Fire Breath vs Fire Taste
Gallus wasn’t totally sure why the School of Friendship had entire jalapeños available in the cafeteria at lunch, but he didn’t care, either. Maybe it was just to accommodate the needs of all the different types of creatures. Maybe it was a joke by Professor Pinkie (Prank Week was going on, after all). Maybe it was just for variety. Either way, for the first time since he’d started coming to the school, Gallus snagged several peppers from their container along with his normal food.
Smolder was sitting at her usual table, daintily consuming her gems. She looked over when Gallus, grinning broadly, dropped his tray with a clatter. “So what’s up?” she asked, raising an eyeridge.
“I’ve been thinking.” Gallus picked up a hot pepper and examined it. It didn’t look like much, but then, neither had Cozy Glow. “Ponies are always talking about how spicy these things are. I’ve never had one. I bet you’ve never had one. So…” He grabbed another pepper and held it out to Smolder. “Whaddya say?”
“You know I breathe fire, right? That ‘hot’ pepper’s not gonna do a thing for me.”
“Probably not. But you don’t know until you try, right?”
A second’s thought, and Smolder shrugged. “Eh. What the heck. Gimme.” She snatched her pepper, sniffed it suspiciously, and took a nibble.
Gallus bit into his own pepper and chewed. Slowly. It wasn’t that bad, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. With his luck, he’d need to sandpaper out the inside of his beak to get rid of the-
Oh.
It took a while to build, but it was hot. It was actually hot. Or was it? It felt like he was being slightly burned without any actual heat. And not just his tongue, either; all around the inside of his mouth. But it was mild enough for him to ignore it. Ponies thought enduring this was tough? Please. Still, it was indeed spicy.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not that spicy, but I can see what they’re getting at. Kinda. Not really.”
Smolder gave him a confused look. “What do you mean? This isn’t spicy.”
Rolling his eyes, Gallus said, “This isn’t a competition, Smolder, you don’t need to-”
“No, really,” said Smolder seriously. “I’m not trying to sound tough. You already know I’m tough. This just isn’t spicy. Like, at all. Watch.” She took a huge bite of the pepper, chewed it for several long seconds, and swallowed.
“Maybe you got a bad pepper.” Gallus snatched the pepper away from Smolder and took a bite. Nope. Just as hot as the first. “Huh. Tastes spicy to me.” Maybe it was more spicy to ponies? He stuck out a leg to clothesline a passing pony. “Hey, Sandbar. Eat this pepper.”
From his spot on the floor, Sandbar blinked. “Um. What?”
“This pepper.” Gallus shoved said pepper in Sandbar’s face. “Eat it. We wanna know if it’s spicy.”
“And you can’t eat it because…?”
“Because I can’t taste any spice,” Smolder said. “Gallus says he can. So what about you?”
Sandbar got to his hooves and looked between Gallus, Smolder, and the pepper as if any one of them was about to explode. “A-alright,” he said. “This better not be part of Prank Week.” He took the pepper from Gallus. He rolled it over on his hoof, like it was a delicate work of art he might accidentally smash. He squinted at it. He brought to his mouth. He took it away. He opened his mouth and closed it again several times in a row. He flicked his ears. He took a deep breath-
“This century would be nice,” Gallus said.
Panicking, Sandbar took a bite of the pepper — a big bite — chewed, and swallowed in the space of a few seconds. He blinked and his entire body twitched. “Yep,” he said in a squeaky voice, getting higher-pitched every second. “That’s spicy. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to drink every drop of milk within five miles.” And he was gone, leaving a trail of smoke in his wake.
Smolder sighed. “Maybe, out of all ponies, you shouldn’t’ve picked Sandbar.”
“He’s not that white-bread. He’s dating Yona.” Gallus drummed his claws on the table and stared off into space. “I bet one of our professors could tell us why you can’t taste anything.”
“Capsaicin!” Professor Fluttershy said brightly.
“Cap say what now?” asked Gallus.
“Capsaicin,” enunciated Fluttershy. “It’s a chemical found in hot peppers that acts as an irritant. Whenever some creature touches it, it produces a burning sensation.” Her smile grew wider. “But that’s only true for mammals. For other members of the animal kingdom, like reptiles-” She looked meaningfully at Smolder. “-nothing happens.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Smolder, her wings springing open. “Are you really saying Gallus and I tasted different things just because we’re different species?”
