Salmon Rose
Admiral Biscuit
For Cold In Gardez
This year, the annual Ichthyologist conference was being held in Rochester, New York, and I’d decided that I was going to go. It was a great opportunity to meet people I only knew from research papers, emails, and online chats. Besides, going to an international conference was the next logical step in my budding career, especially if I wanted to become a true professional.
I wasn’t exactly bursting with money, and conferences aren’t cheap, even at the hotel’s discounted convention rate. Luckily, my colleagues from the internet came to my rescue, and I quickly found myself a roommate named Dr. Rose.
I didn’t really know much about her, other that she was a her—that had been one thing I’d ascertained—and that she had a really friendly personality online. I hadn’t come across any papers she’d written or contributed to, which admittedly was a bit odd, but maybe she was more involved in the practical end of things like I was. She was a presenter at the conference, so she must have something important to say.
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I’ve never liked airports or airplanes. I’m a chronic overpacker, and the airlines charge by number of bags, size of bags, and weight of bags. It took a couple of days to whittle my must-haves down to a single checked bag, a carry-on, and a small bag of personal items.
I also had to take a stupidly early flight, since the hotel room was in my name, and Dr. Rose wouldn’t be able to get into the room before I arrived. In hindsight, that was poor planning on my part.
At least Rochester had a big enough airport for a direct flight; I only had to go through the security process once, didn’t risk missing a transfer, and it also gave the airline a limited opportunity to lose my baggage.
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The flight in was cramped but otherwise uneventful, and the hotel wasn’t too far from the airport. They even had a shuttle van, which was nice. That saved me the trouble of finding a taxi or a Lyft.
It didn’t take very long to check into the hotel, stash my belongings, freshen up, and then there was nothing to do but wait for a text message from Dr. Rose saying that she’d arrived.
While I waited, I got my computer hooked up to the hotel’s internet, and plugged my phone into the charger.
I was skimming through the latest friend drama on Facebook when it occurred to me that a smart person would just text Dr. Rose the room number and she could come upstairs and knock on the door when she arrived, so I did that.
Then I decided that since I still had time I was going to change into something a bit more professional—there was no reason to give a bad first impression—and then I remembered that I also ought to hang my good clothes up.
Once all that was done, I went back to Facebook.
A few minutes later, there was a polite knock at the door. I opened it without looking through the spyhole—which was dumb—and didn’t see anyone there until I thought to look down.
Standing in front of my door was a pink pony with a green mane and tail, wearing a pair of saddlebags.
“Hi!” she said cheerfully. “I’m Dr. Salmon Rose! You must be Linda Dugnė.”
I nodded. “I . . . I wasn’t expecting you to be a pony.”
“That’s okay; I wasn’t expecting you to be a human.”
“Really?”
“Nah, I’m just pulling your tail. I think I’m the only pony who got invited to the conference. Mind if I come in?”
“Of course.” I realized, belatedly, that I’d been blocking the door. “Do you shake hands?” I’d seen a few pony tourists, but never greeted one up close.
“I can,” she said, extending a hoof for me to take. “There we go, all properly introduced.”
“Yeah.” My mind was still whirling, and I did my best to put my mouth on a ten-second delay to prevent the next stupid thing that might come out of it. Do you shake hands? Maybe I could ask her if she knew how to roll over and play dead, too. Or fetch—that was always popular.
Once she’d gotten into the room proper, she leaned her head down under her belly and unfastened her saddlebags, then bounced them down her back a bit until she could grab the top strap with her mouth. I tried not to stare and failed completely. “Is that all you’ve got for luggage?”
“Bellhop’s got a cart with my suitcase,” she said. “Well, he didn’t have a cart when I came up the stairs, but he promised he’d be right up once he found one.”
As if he’d been waiting for that signal, there was another knock at the door. This time I did look through the peephole before opening it.
