ha ha ha! No need to come in!”
“Heeey, I know you!” Spike said, pointing a claw at the newcomer. “Minty, right? You borrowed, um, Sock of the Ages, Gawkin’ and Sockin’, Socks for Dummies—”
“Only to fact-check it,” Minty said, trotting in. Surprisingly she had peppermints for her cutie mark, not hoofwear—although she was wearing four socks, all mismatched.
Use the POWER OF IMAGINATION to picture the soot and socks! Image by Avarick.
“And it’s a good thing I did, ‘cause they COMPLETELY messed up the section on lace variations and they said griffons don’t wear socks, which is just not true at all, they do wear ‘em, but only on their hind feet. I wrote them a letter and I was like, ‘Is this book written for dummies or by dummies?’ Pretty good, huh?”
“Oh wow, Minty!” Pinkie Pie cheerfully bounced over to the green pony. “I have no idea what you’re talking about! But then . . .” She tapped her chin. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m talking about either!”
“Imagine that,” Twilight said drily, wringing the last of the ink from her mane. “Well, if you want any more books on socks—”
“Mostly we wanted to test our surprise party!” Pinkie said. “And you both looked totally completely one-hundred-percent surprised, so I think it was a success!”
“Awww, I missed it,” Minty pouted.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Minty. But you know, Twilight is always saying how important it is to collect multiple samples of data before forming a scientific doohickey, so maybe if she went out and walked in again—“
“Um, that’s okay, Pinkie,” Twilight said hurriedly. “I also said you have to make sure to make sure all the variables are the same for each test run, remember? And reusing the same, um, test subject for a surprise party would definitely skew the results.” The purple unicorn pasted a wide grin on her face, sweating slightly as she awaited Pinkie’s response.
“Oh, okay! I understand!” The pink pony’s brow furrowed. “I think.”
“What about you, Spike? Didja jump out of your scales?” Minty grinned, trotted over the baby dragon.
“Me? Pffft, takes more than a banner and a couple of party cannons to get the best of a dragon!” Spike crossed his arms proudly, nose in the air. But after a second he put his paw to the side of his mouth as he leaned towards the green pony. “Just . . . warn me next time you pull something like that, okay?”
“Well, if you two are done with your surprise-party-testing . . . ” Twilight was always glad to see Pinkie Pie, and Minty seemed nice enough, but the tendrils of smoke that continued to drift in from the kitchen were making her nervous.
“OHHHHHHH!” Pinkie jumped several feet into the air. “Thank you for reminding me, Twilight! We aren’t done!”
“What?” Spike and Twilight chorused, shrinking together as they prepared for another assault of festivity.
“Oh, yeeeeeeah, I almost forgot! Pinkie said you’d be the—what’d you say, Pinks?”
“The number-one super-duper all-around-best pony to go to for advice!” Pinkie said, cheerfully throwing a foreleg around Twilight's neck.
“Oh. Well.” Twilight relaxed slightly. “Sure, girls, what can I help you with?”
“It’s like this,” Minty said, sitting on the wooden floor with a bump. “We're planning a party for my friend Kimono. It’s her birthday tomorrow.”
“Kimono, Kimono . . . I can’t quite picture her.”
“I’ll help, Twilight! Close your eyes—go on, cloooose ‘em—and picture a purple earth pony with purple hair and yellow paper-lantern cutie marks—no no no, not THAT shade of purple, DEEP purple! Nope, nope, now you’ve added too much red.”
“Um, I’m opening my eyes now because, uh, you’re kind of scaring me, Pinkie,” Twilight said, leaning away from her friend.
“Kimono doesn’t come into town much, that’s probably why you haven’t met her,” Minty explained. “Sometimes she even asks me to deliver her groceries and stuff. I don’t know why—”
“I know why! It’s so her surprise parties can be more of a . . . SURPRISE!” Pinkie tossed some confetti in the air to punctuate her remark. “I know, ‘cause at last year’s surprise birthday party I set off a lot of fireworks in her cave, and while we were putting out the fires I heard her say, ‘This is why I live out of town.’”
“Whoa—she lives in a cave?” Spike perked up with interest. Sure, he’d heard of dragons living in caves before—even come across one once—but never ponies. “An earth pony living in a cave in the Everfree Forest, wow! She must be really brave and tough!”