Fluttershy nodded. “Exactly! Sometimes, the raccoons and squirrels and other such critters don’t listen when I tell them to stay away from into the bird seed, so I put some capsaicin sauce on the seed to stop them. The birds don’t taste anything different while the mammals don’t like the spiciness. I’d think Gallus didn’t feel it as strongly because he’s only partly a mammal, but-”
“And that works?” gasped Smolder.
“If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it. You can stop by next winter if you want, that’s when I use it the most.”
“Why’s it only affect mammals?” asked Gallus.
“Oh, that’s very interesting!” In the right contexts, Fluttershy could be even more enthused about knowledge than Twilight. “There’s a protein called the transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1, and you’re already tuning me out, aren’t you?”
Gallus twitched and stood up straight again. “What was that? I didn’t catch it.”
“Biology,” said Fluttershy. “Capsaicin’s so effective at… deterring mammals that it’s the main ingredient in pepper spray.”
Both Gallus’s and Smolder’s wings perked up. “Really?” They looked at each other, grinning equally devious grins.
The shopkeeper looked at Gallus and Smolder with steadily-increasing concern as they put each new bottle of pepper spray on the counter. When they finally had a dozen canisters, she cleared her throat. “Why, why are you buying all this?”
“Biology lesson,” said Gallus with an eminently punchable grin. “On inter-species chemical reactions.”
“Also monster defense,” added Smolder. “You know what Ponyville’s like.”
Everyone looked out the window. No monsters. Yet.
The shopkeeper didn’t look particularly convinced, but she rang up the spray anyway.
Gallus and Smolder settled in on the top balcony of Castle Formerly Belonging to Sparkle. Gallus turned over one of the canisters in his claws. “So what effect would this have on Ocellus?” he muttered.
“If Fluttershy’s right, nothing. She’s not a mammal.”
“She is sometimes. Let’s ask her when we’re done.” Gallus vigorously shook the spray can. “Have you figured out how to get these things working yet?”
“Just squeeze ’em.” Pointing her can away from Gallus, Smolder squeezed the can around the middle, sending out a burst of spray. “They’re made for hooves, remember.”
“Right.” Squeeze. Spray. Worked fine. “You wanna go first or me?”
Smolder stood up, grinned in the most annoying way possible, and pointed at her face. “C’mon, hit me!”
Gallus shielded his own eyes and sprayed Smolder in the face. She took a step back and started blinking a lot. “So?” Gallus asked. “Do you feel anything?”
“Well, my eyes sting a little-” Smolder rubbed one. “-but that’s probably just from getting stuff sprayed in them. No burning.”
“More, then?”
“Sure, go for it.”
An impressively large amount of pepper spray yielded no further results, so the two of them gave up. “Just a small burst,” Gallus said as he passed the can to Smolder. “Since I could taste the spice, I bet it’ll feel like my eyes are burning up.”
“What’s the matter? Chicken?” Smolder smirked as she shook the can.
“No, falcon. Although I did know a chicken griffon some time-”
Smolder sprayed him while he was distracted. Immediately his eyes began watering and he clamped them shut. It was like his face was getting poked with needles all over, and scratching did nothing to alleviate the pain. He blinked and was able to squint at Smolder. “Okay, yeah,” he moaned. “Yeah, this bites. Gaow!” A bolt of pain lanced through one of his eyes and he rubbed at it. “Can’t imagine what it’s like for ponies.”
“Yeah, that looks pretty bad.” Smolder hesitantly pointed to the stairs down. “Want me to get you some water to wash your face?”
“Urfh. Please.”
It took about seven or eight minutes for the pain to subside. Water hadn’t done anything to stop the burning; in fact, it seemed to just spread it out. But, eventually, his face stopped feeling like it was on fire.
Gallus dried his face. “So now that we know it kinda works on me and doesn’t work on you, what do we do with enough pepper spray to outfit a small army? And, no, actually outfitting a small army and taking over Equestria doesn’t count. Not unless we went to get rainbow-lasered in the face.”
“We were talking about Ocellus,” said Smolder. She was starting to grin and her tail was flicking back and forth. “And Prank Week is on. We’ll jump her this evening, and-”
“No,” Gallus squawked, “we can’t ambush Ocellus! Sandbar or Silverstream, maybe, but not Ocellus!”
“Ah, c’mon, it won’t hurt her!”
“That’s beside the point! She’s too sweet! It’s, like, against the law to ambush something that sweet.”