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It wasn’t until the evening that I finally got my mind more or less back on track. Lack of sleep, the pressures of jet travel, meeting my conference roommate for the first time, and suddenly finding out that my roommate was a pony had been a little bit much to process all at once. Everything she did was new to me. I knew it wasn’t polite to stare, but I couldn’t help but watch how she answered her cell phone or jotted down a note on a piece of paper or any of the other little mundane tasks I never would have thought of performing without the benefit of hands.
Every time she struggled with something, I wanted to help her, but I didn’t think I should unless she actually asked for my aid. To just assume she needed my hand—literally—might be taken as an insult.
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Hunger overcomes awkwardness. The hotel had a little restaurant and bar, and we went down there for a late snack.
I wasn’t sure how ponies felt about eating meat. I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t want to risk offending her, so I ordered fries and a salad; she got a salad and a fruit cup, and we both ordered a glass of wine.
She drank hers with a straw. I was glad we weren’t at a fancy restaurant; any sommelier would have tossed her out on her rump if he’d seen that. I thought it was adorable.
Several glasses of wine later—I lost count—we were best friends, and all the weirdness of her being a pony slipped right by me. We probably could have spent the rest of the night chatting at the bar, but we wanted to get a decently early start at the conference, so we settled our tab and went back up to our room.
Dr. Rose—she’d told me more than once that it was okay to use her first name, but it didn’t feel right to me—preferred the bed closest to the hallway. She said that being by a window high up made her nervous. She assured me that she wasn’t afraid of heights and didn’t mind having the curtains open during the day, but just didn’t like the idea of sleeping next to a window that was so far off the ground.
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I’d expected it to take me longer than Dr. Rose to get ready in the morning, since I had to get dressed and she clearly didn't, but I’d failed to take into account grooming time. She had a lot more of it to do, and didn’t have the advantage of hands. Although I had to admit that the various hoof brushes she had were pretty clever.
It would have been fun to stick together at the conference but we had slightly differing interests, as it turned out—our must-attend lists weren’t entirely compatible.
Over breakfast we studied the schedule one more time, then before I got up I felt like I had to raise an important topic.
I wasn’t sure if it was culturally inappropriate, but since she was at a conference I thought I should at least broach the topic. “So, uh, did you pack any clothes?”
“Clothes?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Because—well, here on Earth, you know—people and their first impressions. If you’ve got something to wear.” I tried to imagine an all-nude Ichthyologist conference in Equestria and that worked out all right until I considered some of my colleagues attending. Even swimsuits were often far too revealing. “I mean, you don’t normally—“
“Sure, yeah. I’ve got lots, I just don’t like wearing clothes right after a shower. Because of—” She motioned down at all her fur. “Even with a hair dryer, it takes forever to get all the way dry. So . . . I’m not bothering you by not wearing clothes, am I? I should have asked. Most of my colleagues at the university have gotten used to it.”
I shook my head. “No, no, not at all. I should—I should have thought of that.”
She glanced over at the clock. “I ought to get back to the room, before the conference starts. I hate to run out on you.”
I waved a hand. “It’s fine. Think nothing of it. I’ll catch up with you at the conference.”
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I didn’t see her all morning. Between the lectures I attended and her short stature—if she’d’ve been in the hall off in the distance, I probably wouldn’t’ve seen her.
I thought about texting her and offering to meet her for lunch, and then I ran into Dr. Ghoti, and we got to talking and it wasn’t too long before I completely forgot about Dr. Rose.
I remembered when my burger came, and I quickly sent her a belated text, then breathed a sigh of relief when she sent one back saying that she’d gone to Akwaaba for lunch with a couple of researchers from Wood’s Hole.
Once I was back at the conference, I caught sight of her in one of the lecture halls. She had a blue T-shirt on, and I thought about joining her, but the exhibit hall’s promise of free swag was too alluring to pass up.
I’d heard that after attending one of these conferences I’d never have to buy pens again, and that was totally true. Besides the pens, I got stickers and magnets and notepads and a couple of cloth totes and even a shark-shaped USB drive.
