Hearth’s Warming Eve was coming up in a week and the town of Ponyville was bustling with shopping activities. It was apparent that many ponies were doing some last-minute shopping, but at least they weren’t last-second shopping. Hooves moved ponies from place to place in the market, shuffling products and bits back and forth between shop owner and customer. Saddlebags were filled with material possessions soon to be wrapped, only to be shuffled by the same hooves into different hooves for the holidays.
A yellow pony with brown hair was looking at one side of the music store while a bouncy pink pony was looking at another side. They had covered the whole store three times over before meeting in the middle by the brass section.
“Pinkie, I just don’t know. We’ve already tried just about every instrument we could. She just doesn’t seem ready yet.” Cheese Sandwich looked towards the tubas and sighed. “She didn’t even seem to enjoy the artillery sousaphone!”
Pinkie Pie sighed and ceased her bouncing, hoofing at the floor. “I know...and we even had commissioned that really neat battle lederhosen from Rarity. At least we had something for Apple Strudel to enjoy…” The normally-bubbly pony started to deflate and she sighed again.
“We’ve been through every store in town!” Cheese gestured his front leg up in the air. “How come we can’t find something for our little girl?” He sighed in defeat and started walking towards the exit. “Maybe we should just go home for today. We need to prepare for the Pie party next week. I’m sure we’ll find something by then.”
***One Week Later***
Igneous Rock Pie sat in his rocking chair despite being a horse (you picture it.), chewing a piece of rock candy. From the porch he could see two bouncy ponies of pink and yellow rushing up to him. He squinted his eyes to see who they were, and “Dad” and “Grandpa” were the last things he heard before he recognized them. With a blank stare he sat up and opened his mouth to greet them, just in time to be hit with the hug force of a thousand of Celestia’s sunrises. Falling back in his seat with his daughter and granddaughter in his lap, he wore a very dazed if not confused face.
The ponies in his lap giggled almost identical giggles and he wrapped his front legs around them. “Girls! How many times have I told you you can’t hit me with the fury of a thousand suns! My body can only handle eight suns at a time!”
Pinkie Pie hugged her father almost rib-crackingly tight, causing him to lose his breath. “Sorry! But we were just so excited to see you for the first time in ages! A whole 184 days!”
The littler pony looked up at Igneous and nuzzled into his chest. “Yeah! So the best we can do for you is 57 of Celestia’s suns!” Igneous tried to keep a gruff look on his face at that but the bubbliness of the two girls was contagious.
His grumbles turned into a wide smile he couldn’t hide and rolled his eyes. “Fair enough, fair enough. Now come on you two. Let’s go ins- Wait, where’s my son in law?” He looked up as the dust trail the two girls kicked up wisped away in the wind, revealing a very exhausted-looking Cheese Sandwich pulling a cart stacked with gifts, cakes and toiletries.
Cheese held up a hoof, panting. “Hang on huff...let me catch my...breath…” As if the gray streak in his hair wasn’t already indication enough that he’d aged, Cheese was showing it through his panting. He held up a hoof towards the sky as he panted. “I would like to request some water please…” He then slumped down in the reigns, splayed out on the rocky floor.
With the wagon in the barn and the Pie family flag hunt starting, Little Cheese ran off to play on the rock farm. She slipped by everypony, shirking her party-decoration responsibilities of which she resented. Instead she slinked around the silo and into the rock fields where she found a nice creek. She collected rocks together, trying to find the smoothest ones she could. Then she collected mud from the river, packing it into nice mounds beside it. Little Cheese very much enjoyed these little tasks even if they were truly boring to most people. She found it fun to play in the dirt, designing and building what she pleased.
Little Cheese wasn’t as slick as she thought. Nothing could get past Igneous’s sight. He wanted to see where his granddaughter would go and watched from afar. Strange...this kid may act like her parents. Yet she seems to be different in a way. He watched as she lay down the retrieved mud in a single square pad, smoothing it and making it level with the earth around her. She spent a lot of time on this, seeming to want to get it absolutely perfect.
Igneous quietly took his time to walk up to his granddaughter, sitting beside her. She visibly shrank, her head moving lower into her shoulders. She kept her head down and stopped smoothing the mud. She was silent, closing her eyes for the incoming lecture, but it never came. When she mustered the courage to look up at her grandfather, he gestured to the mud and nodded, keeping a stone face. “Well. Go on.”