“…Are you crushing on her?”
“I don’t think so. Remember how Professor Pinkie left Professor Fluttershy off the prank list? She’s like an older pegasus version of Ocellus. And, yeah, I know Ocellus is a bit tougher than Fluttershy, but we are not ambushing her!”
Ocellus poked her head above the balcony’s railing. “You got that right! Whatever it is.” She vaulted over the railing and took a seat on the floor. “I heard you maybe wanted to talk to me?”
Gallus and Smolder looked at each other. Gallus shrugged and said, “Sure, maybe. How’d you know?”
“A little bird told me.” Ocellus whistled and held up her hoof. A chickadee fluttered down, alighting gracefully. “Professor Fluttershy’s been helping me speak to animals!” Ocellus said brightly. “I’m not as good as she is, but I can understand Charlie here. Right?”
Charlie whistled an up-down-down-down-down tune.
“Yes, I’ll get you some safflower seeds soon.” Ocellus lightly stroked his feathers and the bird fluttered off. “Charlie’s very active, so he hears a lot. Including you looking for me. What for?”
It suddenly struck Gallus just how weird this all was. Ponies were rubbing off on him. “Well, um,” he said, kneading his claws together, “we, uh, just wanted to-”
“Experiment on you!” said Smolder. “With pepper spray!” She grinned and sprayed one of the bottles in a random direction. “It only works on mammals. We already know it doesn’t work on me.” She sprayed some in her own face to demonstrate. “So for you, we-”
“-wanted to see how my shapeshifting made it work on me!” Ocellus bounced up and down, buzzing her wings. “Oh, wow, that’s an amazing idea! Let’s do it! Now!” She smiled a smile that shouldn’t appear on the face of someone about to have chemical weapons tested on them.
Before Gallus could react, Smolder had dosed Ocellus with a blast of pepper spray, right in the face. Ocellus staggered back and blinked, then coughed. “That was it?” she asked tentatively. She ran a hoof down her face. “I’ve heard my face is supposed to be burning. Why isn’t my face burning?”
“Well, if you turn into a pony, maybe it will,” said Smolder.
“Here’s hoping.” Poof, and Ocellus was a nondescript pony. “Hit me.”
This time, Gallus was ready. He sprayed Ocellus while she was still looking at Smolder. This time, he got a reaction.
“Sweet Queen below!” shrieked Ocellus. She clutched her face and dropped to the ground. “My face is burning! Why did I want my face to be burning?!” She dissolved into an undoubtedly uncouth array of buzzes and clicks.
Gallus and Smolder were already on their feet, hovering over Ocellus. “Should- should I get some water or something?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Gallus. “It didn’t really work with me, why would it work with her?”
“We need to get a teacher!”
“Oh, sure, then you can tell Headmare Starlight what we were doing, running around with-”
Poof. Ocellus was Ocellus again and, more importantly, still and quiet. Lying on her back, she delicately massaged her face. “Ow,” she said, sounding nothing more than vaguely surprised. “That… hurt.” She blinked up at Gallus and Smolder. “I’m fine now, but…” She rubbed at her eyes; they were watering like mad. “Ow.”
“Sorry.” Gallus extended a claw and helped Ocellus to her feet. “I didn’t think it’d be that bad, or else I would’ve-”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s one of the risks of science. Really, I’m fine.” Ocellus blinked a few more times and let out a deep breath. “So what do we do with all these?”
“I dunno.” Smolder tossed her can in the air a few times. “Prank Week?”
“Notagainstponies!” squeaked Ocellus. “Or yaks or- or mammals! That really hurt.”
“That still leaves us with a lot of options,” Gallus pointed out. “Didn’t you notice? Ever since Headmare Twilight became Full-Time Princess Twilight, more changelings and dragons have showed up, plus some other creatures I don’t even know the names of.”
“Nagas,” said Ocellus. “Yes, I have noticed.”
“And we can teach them about chemistry while we’re at it!”
“Professor Pinkie does like her ambush lectures,” mused Ocellus. “And they do work. But we still need somenotpony to prank…”
Suddenly, Smolder’s eyes lit up and she grinned. “We need to check the schedule,” she said. “I bet I know the right person if she’s around.”
Gallus, Smolder, and Ocellus sat on the couch in front of Headmare Starlight as she bumped her hooves together and did her best Disapproving Look. She’d learned well from Twilight. Eventually, she said, “Tell me. Why did you think it was necessary to ambush Ember right before her guest lecture and attack her with pepper spray?”
