Do Not Challenge His Authority
As somepony who had yet to slip into the stupidity-inducing fog of adulthood, Shining knew everything about life, and so the first thing he knew was that it was unfair. The world was run by those who were old and every child knew that the older you became, the stupider you got. It was something which seemed to happen to everypony and because Shining knew everything, he’d decided it would never happen to him.
Adults didn’t understand about priorities. They thought about things like school and homework and (this was the worst thing imaginable: Shining knew that because he hadn’t been able to imagine anything worse) foreign language studies. What was the point in speaking another language, traveling to another nation? All of the best stuff was in Equestria! Shining knew that because if there had been anything good anywhere else, he would have gone there already. Besides, he’d been to Horaceland for three whole days, the best days, and if there was anything out there better than that, it probably shouldn’t be allowed. He felt it was possible to live in Horaceland right up until the moment you died of sheer happiness, and that was clearly the best way to go.
He’d expressed that to his parents, as the goal of his life. To live at Horaceland. And because they had no true priorities, they’d brought him home anyway.
The world was unfair, because it was run by the old. In fact, their home nation was ruled by the oldest pony ever and Shining didn’t want to think about just how much stupidity that many years added up to. (This was largely because he didn’t like math, but he was sure the total worked out to the only appropriate number: A Lot.) Shining knew what life was about, and having the entire continent constantly disagreeing with him said everything about how dumb adults were. And because the whole world was geared towards the repression of those who knew best, two of those adults had direct authority over him.
He loved them both very much, and often told himself it was because ponies that dumb needed somepony to look after them. They just seemed to think it was the other way around.
His father wasn’t bad at games, although he had odd objections to most of the things Shining did in the name of winning, because there were rules and when those rules kept Shining from victory, they were stupid. But his father occasionally helped him with homework (because knowing everything about life didn’t include the school stuff which was clearly never going to be any part of it), and that forgave a lot. He also had good voices for stories, a ready laugh, and when the other parent ordered a mere five more minutes of play, had been known to completely misplace the concept of time.
His mother liked to control things. She was an organizer. Shining didn’t have an allowance: he had a shopping budget. (To be fair, the same was true for his father.) She had a sense of fun, but very little of it was spontaneous: this was demonstrated by the amount of effort which had been required to get Shining into Horaceland in the first place. (One full lifetime, and then she’d drawn up a chart to dictate the order in which they would go on the rides. To her, fun was something which happened on schedule.) Shining’s mother operated under the simple false belief that the world worked better when she ran herd over it, and so had a built-in aversion to anypony having authority over her. To Shining, there were few things funnier than those moments when she wasn’t in charge and he suspected his father agreed with him: there was always that certain quick smile. She meant well, she always did — but as an adult, she was stupid.
One of those moments was upon them now, and it should have been funny. But it wasn’t, because it was Medical. Medical stuff was never funny. Medical was pokes and proddings and needles. As things which Medical had come up with went, needles were so horrible that Shining wasn’t sure they should happen to adults.
His parents had been taking about it over a very strange dinner, one where the only thing his mother had consumed was a stinking green potion that smelled worse than anything ever. (As a colt, Shining was naturally fascinated by horrible smells, and so had found the best way to truly judge them was to be right on top of their source. Most fillies his age seemed to have a weird objection to that, especially when he proudly brought back samples.) She had to force herself to take every sip, her hornlight flickering as it raised the mug, and her face said it tasted just as bad as it smelled. Shining hadn’t even been sure that was possible.
The Doctors had told her to drink three whole mugs of the potion before bedtime. She had to have another two after Sun was raised, and then she would go back to the Doctors again. All of that was supposedly Medical, and Shining had no trouble believing it because Medical was always horrible.
But there was a worse part. She had to drink the potion — and she couldn’t have anything else. In fact, if she ate or drank a single thing during the night, anything at all... then she would have to start all over. And Shining had smelled the potion from his side of the table (because it was just that wondrously foul), had watched her face as she forced herself to drink it, and knew he never wanted to see his mother go through that again.