Confused, the little yellow pony continued smoothing out the pad until she was satisfied. She then placed smooth rectangular rocks in a rectangular shape on the pad, nudging them into perfect shape. Using some more mud, she smoothed it over the rocks like mortar. Meanwhile, Igneous quietly got up with a grunt and moved over to the creek, digging a small hole by the water. As Little Cheese built, Igneous came back over with a brownish-red clump, setting it next to his granddaughter. “Clay. Clay is more adhesive than mud. And when it rains the clay won’t wash away quite as easily.” A yellow hoof reached out to take a glob from the pile and brought the glob up to her face to inspect it before slathering it over her “bricks”. Little Cheese noted the consistency was different and it seemed more rigid than the mud. She had to pat it and shape it down like Playdoh rather than just slather it.
Igneous soon brought over rectangular shaped rocks and smoothed out a pad of his own, building next to Little Cheese. “The key to building anything, whether it be a building or your life, is a solid foundation.” He laid the rectangular rocks on the pad, stacking them by laying one rock over two. “Alternate your placement in your foundation. Uniform foundations fall quicker. Branching out is important. Even if it means branching past what most ponies are comfortable with.” Little Cheese stopped to look her grandfather in his stone face for a long time, and he sat there to reassuringly stare back. Soon it was Little Cheese who was building alongside her grandfather until it started getting dark. The alternating lights emanating from the rock silo could be seen from the creek. Two structures made of rock and clay were left to stand the test of time, sitting by the creek with only the sounds of the wind and the water flowing as company.
Streamers, paper snowflakes, and confetti littered the floor. Cloudy Quartz was just placing the last decorative cake on the enormous vanilla-sour-strawberry-cherry-bomb-swirl cake that took up a good portion of the silo floor. Cheese Sandwich was sitting in a chair entertaining the family with his greatest hits on his wife’s one-pony band kit, including Polka Face, Eat It, and the family favorite: Amish Paradise. The rest of the Pies were dancing around him, kicking and jumping and singing along. Cheese Sandwich exclaimed, “We have quite the Hoedown here! Shake those tails off for one more song!” Limestone Pie was about to argue that it was in fact a Hootenanny, but she decided that hooves didn’t need to fly today.
As the music and dancing died down, Cloudy Quartz served comically-small portions from the comically-large cake for everyone to gather around on the floor. The cart had been unloaded and gifts for everypony were ready to be unwrapped. With the presents nicely stacked in front of the cake, Pinkie Pie sat close enough to the cake to swipe some frosting when she wanted. Igneous sat in the back, and Little Cheese sat next to him. Cloudy Quartz clapped her hooves in front of the cake to get everyone’s attention. “Okay everyone! Gift time is here! Let’s open them up!”
Little Cheese looked up at the huge pile of gifts in awe and concern. “How are we ever going to get through all these gifts?!” Cheese Sandwich just chuckled and kicked one of the gifts, sending a whole cardboard cut out to splat into the cake. “That’s just a backdrop! We weren’t going to spend the whole night unwrapping stuff! That’d be ridiculous! N-Not that we couldn’t find anything for you! Th-There’s stuff for everyone…” Pinkie looked hurt as she stuffed another hooful of icing in her mouth. Gift after gift was handed out to the ponies in the silo, each unwrapping them as they came. Little Cheese watched as a big smile crept up on her grandfather’s face. He opened a box of Cuban rock candy. He quickly put a lengthy piece in his mouth, sucking on the end of it and relaxing in his spot with a droopy-eyed smile. Little Cheese actually missed all the other gift openings, just in awe of her grandfather’s reaction to his own gift.
Soon, Little Cheese’s present was passed to her. She looked up at her parents who were smiling, looking almost too eager for her to open it. Pinkie was standing so far up on her toes she fell forward on her face with a yelp. She got back up and rubbed her neck with a nervous smile, watching her daughter open her present. Little Cheese’s face remained confused as she looked into the box, pulling out another box. This one also happened to be gift-wrapped. She tore the paper and tape expertly-installed by Pinkie herself, opening the box to find yet another box. She sat there in even more confusion, now standing up to tear through that box, and another, and another. The Pies all gathered around, torn away from their own gifts to watch the spectacle. Wrapping paper and boxes piled high as Little Cheese worked, her motions not unlike Maud Pie’s digging skills. Igneous had a twinkle in his eye as he watched the technique unfold before him. Finally, Little Cheese had reached a branded box. It was smaller than a small box, but larger than a tiny box. She opened up the jointed case to find: nothing. Little Cheese’s face fell, and she turned to all the other confused Pies. Pinkie then turned to her husband.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know I...I was sure I put it in there…”
“Did you leave it at home?”