“W-well, uh,” said Gallus, squirming in his seat.
“Y’see,” said Smolder, opening and closing her wings.
“We kinda…”
“…wanted to see if…”
“…she was, y’know…”
“…affected by…”
“For science!” Ocellus said cheerfully.
That triggered something in Gallus and the next words came out in a torrent. “Dragons aren’t supposed to be hurt by pepper spray and Smolder wasn’t but maybe that was just her and it’s Prank Week and Spike’s in Canterlot so Ember was the next closest dragon so we got caught up in the moment and it’s absolutely Smolder’s fault but I kinda went along with it and I’m sorry.” He looked down and pulled up his wings to hide his head.
“Besides, she liked how well we ambushed her.” A few scraps of Smolder’s anxiety fell away as she puffed her chest out.
“And that makes it better?” demanded Starlight.
“…Wait, you mean it doesn’t?”
Starlight introduced the desktop to her face. “Why now?” she moaned.
“Because she was the guest speaker visiting this week,” Smolder said as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. “If it’d been Thorax, we would’ve ambushed-”
Dropping his wings, Gallus whipped around and stared at Smolder, his beak hanging open. “Wait, what? We would’ve?” he screeched. “Why would we pepper spray King Thorax?”
“For science!” Ocellus was taking possible treason remarkably well.
“ ’Cause it’s funny,” said Smolder.
“You know that a chandelier would turn out to be Pharynx and he’d eat us alive for attacking his brother, right?”
“I’d like to see him eat me alive,” boasted Smolder. “But you? Easy. But I bet once we told him changelings are immune to-”
“Quiet!” yelled Starlight. Silence fell. “Here in Equestria, we don’t ambush heads of state with pepper spray! Never! And what sort of place is this that that even needs to be a lesson?!”
“One in Ponyville?” suggested Gallus.
Starlight kneaded her temples like she was nursing a hangover. “Oh, stars above. Why were the three of you even running around with pepper spray in the first place, anyway?”
Gallus and Smolder didn’t even open their mouths. They simply glanced at Ocellus, who said emphatically, “For science.”
Three is a magic number. Literally. Throughout the cosmos, three appears in the oddest of places. There are three pony tribes, each with three syllables in their tribe names. Many pony names have three syllables. The number of Elements of Harmony was a multiple of three, as was the number of Pillars of Equestria. Three villains nearly conquered Equestria in the War of the Bell and were beaten back by power channeled by three generations’ worth of heroes. Various “rules of three” appear in countless fields of science and art. Three is the minimum number of occurrences required to establish a pattern. And so on and so forth.
But three isn’t merely magical; it’s ritualistic. Perhaps nothing would have happened if Ocellus had only said “for science” twice. (Astute individuals may note that the phrase has three syllables.) But with her third utterance, she unknowingly invoked something deep within the fabric of reality. Something had been called. And something would answer.
Starlight groaned and planted her face in her hoof. “While I appreciate your curiosity,” she said, “and experimentation is the best way to confirm hypotheses, you ca-”
Princess Twilight Sparkle, crown and peytral and all, burst out of thin air onto Starlight’s desk in an explosion of lavender sparks with the sound of a cannon blast. Subtle auras still danced around the gleaming metal that gilded her. On her left side was a notebook; on her right, a quill. Her grin was wild, deranged, manic, the kind of a pony caught in the throes of single-minded obsession and loving every last second of it. “For science? Really?” Twilight put quill to paper and leaned in close, examining Ocellus as if she were prey. “Tell me moooooooore.”
Gallus and Smolder quickly shuffled to opposite ends of the couch, leaving Ocellus cowering in the middle, utterly devoid of her previous bravado, and fighting the urge to turn into a rock. “W-well, uh…” She swallowed. “You… see-”
Starlight pushed Twilight’s tail out of her face and cleared her throat. “Twilight, shouldn’t you be talking with the Griffon Council about relations with Griffonstone? And not having a swarm of angry birdcats attempting to break into all of Equestria’s banks next year? And actually having a codified Griffon Council in the first place?”
“Ah bah bah!” Twilight already had the royal action of “holding up a hoof to prevent somepony from speaking out of turn” down pat. “That can wait. This is important. This! Is for science.”
“This is gonna be a loooooooong year,” Starlight mumbled.