(He’d asked them why it was all happening, and they’d said he would be told after the Doctors had finished. That was how he knew it was extra-important, and thinking about just why something could be that important had made his stomach hurt.)
His mother couldn’t eat or drink. For one whole night. She had to follow somepony else’s orders and this time, it wasn’t funny. His father wasn’t smiling at all...
So Shining had kept a very close eye on his mother throughout dinner, fully prepared to swat at any plate which wound up surrounded by her light. (He didn’t have his own light yet, which was also horribly unfair.) But she’d made it through the meal, through three horrible mugs of potion, she’d checked his homework, checked to make sure his father hadn’t helped him, they’d both lied about it, she’d visited the bathroom several times and eventually (which was always far too soon), they’d put him to bed. And he’d laid awake because he was completely capable of staying up, wondering what the stupid Doctors were going to do.
But then he’d heard something horrible happen.
His parents had gone to bed.
Both of them.
And that was wrong.
Shining knew his mother: that was a very natural part of knowing everything. There were times when his mother got up during the night: some of those movements had briefly woken him up, And he would smell food before falling asleep, because she was getting herself a snack. (Shining wasn’t allowed to do that, and was waiting for the day when Something Could Be Done.) And his father was a deep sleeper. His father typically only woke up when Sun touched his face, although Sun sometimes needed the assistance of a strategic hoof poke.
His mother wasn’t supposed to eat or drink. She hated being told what to do, she resisted, and nopony would be watching her at all.
The potion had smelled horrible: foul enough that Shining longed to display some during recess, just to see the fillies run away. But he didn’t want his mother to go through an extra night and morning of having to drink it. Watching the pain on her face once had been bad enough.
Something had to be done.
It was strange, sneaking through his own house at night. The shadows were longer, but there were still his shadows: any monster which wanted to lurk within them would first need to notify him that it was moving in, and then it had better be prepared to start paying rent. It was his house.
(With the exception of the basement. He let them freely have the basement, because then they would have no need to come up.)
The strange part didn’t come from the sneaking. It felt strange because for the first time, he wasn’t sneaking at all. This was a duty. He was only trying to protect his mother from both herself and unnecessary extra potions, because one of the few things children and adults could sometimes agree on was that Medical usually meant bad. (He was trying not to think about how bad that might be, and how many needles could wind up involved.) And if it was a duty, then he couldn’t be sneaking, because he was moving through the house while under the obligation to defend the hopelessly stupid and, incidentally, somepony he loved. That made it patrolling.
He puffed out what little chest he possessed, held his tail a little higher, and then remembered that he still had to pass their bedroom.
Hooves made too much noise. It was easier to push himself along on his barrel.
The first step: secure the kitchen.
In terms of total opportunity for trouble available, the refrigerator should have been his initial priority. However, it seemed vitally important that he initially secure the cookie tin, because Shining knew about temptation and the many reasons why it was normally best to give in to it immediately, at least when it was his temptation. Besides, he was going to be awake for a very long time (something he’d always known he was capable of, because bedtimes were stupid) and since meals were something you had when you were awake, it made sense that a very long time awake would naturally require him to have at least one extra meal.
Then it occurred to him that there was a way to secure the cookies themselves while simultaneously fulfilling the new requirement.
After the crumbs of his brilliant strategy had been wiped away, he began the formal survey of his assigned area, and so discovered the hot zone was everywhere. He’d never really thought about just how much food was in the kitchen, especially since the part he was usually most interested in had just been taken care of. It wasn’t just the refrigerator: there was a breadbox, a vegetable crisper, cabinets filled with spices (and some of those required a little rolling ramp to reach, especially when you unfairly didn’t have your hornlight yet), assorted cans, and some imported goods stored under the lightly-glowing blue dome of a stasis spell, one which only affected food and offered his main source of illumination. Such spells were expensive to purchase: his mother had complained about the cost, along with how little truly fit under the small dome — but for protecting the most scarce of foodstuffs, it was the best thing available.
Shining had never eaten anything from that dome. Nopony (no one?) in the other nations appeared to have ever heard of sugar, and it made him feel sorry for their children.