Cheese Sandwich threw his arms up. “I don’t know! Maybe? Does it even matter? It was just going to be lousy anyway! We looked all over town for something to get her but nothing seemed to fit!” He leans down with his face on the floor and wraps his arms around his head. “We’re the worst parents ever.”
Little Cheese looked down at her box and then back at her parents’ display, thinking of all the time she spent with her parents. All the parties they made her help set up, all the music lessons she attended. She didn’t have the courage to tell her parents that she had no interest in those things. She looked up at Igneous, and he looked back, now stone faced again despite his amazing gift. He gave her a nod and used his eyes to gesture towards them. “Well. Go on.”
Cheese Sandwich lifted his head to find his daughter in his face. She looked at him, then her mother, then him again. “Mom, Dad, I have something to say. I-”
“Oh yeah! My little niece is coming out! What’s it gonna be kid? Are you gay? How about trans? Do you feel like you’re a boy at heart? I knew it!” She fist pumped to the shock and dismay of everyone around her. Little Cheese blinked a few times before speaking up.
“No, none of those. I’m not even sure what you’re talking about. But-”
Limestone then cried out, “Oh Celestia! She’s a Republican!” Igneous and Cloudy Quartz just rolled their eyes.
Little Cheese then shouted, “NO! Mom, Dad, I think I’m an engineer!” Pinkie and Cheese recoiled at that. Well, Pinkie didn’t recoil so much as her animation spazzed out for a second, prompting Cheese to take a cartridge out of her hair and blow on it before plunging it back in. The rest of the Pies were surprised and seemingly curious for the story to develop.
“I don’t like having to put up all those decorations all over town, I don’t like all those music lessons I have to attend, and I don’t like all the baking I have to do! I like learning how to do those things but I don’t want to do it all the time!” Little Cheese huffed and looked down at the ground, expecting punishment for her outburst. But she was instead joined by Igneous, who sat down next to her, pulling her close.
“You can’t pressure the kid into doing what you two like to do. She has a life that she herself needs to live. It’s your job as parents to not just parent your child, but to steer her into becoming a full adult in the future.” He looked down at his granddaughter. “And that all starts with a solid foundation.”
Igneous stared sternly at the two beaten parents before his expression softened. “Pinkie, when you left the rock farm, I felt devastated at first. All my other girls stayed, but you were completely out of left field. And up field, and lateral field. You were all over the field really. But I knew that keeping you at the farm would leave you miserable. I knew you needed to change your own path. Come on you two, talk to your kid. She needs you right now.”
Pinkie Pie was weirdly silent during the whole speech, for once sitting still. She was the first to walk over and sit beside her daughter, soon followed by her husband. Pinkie kissed her daughter on the cheek. “I’m sorry my little yummy gummy. We just want you to be happy. And engineering school is not a happy place.”
Cheese chimed in. “Yeah. We tried everything to steer you away from that path. We never gave you LEGOs, we kept training you to eventually host parties...but that wasn’t right. We got so wrapped up in building a future for you when we should have been building a future with you.” Both parents leaned in to hug their daughter, which was reciprocated. The other Pies gave each other a smile and moved in close. Cheese then hoisted his daughter up onto his back and smiled. “I guess if we don’t have a material possession for you, maybe we can try to do things your way this Hearth’s Warming. What do you want to do?”
Little Cheese thought about it for a few seconds and silence fell upon the whole family. “I think I just wanna eat cake and party.” She leaned in and nuzzled her dad’s neck. “It’s Hearth’s Warming, and I still like doing those things you know!” And then they ate cake and partied.
Author's Note
Source material includes the Barcast episode featuring MrNumbers and his fics. I didn't read his Lil' Cheese story because I wanted to bring a perspective of my own to the table. I'm open to criticism entirely. Brought to you by an engineering student. Merry Jinglemas MrNumbers!