Minty snorted with laughter. “Oh geez, she doesn’t live in the Everfree Forest, ah ha ha, that would be ridiculous! Like Pinkie always says, only an evil enchantress would live there. Right, Pinkie?”
Pinkie cleared her throat and pawed at the floorboards in embarrassment.
Oblivious, Minty continued, “But guess what else lives in there? A zebra! That’s what Wysteria was telling me, anyway . . . Shoot, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, Kimono’s cave! It’s in Whitetail Woods, by the Horsetail Falls. I know a cave sounds, like, ugh but it’s not that bad. She’s got lanterns and pillows and stuff.”
“But it’s itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny tiny,” Pinkie said. “So there’s no room for any big gifts. So we thought, ‘Who can help us think of a gift that’s awesome and small for the wisest pony in town?’”
“Hey!” Spike objected, shoving his forehead against Pinkie’s. “Twilight’s the wisest pony in town!”
Pinkie merely leaned back until gravity took over. As Spike faceplanted into the floor, she skipped over him. “Oh Spike! Twilight’s the smartest pony, not the wisest. If she were the wisest, her eyes wouldn’t go ‘oogle-oogle-boogle’ all the time.” Her eyes spun wildly in their sockets.
“I remember seeing her eyes do that when that whole Smarty Pants thing went down!” Minty said eagerly. “Do they really do that all the time?”
“All the time. Like, if she doesn’t understand something? Oogle-oogle-boogle! If she loses a list? Oogle-oogle-boogle! If she meets a version of herself from the future—”
“Wow, if we could get Kimono’s future-self to visit her, that would be the perfect gift!”
“No! No! No time travel!” Twilight yelped. “How . . . how about a nice book?” The unicorn began rummaging among the shelves. “Does she like novels? Poetry? Essays on the laws of thermodynamics? Nonfiction?”
Minty’s eyes grew larger and larger as she watched the books swirling around Twilight in a purple glow. “Um . . . Yes, yes, what is that, and I dunno. But we can’t give her a book.”
The tomes dropped from Twilight’s grasp with a series of thumps as she turned around to confront the green earth pony with a wounded expression. “Why not? Doesn’t she read?!”
“Yeah, she does!” Minty quickly assured the scandalized librarian. “A lot! But she says it’s bad for books in the cave, like ‘cause of the humidity or something? So she just has Sweetberry pick ‘em up from the library—from here, I mean—since Sweets is always down here looking for new cookbooks anyway.”
Well, that explained the weird, hunted look on Sweetberry's face that time Twilight had tried to plunge into an in-depth discussion of the classic novel Peace and More Peace with her.
“Hmmm, okay, books are out . . . What else does she like?”
Minty tilted her head, her tongue stuck out slightly as she chewed on it for concentration.
“Sunsets?” she said finally.
“ . . . sunsets.”
“And . . . soup.”
Twilight decided to take another approach. “Is there anything she collects or . . . does she need anything? ” She tried to imagine life in a cave. “Galoshes? Insect repellent?”
Pinkie rocketed to her hooves, gasping. “OH MY GOSH, I’VE GOT IT!”
“I hope it’s not catching,” Spike muttered to Twilight behind his paw.
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “What, Pinkie?”
"Kimono does need something! I can't believe I didn't think of it 'till just now!" The pink pony spun around to face Minty. “Minty, do you remember what she said way, way back, when we were helping with Winter Wrap Up last year?”
The green pony looked confused for a moment, then her face brightened. “Oh yeeeah! I asked Kimono why she never wore her very, very special charm bracelet anymore and she said she had lost it!”
“Which means we could make her a new one—”
“—to replace the very, very special one—”
“—that she lost!”
“YEAH!” the two earth ponies chorused, slapping their hooves together in a high five. Twilight was only mildly surprised when they broke into a surprisingly well choreographed musical number in celebration. She waited stoically for their dance moves to peter out.
“I think that’s a great idea, girls,” she was finally able to say when the music lulled. “Right, Spike?” she added, giving him the evil eye before he could drop any “girly frilly frou-frou” remarks.
“Uh . . . sure thing! Awesome idea!” The minute the ponies were looking away he made gagging motions.
“Oh, thank you so much, Twilight! Your big, brainy, brainiac brain totally sparked off that idea—just like a bolt of lightning! SCHWOOOM!” Pinkie zipped around the room in a circle, sending loose papers flying.