Well, the sheer quantity wasn’t much of a problem: after all, everything was in the same place. His mother would need to come into the kitchen if she wanted food, so that meant her exact target didn’t really matter. All he had to do was find a location where he could watch the whole thing while remaining unseen.
Of course, the world had seen fit to give him white fur.
Shining had previously tried multiple means of correcting for the world's dumb mistake, and found that those which weren’t removed by his sixth consecutive dunking in the tub had countering spells. This, of course, was unfair. It wasn’t dirt: it was camouflage, and that was a philosophy which should have applied at nearly all times.
Possibly not at the current exact moment, though. Moving dirt into the kitchen would take time (along with leaving his post) and when it came to camouflage, he wasn’t entirely sure how to go about making himself look like a breadbox.
After some consideration, he briefly entertained the thought of finding a huge cardboard box somewhere, horn-poking a pair of eyeholes into the thing, dragging it into the kitchen, then inverting it and crawling underneath. His mother was stupid, and so just might believe there was an extra breadbox about. A very large one. Made of cardboard. With eyeholes poked into it. Which occasionally moved.
Shining thought about it, and then reluctantly concluded that she probably wasn’t that stupid.
Well, there was no help for it. He was a little too big for hiding inside most of the cabinets and not only would doing so cut off his sight lines, but he would need to empty one first. He didn’t have his magic, so stuff like turning invisible or standing inside a wall wouldn’t work, plus he was pretty sure that you couldn’t be inside a wall and see through it at the same time anyway.
(He’d asked about invisibility during magic kindergarten, especially as it had seemed to be the single best way of hiding from baths, and had been told that it would mean light went all the way through his eyes. If you were invisible, then you were blind. He was almost completely sure that was wrong, because any magic that fun wouldn’t come with such a huge flaw.)
No cabinets. No magic. That left huddling under the kitchen table, and so that was where he went.
Shining settled in for a long night.
Settling in was surprisingly comfortable.
— he hadn’t fallen asleep! He just hadn’t! Not for more than a few minutes, but those were minutes in which his mother could have come into the kitchen and...
Shining emerged from beneath the table, began to quickly (and, to the best of his ability, silently) take inventory. Everything looked normal. But that was just how it looked. He had no way to be completely sure.
It occurred to him that his first move upon entry should have been counting the contents and writing down a full list, which suddenly meant that both math and writing were actually important. It was a revelation, and Shining spent a few seconds in trying to get the taste of it off his tongue.
He worked his way back to his parents’ bedroom, risked peering in. The sheets were disturbed, and that was good because whenever his mother got out of a bed, her hornlight automatically straightened it. Having somepony still under those sheets didn’t seem to be a factor. (Shining dimly recalled that ‘factor’ also had something to do with math, and depressingly realized that now he had to learn about that part too.)
The trip had been a risk, but that risk had paid off. His mother hadn’t gotten up. She was going to be okay. And not only that: the movement seemed to have done Shining some good. He didn’t feel sleepy at all any more, especially not when he was a colt for whom bedtimes were already a cruel joke.
Well, it wasn’t as if anypony ever fell asleep while they were playing, was it? You slept when you stopped moving, which now seemed to turn beds into nothing more than a rather comfortable sort of prison, So that meant he had to stay on his hooves. If he trotted, he wouldn’t fall asleep. Simple common sense, as well-befitted a colt who already knew everything.
He had already been on patrol. Now he needed a patrol route.
Patrol routes were complicated.
His initial assignment had been to patrol the kitchen. The kitchen floor was covered in the sort of thing (stone? Marble? He’d never really thought about it) which hooves weren’t fully silent upon: another reason to love dirt and mud, which were more forgiving until you got a really loud squelch. To trot back and forth along the kitchen floor all night would produce some noise, especially since a colt couldn’t push himself along on his barrel forever. His mother might eventually register that kind of sound, the same way she always seemed to pick up on the squelches.
Shining thought about it for a while, then risked a trip to the linen closet. Trotting across towels didn’t produce noise.
