Sweetie’s Market

Sweetie Belle was lying on her bed, quickly flicking her eyes between a textbook and the sheet of homework that she had to fill out by tomorrow.

Of course, given the opportunity to do homework, Sweetie Belle decided that procrastination would be a better use of her time. It started off simple enough, with Sweetie shifting over and looking at the sky outside her window. The clouds and the weather ponies occasionally moving them were a hundred times more interesting than-

Sweetie Belle glanced back at the sheet of homework, the lower half of it being noticeably blank.

-A hundred times more interesting than ‘’The impact that the Hayseed Swamps had on Baltimare’s development’’ Sweetie couldn’t help but let out a groan at the utterly useless research she was forced to do, after all, it didn’t take a genius to figure out how a swamp might effect the development of a city.

Since ponies weren’t creatures meant for swamps, Sweetie reckoned that it would badly effect the development of a nearby city. There! Sweetie Belle has just use a single sentence to give the same amount of information as- she glanced at the homework sheet once again -as six questions and a five hundred word essay on the relationship between the (apparently independent) swamp-ponies and the Equestrians did.

Sweetie let out a small sigh, if only she wasn’t such a coward she would have brought this issue up with miss Cheerilee, but the last time she tried to question her teaching methods all she got out of it was a stern scolding from Rarity. Apparently ‘wanting to help refine a pony’s own education’ and ‘laziness no pony expected from you’ were the same thing.

She was tempted, so tempted, to simply wright down: ‘’Swamps and ponies don’t mix, which means they slowed down development’’ and just be done with it. Doing so would mean that Sweetie Belle technically completed her homework and would have time to go out crusading.

That seemed like a good idea on the surface. Unfortunately, Sweetie Belle was blessed with a mind that thinks ever so slightly ahead and realized that turning in a homework completed that way would make miss Cheerilee, and by extension Rarity, mad. Making them mad would probably result in Sweetie Belle not being able to see her friends tomorrow and possibly the day after. Tomorrow was Friday. Sweetie Belle was aware that sacrificing a day of possible crusading on Saturday for a couple hours of crusading now was a bad trade.

Her plan of action having not changed at all, Sweetie Belle returned to looking out of her window. Some Pegasi colts that she didn’t know were trying to create a tornado or something, about a dozen of them flying around a cloud in circles. Correction, a dozen of them were flying around a cold in circles until one of them got too close and clipped his wing on the cloud, sending him spiraling down towards the ground.

Sweetie never really understood the relationships clouds had with Pegasi, sometimes allowing the to pass right through while at other times becoming solid ground or even barriers for them.

The Pegasus colt obviously didn’t understand it either since he was spiraling down in the direction of the boutique, his friends too busy circling the cloud to have noticed that he was missing. Sweetie Belle should have really done something, anything really. Instead, she simply sat up a bit higher so that she could see where the colt would crash, some form of morbid curiosity keeping her glued to the unfolding events.

Sweetie Belle watched in silence as the colts grey muzzle connected with the dirt road outside. She even watched as the colt tumbled towards the wall of the boutique until he slammed into it and slowly fell sideways.

The show now over and her curiosity satisfied, Sweetie Belle opened the window and called down to the colt below.

“Are you okay?”

The colts head sit up and looked around the unusually empty street, whipping back and forth in confusion.

“Up here!”

The colt looked up and flashed Sweetie Belle a smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. Isn’t the first time I fell out the sky.” He then slowly got up and quite flew back to his group in the same manner Ditzy Doo would fly before she crashed into a tree.

Sweetie had to hand it to the colt, he certainly knew how to fall out from the sky. If a unicorn or earthpony fell from that high up they would have been paste. Well, a good unicorn would use magic to slow their fall or something but the point still stands.

But you know what won’t stand? Unfinished homework. At least that’s what the tiny Cheerilee inside of Sweetie Belle’s head said, and the only way to please such a creature would be to look at the text book.

And so, Sweetie Belle looked at the textbook and actually focused on it.

There were three sections, each with a picture and a block of writing. The two main ones were about Baltimare itself and the Hayseed Swamps, the pictures giving an example of what the two places looked like and the writing simply describing area and how it benefited or hurt the city’s development. A tiny picture of the Horseshoe Bay acompanied by a tiny snippet of information was in the bottom right corner of the second page.

Sweetie Belle read all of this with her usual enthusiasm, forgetting most of the words she saw unless she deemed them relevant. That resulted in her not remembering much of the information about Baltimare itself except for the fact that it had a docks. The section about the Hayseed Swamps turned out to be more interesting than expected though, going over how the swamp-ponies didn’t believe in Celestia until they got absorbed into Equestria and other bits of random trivia.

Fascinating stuff really.

She was about to move onto the tiny snippet about the Horseshoe Bay when something caught her eye, a couple sentences that spoke highly of the swamps in a oxymoronic way: ”The thick vegetation and inaccessibility of the swamps was a great assets for the many smugglers from overseas. This illegal practice is what turned the once unnamed fishing village into the great city it is today, the smugglers bringing required materials and goods, legally or otherwise.”

Sweetie Belle reread the passage over and over again, finding it hard to believe that a city could possibly grow due to such an...... immoral practice. How could doing the opposite of what the princess said was okay help in such a substantial way?

Why did the princess forbid things that were needed for Baltimare to grow and expand?

Why did the ponies in Baltimare stoop to crime in order to expand, why was the fishing village not enough?

Most importantly, why did ponies dedicate entire villages to fishing back then? Ponies don’t even eat fish.

Sweetie Belle shuddered at her last thought. Fish were slimy, oily and meat. None of those things ever belonged in a mouth. Maybe that was why they did the smuggling thing, because ponies didn’t really need the fish but the smugglers had a use for them?

Sweetie would have liked nothing more than to spend more time thinking about these things, maybe even find answers for them. But she glanced at her window once again and noted that the sky was noticeably darker than the last time she looked at it. Her eyes snapped to the still unfinished homework besides her, more precisely to the last task.

Relationship between the Swamp-ponies and the Equestrians?

She knew that one! They were smuggling things to support the Equestrians, who for some reason didn’t have those things and couldn’t obtain them legally. Sweetie Belle shook her head, the task didn’t ask those things, it asked for the relationships between the smugglers and the Equestrians.

Her magic being just as disappointing as always, Sweetie Belle grabbed her pencil and started scratching away at the paper, manually.