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I’d already turned in for the night when she came back—turned in wasn’t the right word, since I was still browsing Facebook on my phone, but my teeth were brushed, I was in my PJs, and I was in bed.
I heard the click of the lock and then she came into the room. I knew it was her because the hallway carpet didn’t entirely muffle her hoofsteps.
She went right to the bathroom without saying ‘hi,’ although to be fair I might not have been all that obvious from the entrance, and she did greet me when she got out of the bathroom.
Dr. Rose was wearing what was obviously a Dr. Seuss shirt. The only part I could read was ‘One Fish’; the rest was lost under the curve of her belly. Pony shirts probably didn’t put the slogan on what we humans would think of as the front.
She wasn’t wearing pants, and I wrongly assumed she’d left them in the bathroom.
“How was the party?”
“Fun!” She grinned. “I got to meet some researchers, and we talked a bunch, and Dr. Cope drinks a lot.”
“Like a fish?”
“Heh, yeah. I probably had more than I should have, but I’ll be fine.” She thumped her chest with her hoof. “Us Earth Ponies are good drinkers.”
“Make sure to drink plenty of water, anyway,” I said. “You’ve got your presentation tomorrow, and you want to be sober for that. Not hungover or dehydrated.”
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On a normal day, I wasn’t too keen to get up after only six hours of sleep, but at the convention, it was fine. I hardly felt tired at all.
Dr. Rose hadn’t been kidding about Earth Pony stamina. She was already up, and toweling herself dry from her morning shower. “Good morning, Linda. How’d you sleep?”
“Pretty well, actually. You?”
“Not as much as I should have. That’s okay, I’ll sleep on the flight back. I don’t know why, but airplanes put me to sleep. I think it’s the air rushing by, but if it is, why don’t pegasi fall asleep mid-flight all the time? Do you want coffee? I can make a cup while you’re in the bathroom.”
I wasn’t sure how she’d make coffee, but there was already a cup brewed, so she’d obviously figured it out. “I’d appreciate that, thanks.” I rummaged through my bags for some clean clothes, and then headed into the bathroom.
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Dr. Rose and I had a leisurely breakfast together. I was glad that we got that time to share, because she said she wanted some time alone to prepare for her presentation. I couldn’t blame her; I’d’ve been sweating bullets if I had to do a presentation in front of everyone.
I promised her I’d be there in the front row, and I also promised her that while she was up in our room mentally composing herself, I’d get her a shark USB stick.
I went down to the exhibit hall first and got her shark-drive, and also some more pens. Even if she didn’t want them, I could use them.
I sat through part of a lecture on the effects of salinity and brackish water on commercial fish stocks before getting bored—it hadn’t been what I was expecting. Luckily, I’d arrived a bit late and gotten a seat towards the back, so I could sneak out without too much fuss.
I found the room where she was going to be presenting, and caught the tail end of that lecture, then made my way to the front as the seats cleared. An entire cluster of people moved with me; apparently I wasn’t the only one eagerly awaiting her lecture.
The room was full of excited chatter. I guess either she’d been talking her presentation up with everybody that she’d met at the convention, or she was well-known in the ichthyology community. I thought about chiming in and mentioning that I was sharing a room with her, but that felt like I was trying to bask in her glory.
That didn’t stop me from casually eavesdropping on conversations as the tech crew set up for her, just to get an idea what other people thought about her. Unsurprisingly, most of them that knew her liked her.
When she arrived, Dr. Rose had on a lab coat—that was the first thing I noticed as she entered from the back of the hall. And even though she was a pony, she looked quite professional in it. It was a bit informal for a lecture, I thought, but not overly so, and it did add credence to her status as a researcher. Especially since her name and university were embroidered on the breast.
She went right up to the podium and put her hooves on the little shelf and lifted herself up and then leaned down into the mic.
“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen! I’m Dr. Salmon Rose, and my field of study is ichtheology.”