...all right, towels slid. But that was okay, as he hadn’t fully crashed and everypony was still asleep. And he already had the solution for that, because he knew that only dry towels slid. Wet ones just sort of stayed where they were, which was why he always felt free to just shake them off in the bathroom and leave them lying wherever they hit. It wasn’t as if his weight, stepping on a wet towel, was enough to make it skid while taking a foreleg out from under him and potentially leading to a fall. And since he had never seen it happen to any of the adults, he assumed they were lying about it in the usual effort to make him do unnecessary work. (Anything associated with cleaning up.) So he fetched a mug, filled it several times, dumped out the contents just as many minus one (because he was getting thirsty), and reminded himself to refresh the moisture throughout the night because towels dried out eventually: something which clearly made laundry stupid.
The patrol route (kitchen perimeter plus some risky glances into the hallway) was resumed. The back portion put him next to the kitchen window, and he took a moment to look at Moon and ask for help. He wasn’t sure what kind: he was certain he could stay awake now, and there were some questions regarding exactly what Moon could do to keep his mother in bed. Ultimately, he decided to leave it up to the orb, because it probably dealt with that kind of request all the time and so had some experience.
Time passed. Maybe Moon was helping with that.
He was doing well. The fact that his mother hadn’t actually tried to come in only to find herself stopped -- that didn’t change the additional fact that his patrol route was excellent. All of the food in the house was under his protection. He was saving her, and had also remembered to save a cookie for her — but that would only be given out after she got back from the Doctors. Shining was in exactly the right place. There was nowhere else for her to go, not if she wanted real food —
— ponies could eat grass.
The thought froze him in mid-hoofstep.
Why hadn’t he remembered that? Yes, grass was usually a last resort because while you knew exactly where it had been (nowhere), you had no idea who had been stepping on it. But Shining had eaten grass, when he was outside playing and really didn’t want to stop long enough for a different snack. Some of it was even tasty. He was a pony, that meant his parents were also ponies, and — ponies ate grass. For a pony, to step out into a green growing world was to be surrounded by food. There were plants in the house...
He worked quickly. Most of it involved rearing up on his hind legs and pulling on the pot’s edge with his teeth, but that was okay because the pot got moved. Besides, he’d dropped a pillow onto the floor and that gave the plant a place to land. (His pillow, as he wasn’t currently using it.) Some of the dirt spilled out, and a lot fell onto the floor when he moved the pillow to the next station, but what was wrong with a little dirt? Nothing, which his parents would have understood if they had only possessed the brilliance of a child.
(Shining sometimes wondered what they’d been like, before the years had made them stupid. He usually decided he would have liked them, although his mother was bossy enough that he might have initially liked her at a slight distance.)
All right: he had all of the plants together. But to put them in the kitchen would restrict his patrolling space. He needed somewhere to put them, something out of sight to prevent them from being eaten, and he didn’t think there would be enough room in the closets.
Shining thought about it, and reluctantly concluded that he had to take a risk. There was a side door which led to the outside, and it was fairly close to the kitchen. If he kept using the pillow, he could silently drag the plants outside, one at a time, and probably still be able to hear his mother if she got out of bed: it was just a matter of making sure the door stayed open.
Well, there was no helping it. He seized a pot edge in his teeth, transferred the container to what still vaguely resembled a pillow, then began to drag.
Dirt was a lot more fun in his fur than it was in his mouth.
He let go of the pillow long enough to rear up and press his chin against the door’s too-high lever. (Adults...) It silently opened, and he dragged the first pot outside under Moon, onto the little stoop. Maybe the plant would enjoy being outside for a while. It didn’t get to see Moon very much, let alone a truly direct view of Sun. And besides, now it would have company —
— the thought was horrible. It was a thought which revealed the biggest vulnerability in his plan, and so there were ways in which it was its very own waking nightmare. But it had to be dealt with, and so Shining forced his body to turn on the stoop, until he was staring out at the visible portion of the lawn.
The facehoof seemed to be fully justified.
All right: things were still under control. As long as his mother didn’t wake up and besides, now he was outside the house. Sometimes she activated lighting devices as she moved through bedroom and hallways: his father slept through that, while Shining sometimes didn’t. There was a chance to spot light through the windows. He wasn’t beaten yet, especially since he still knew everything.