“I really didn’t do anything, Pinkie Pie, you thought it up all on your own—” Twilight began with a smile, but was interrupted by Minty waving her hoof in the air.
“Oh! Oh, oh! Will you help us get Kimono out of her cave tomorrow so we can set up the party stuff?”
“I . . . I don’t know, girls. I mean, I don’t really know her. Won’t it seem weird?” But Twilight’s curiosity had been piqued. What kind of pony lived in a cave? “Weeell . . . sure. All right.”
“Yay!” cheered Pinkie. “We can meet here tomorrow and go together!”
"Okay!" Minty agreed. "Wanna make the bracelet at my house, Pinkie? I'll make my famous cucumber and blueberry pizza!"
"And I'll bring cookies!" Pinkie bounced in place at the thought. "Okey dokie lokie, I'll be there real soon!" She waved after Minty as she left.
“So the party’s just one day away,” Twilight Sparkle commented, shutting the door after the green pony. “Do you really think you and Minty will have time to make a charm bracelet by then?”
“Pffft! Twilight, Twilight, Twilight.” Pinkie patted her friend’s head, a slightly condescending smile on her muzzle. “Like you really have to ask? We've saved the world in less time than that.”
Twilight had to laugh. “I guess you’re right.” A thought struck her. “If you didn’t have a present for Kimono, what’s that?” She gestured towards the huge present that had almost crushed her.
“Oh, that’s just a decoy present! I keep them all over town for party-related emergencies. You can keep it, Twilight. But be careful—it’s veeeery sensitive! See ya tomorrow!” Pinkie merrily bounced away . . . through the wrong doorway.
“Typical Pinkie,” Twilight smiled to herself before following her into the kitchen, calling, “Hey Pinkie, what do you mean by . . . very . . . sensitive . . . .”
Twilight Sparkle stood silently for a while, contemplating the frizzy pink tail bouncing away over the horizon, framed by the charred hole in the kitchen wall. Finally she turned on her heel with a sigh.
“Spike, go find Miss Sawhorse, please. We need a carpenter.” She looked at the “decoy present.” Whatever was inside was beginning to tick. “And the bomb squad.”
Can Pinkie Pie and Minty complete a charm bracelet in just one day? Will they set fire to Kimono's cave again? Who the heck lives in a cave anyway? Find out in the next chapter!
Chapter 2: Reading Between the Lines
Chapter Two: Reading Between the Lines
To Twilight’s dismay, the decoy present exploded before the bomb squad could arrive. To her relief, it contained only balloons, cupcakes, and confetti. To Spike’s dismay, he was the one who had to clean up the library while Twilight went out for more quills. He was still scraping frosting off the walls when the moon rose, stifling his yawns until finally Twilight nudged her droopy-eyed Number One Assistant into bed.
The next morning Spike came downstairs, rubbing his eyes, to find that Twilight had pitched in by cleaning up the rest of the cake and the balloons by herself. Then she promptly renewed the clutter by leaving books stacked and spread across the floor.
With a sigh Spike began to sort the ones in the messiest pile for reshelving, though this hardly made a dent since Twilight was still running back and forth across the library, wearing an intent little frown and muttering to herself as she pulled more books from their shelves. Often she flipped them open to silently read a few pages before either pushing them back into their rightful place or—more frequently—casually dropping them with a thud, adding to the mess.
“Twilight, what are you doing?” Spike asked.
“Oh, good morning, Spike!” Her expression brightened as she smiled at him, pushing an unkempt lock of hair out of her eyes. “I’m just picking out a few books Kimono might like.”
"But Minty said she can't keep books in her cave. And you're going to give her library books?" The horror in Spike's voice was not so much due to the thought of giving away library books, but more at the thought of Twilight Sparkle willingly giving away library books.
"Spike! These books are community property! I can't give them away," she said, as disapproving as though it had been his suggestion. "I'm just taking them over so I'll have something to talk to her about!"
Spike scratched his head. “Can’t you talk to her about the party?”
“I have to lure her out of her house—I mean, cave—before the party,” she reminded him. “Since I don’t know any of her hobbies, I decided the best way would be to take over some books she might be interested in. So I looked at the kinds of books Sweetberry had been checking out for her—”
“How’d you do that?” He picked up a book at random and flipped the cover open; sure enough, the index card in the front showed that Sweetberry had checked it out last. “We don’t keep a list of who checked out what in the past, do we? Just what’s currently out, right?”