Dr. Rose stepped away from the podium then, and as she turned to face the projector screen I immediately realized that while she’d put on a lab coat she hadn’t bothered with pants. I should have expected that; I hadn’t ever seen her wearing them and while I’d built up an image in my mind of her knowing that she should wear pants if she expected anyone to take her seriously, she was clearly quite comfortable without them.
For a moment I thought about our breakfasts together and her lack of pajamas and realized that I should have been more adamant about what she wore, but then was it right for me to be embarrassed for her?
“As you all know, fish habitats and societies on Earth are far different than in Equestria, and as such it led to the natural question for an ictheologist to answer. I’m sorry to say that the answer is negative: Earth fish do not have religion.”
I couldn’t focus on what she was saying at all. I was on the edge of my seat, true, but it was because I was waiting for the first laugh from the audience. The first accusatory observation that the doctor has no pants, something that was painfully obvious whenever she moved her tail. It would crush her. Humiliate her. Ruin her career. Wouldn’t it?
And then there was the subject of her lecture. How had that made it past the convention staff? Was she just the token pony scientist, given a platform in order to draw a crowd, with no thought about how it might affect her career going forward? Had they looked at her slides, or read any papers she’d written, and if they had, had they just approved it anyway?
Or had they seen something that I’d managed to miss completely? Her composure was spot-on, and there wasn’t a single negative comment as she deftly picked up a pen in her mouth and used it to advance the PowerPoint to a slide of fish being dumped out of the back of an airplane into a lake. “I thought that this journey through the air into a new home might impart some religious belief in native fish species, however, it did not. The original fish and the relocated fish were all confused by their circumstance, but did not view it as any sort of notable miracle.”
Was I too close-minded to see what she saw? Scientific advancement required radicals, and maybe she was one of the few destined to that role. Maybe she was the one to go down paths no scientists had considered before, and would push research in new directions.
Notwithstanding my misgivings, the entire hour passed without a single chuckle; even more strangely to me, when it came time for questions, they were thoughtful and relevant. Nobody asked her why she hadn’t worn pants, or thought that there was any concern about presenting the results of a negative study.
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“You were awfully quiet,” she observed later, when we were back at the hotel bar. “I hope I was understandable.”
“Oh, you were.” I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me specifics about her lecture. “I just—I hadn’t expected that particular topic, and I hadn’t—“ I stuck my finger in my rum and Coke and swirled the ice around. I was going to give my ten-second delay a chance to actually work for once.
“You hadn’t what?”
I hadn’t expected you to show your goods to the whole audience, and then after you did, I hadn’t expected the audience to not respond. “It’s not important. I got you a shark-drive.” I reached into my tote-bag and fished it out. “Like you wanted.” A change of subject was a valid answer, I hoped.
Her eyes lit up as she got a look at it. “That’s really amazing. Who would have thought to make something so practical and so fun at the same time? Back in Equestria, most of the craftsponies are all about function and tradition and not as interested in fun. When I stick this in my computer, it’s gonna look like the shark’s trying to bite it.”
“Yeah.” I took a sip of my drink, trying to compose my thoughts. Maybe I should go up to our room for a little bit to think in silence. I could contemplate how human scientists generally avoided the subject of religion like the plague, or I could consider what kind of reaction I’d have gotten if I’d gone up to do my presentation sans pants. I could ask her a billion questions about how it felt to live in a world where putting on a lab coat—but not pants—was dressing up, or a world where studying fish religion was an actual thing. I could ask her if the convention organizers had had any idea what her presentation was actually about before they’d approved it, and I could ask her if she’d written a dissertation on the subject. I could ask her what, exactly, the requirements for a pony PhD were, and how they compared to the requirements of a PhD from any actual Earth university.
I asked her none of those things. Instead I set my unfinished drink back on the bar and tilted my head in the direction of the convention. “You want to make another round of the exhibit hall? See if there’s anything we missed?”
“Sure. As long as we go up to the room first so I can get out of this lab coat.”
Author's Note
Cold In Gardez writes some really good stuff, and y’all should go and read it.
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