Admittedly, it had taken a moment to remember the currently-applicable part of ‘everything’: at first, all he’d been able to think about was that the enemy forces were more vast than he’d ever imagined, and the other side of the property line had reinforcements available. It meant he needed some means of dealing with the grass.
His father had a mechanism in the stable which cut the stuff, but it was pulled along by hitch and Shining was too small: his shoulders didn’t reach. Pushing the thing along while awkwardly balanced on his hind legs would take forever, and doing the same thing with his horn usually meant his head just skidded off to the side. So cutting the grass was out.
There was the cookie option, but that space was still occupied with cookies. Besides, there was just no way he could eat that much.
So he couldn’t get rid of the grass. it was just resting in the ground, swaying in the breeze, waiting to be eaten, and looking rather smug about it. How was he supposed to fight back against that? Grass got eaten, as long as it was clean. You had to be sure nothing interesting had been stepping... on... it...
His head tilted up, and Shining carefully sniffed the air.
He loved to play in dirt and mud, to show off foul-smelling stuff. But there was a practical limit to that, especially when it came to eventually getting out of the bathtub. Some things couldn’t be played with — but they could be pressed into service.
Shining trotted towards the back of the house.
The compost heap took some time to dismantle, and slightly less to spread.
For the first time in his life, Shining was beginning to wonder if dirt and putrid stenches could be bad things. He was arguably filthier than he’d ever been, coated in a level of muck which didn’t call out for a bath so much as it politely requested extended submergence in the nearest ocean as a means of protecting the populace, and when it came to the smell...
It was rather easy to tell where Shining had been, and that wasn’t just because he was leaving behind olfactory afterimages. As the neighborhood slept, he’d gone about his job (with frequent checks on those windows). Every square body length of grass on the property had been rendered inedible. It was easy to see just how good a job he’d done, and smelling it required even less effort. There was every chance that Moon was appreciating his efforts, although he wasn’t entirely sure which craters served for nostrils.
Of course, there was more grass in the neighborhood than that of his own fouled lawn, but his mother had some very strident views regarding property lines and so he doubted she would take what was seen as somepony else’s grass. (Not that it mattered very much, as he’d already lost track of the actual borders.).
It had been thirsty, tiring work. He could only do something about the first part, and so Shining ventured back inside, wearily staining his way across the floor. For the first time in his life, he almost wanted a bath. (Almost. A colt had to have standards.) But at the very least, he was going to rinse his mouth out before drinking. For a few seconds. A minute. Possibly the rest of his life.
He made his way into the first-floor restroom, headed for the lower of the sinks, which meant his body only stained a few things along the way. Nudged the tap with his snout, tilted his head forward and tasted very little of the water. There was only one thing he was currently capable of tasting, and he really wanted to stop.
It took a while before he could risk swallowing anything. But when that finally happened, the cold, clear results ran into his stomach. He was starting to feel better. There was nothing like a good drink after a long time at play, and it now seemed as if actual work made the water even sweeter. It felt as if he could stay at the tap forever...
...his parents had their own bathroom.
Bathrooms had water.
(This facehoofing came with a heavy degree of smearing.)
Why hadn’t he thought of that? He was supposed to be guarding against eating and drinking! His mother had water on tap any time she wanted it, just hoofsteps away from the bed! There was their private bathroom, there was the restroom on this floor, there was the one he usually got dunked in... water was everywhere. How was he supposed to stop it?
He nearly surrendered, right there. The enemy was everywhere. He was surrounded and outnumbered, preemptively countered by a strategy he hadn’t imagined to exist — not in time. And he was so tired, he shouldn’t be so tired when he’d always known he could stay up all night if he wanted to, but he’d been patrolling and as it turned out, patrolling was work. The sort of job which was never quite complete, because there was always one more thing to do.
How was he supposed to fight water? He knew everything: any child too young for the fog did. So why didn’t he know that?
He stared at his stained, exhausted reflection in the lesser of the mirrors, and saw a colt trying very hard to think.