Twilight didn’t answer, burying her nose in another book.
“Twilight?” Spike repeated, suspicions aroused by her tousled hair and her slightly bloodshot eyes. “How’d you figure it out?”
“There are a lot of things you can find out with magic,” Twilight Sparkle said, giving an airy, carefree, and altogether unconvincing laugh.
The little dragon crossed his arms. “You got up early to sort through the books one by one, didn’t you?”
“No, Spike, I did not get up early to sort through the books one by one!” She rolled her eyes.
“So, you stayed up all night?”
“Oh, be quiet, Spike," Twilight grumbled. She telekinetically waved a mug at him. "And bring me some more coffee!”
Spike took the cup with a sigh and disappeared into the kitchen, where several boards were now nailed over the hole in the wall. A few minutes later he handed a cup of double-strong brew to Twilight.
“I don’t get why you’re putting all this effort into this. It should be a piece of cake. Speaking of which . . .” He fished a cupcake out of the trash as Twilight Sparkle wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“First of all, that’s extremely unsanitary,” she said as she levitated the baked good away from him. “Second, I can’t let down Pinkie Pie. Third, have you seen the types of books Sweetberry takes out?”
Spike licked the frosting off his claws thoughtfully. “Well, sometimes she checks out cookbooks. And sometimes she checks out big, thick ones without pictures.”
“Exactly!” Twilight’s tone was no longer admonishing, but excited. “Serious literature! And my hypothesis is all those books were for Kimono!”
Spike snuck another cupcake out of the trashcan. “So?”
“‘So’? ‘So’??” Twilight stared at him incredulously. “Spike, do you know how great it would be to make friends with a pony who reads?”
“You’re already friends with ponies who read,” Spike pointed out. “Even Rainbow Dash reads now.”
“That’s true. And I’m really happy for them—especially Rainbow. It’s not that I think that their books don’t count or anything, it’s just that . . .”
She sighed as she opened a little box sitting by the door, each index card inside representing a book that was currently checked out. Rainbow Dash had been in for the next Daring-Do book, Applejack was working her way steadily through a set of pulp westerns, and Rarity and Fluttershy each had checked out a paperback by romance novelist Lovey Dovey.
“It’s just that I’d like to be able to talk about my favorite books with somepony, once in a while. I’d like to ask other ponies what they thought about Horsesense and Sensibility or talk about the themes in The Old Mare and the Sea Pony. Share my love of classic literature, you know?”
“You can always talk about that stuff with me, Twilight. Just look!” He proudly pulled something out from behind his back.
Twilight read the title of the wrinkled, dog-eared comic that he was holding out. “The Adventures of Sampo the Super-Deer were not quite what I had in mind when I said ‘classic literature’, Spike.”
“It’s very classic,” he insisted, hugging the precious comic book to his chest. “It’s a reprint of the very first issue!”
“That’s nice,” Twilight began, “but it’s not—oh, shoot!” She leapt to her hooves as she heard a knock at the front door.
As Twilight frantically jammed an assortment of books into her saddlebags, Spike answered the door.
“Hiya Spike, hiya Twilight!” Pinkie said as she bounced in.
“Heeey you two!” Minty followed her in. “Excited about the party?”
“You mean I’m invited too?” Spike brightened.
“Of course you are, Spikey-Wikey!” Pinkie rubbed his head with a hoof. “A party without a dragon there to get his party-on is just a drag! Ready to go, Twilight? We don’t wanna be late. Although . . . it’s a surprise party, so she doesn’t know about it, so I guess technically we can’t be late!”
“Just . . . a . . . minute,” Twilight puffed, forcing A Tale of Two Pastries into her satchel. “Okay! Ready!”
Pinkie Pie blinked, perhaps surprised by the glint of determination in Twilight’s eye or perhaps perturbed by the way she was staggering under her literary burden. “Are you all right, Twi?”
“You bet I am, Pinkie.” Twilight put on a wide smile to reassure her friend. Everything was all right, more than all right! She was going to meet a smart, literary pony and she was going to make a new friend.
She was going to make a new friend or die trying.