Water... came through pipes. There wasn’t much he could do about that: pipes were underground and ponies weren’t good diggers. Even if he could find a pipe outside, he would never be able to hoof-scrape his way down to it: having recently added an extra layer didn’t exactly help.
Of course, the pipes eventually had to leave the ground, especially since there was water moving to the upper floor. But he had a vague suspicion that those pipes were in the walls, and there was no way to reach those quietly.
It was possible that there were pipes in the basement: Shining could certainly believe that. The issue was that he also believed there were other things down there.
But he didn’t have a choice. This was war. And so he puffed out what minimal chest he possessed (dislodging a few pieces of compost in the process), gathered his strength, headed for the door —
— stopped.
No. You didn’t take the fight to the enemy on their own territory unless it was absolutely necessary. It would be hard to cut off the supply lines and he had no way to stop things at their ultimate source. What did that leave?
Shining thought about it.
It took some time to rip up one of the towels with his teeth. (You had to make sacrifices, when it was war.) More to get a piece of that cloth precariously covering horntip, and then the approach had to be so careful...
Eventually, he had everything ready at the proper angle, which was giving him strange feelings in his neck. He pushed.
In Shining’s opinion, the cloth was truly jammed in there.
Still... it wouldn’t hurt to provide reinforcements.
He crept throughout his house. There were times when he trotted as softly as he could, others where he had to push-slide again: the main difference was in the shape of the resulting stains. He saved his parents’ bathroom for last, because it was the trickiest part of the operation. His mother had been known to wake up at the thought of dirt, and he was starting to realize that his current stench wasn’t exactly boosting his chances.
But they never moved, as he went about his duty. His father was simply that deep a sleeper: he always had been. And his mother, sent far below awareness by the aftereffects of the potions, simply snoozed on.
Shining finished. Stood stock-still, trying to think of anything he might have missed. And finally, confident that he’d secured the area at last, the exhausted colt went down the ramp to resume his patrol.
In the postmortem of the event, the first part of the disaster was actually easy to identify. Neighbors who stepped outside to find part of their lawns coated in compost could be reasonably expected to scream, and screams could wake ponies up, especially if the last tenth-bits of the initial potion drenching were finally wearing off.
So that would mean getting up. And upon getting up, his mother would have naturally noticed the dirt, along with all the things which their neighbors were desperately wishing was dirt, thus proving how little wishing actually did. Her typical first move upon seeing dirt was to go for water, the nearest source was her own bathroom, and that would have led to discovering the blocked faucets. Since all of the blocking material had been pushed up out of sight, she would have no idea what was wrong, nor would she have tried to remove the clog when she didn’t know there was one. Time would have also been lost to staring around the filthy bathroom in horror, and that allowed extra water pressure to build.
It was possible that she’d also tried to use the restroom trench. Shining had considered that water running into the trench started out clean, and acted accordingly.
So the pressure would have built, until it could build no more.
Which was exactly what it did.
The colt barely acknowledged the sound of hooves skidding out as the gallop encountered some rather unexpected wet towels. The sound of his father crashing into the cabinets merely made him raise his head, force his eyes to open, and that allowed him to see Sun’s light glinting off the cans he’d arranged around his body. An extra line of defense had seemed helpful, along with putting some of the food where he could keep an eye on it.
He saw that Sun had been raised, and the food was untouched. He’d made it. He’d won. His mother was safe.
She entered the kitchen then. Silently regarded her son within his miniature fortress, for no words could be found. And just before his eyes closed again from weariness and the pride of a job well-done, he noticed that every strand of fur on her body was dripping with water.
He hoped none of it had gotten into her mouth.
The last of the potions had been consumed. It allowed the test to be performed and at the end of it, the doctors confirmed what they’d already suspected. But there was a reason they’d gone through the exhaustive (and as it turned out, wreckage-inducing) test, something hardly anypony was willing to do. They wanted to know and because the potions had been consumed on schedule, with no interfering food or drink, they found out.
It was a filly.
Maybe fillies were easier.
Author's Note
Based on a story prompt from Shawnyall: used with permission.
