Technically the sea-gnats were a descendant of plankton, in the same sense ponies were a descendant of furry lizards. Magic and the whims of evolution had changed them to something different. They had transitioned from colonies of aquatic arthropods to underwater clouds of chitinous particulate shaped like diminutive, hollow needles with membranous fin-wings and nubby legs, each cloud now unified by a shared mind of no small complexity. They lived well beneath the layer of ocean where light still penetrated, but far enough above the hadopelagic depths to avoid its dangerous biodiversity.
The clouds mostly avoided one another, and they certainly avoided baleen whales, as well as sea ponies, who preferred the shallows. Thanks to a combination of their environment, behavior, and considerable powers of illusion magic, no sapient had ever come in contact with the sea gnats.
***
In the sisters’ waterfront house in Silver Shoals, Celestia tried to pour herself a bowl of cold cereal and got a cascade of what appeared to be tiny, winged needles. She froze, sat back, leaned in the squint at them, looked behind her, and looked back at the bowl.
"Luna," she said to the closed bedroom door down the hall, "don't go to bed yet."
The door cracked open to darkness. "Hmm?" said Luna.
"Some sort of animal has eaten my oat puffs."
"What kind?" Luna's voice was muffled, audibly speaking into a pillow.
Celestia examined them in their bowl. They hadn't moved, so she could only assume they were dead. "Well, they smell aquatic. They look pointy, like tiny terebra shells, but—
"Augur snails ate your food?"
"No, they look like... hm. Well, I don't think these are shells."
Luna audibly sighed and got up. "All right, all right, let's see it." She trudged in with theatrical tiredness to let Celestia know she wasn't in the mood for nonsense.
Celestia pushed the bowl toward Luna. "There, look at that."
Luna did. She poked the bowl with a ting and leaned from side to side to study the creatures from other angles. "Yes, that's odd."
"And?"
"And quite pretty in the morning light. They have a certain luster."
"And?"
"And I don't believe you should eat them."
Celestia glared at Luna.
Luna relented. "And I don't know what these are. You ought to contact the local marine biology center. They can tell you what it is, or, if they have never seen it before, they can name it after you."
Celestia groaned. "I hope they don't. I'm sick of being memorialized while I'm still alive. In fact, maybe I'll look through the local biology journals at the library first."
"As you will. Remember to eat breakfast before you leave, and—aah!" Luna ducked as the creatures, suddenly quite alive, flew from the bowl and out the window.
Luna and Celestia craned their necks out the window to see where it had gone.
Luna patted her sister on the shoulder. "Well, good luck with that. Was there anything else?"
Celestia sighed. "No, go to bed."
***
Pinkie Pie, who was taking a "me-day" to hike near the coast of Silver Shoals, bounced from rock to rock. Then she fell between the crevices. She poked her head out. Her backpack fell from her shoulders, and her hiking stick dropped from her mouth and rolled down the hill, unnoticed by Pinkie's widening eyes. She lifted her muzzle and sniffed the air.
Food.
FOOD.
A thousand segmented mouths salivated under the fur of her false skin. Her belly writhed visibly. The last time she'd encountered a new smell as delicious as this, she'd discovered sugar. But this smell was not at all like sugar, more a mix of kelp with a dash of umami and some other, deeper savor she'd never encountered before.
Pinkie Pie scanned her surroundings for witnesses, put on her detective hat, and abandoned every remaining pretense of normality (this didn't take long). She clambered down the cliff-face head-first on hooves that shouldn't have stuck to bare rock. This new food would not go untasted.
***
Individually, the gnats were incredibly simple creatures, barely capable of self-propulsion, let alone cognition. Their interactions with the environment were almost entirely limited to the passive perception of ambient pressure, water and air currents, and the presence or absence of food. They could sense light, but only its intensity.
As a collective entity, they wondered how they would get out of this mess. There was no going back in the water. Even as individuals the gnats knew that. Since when did gray whales dive so deeply? What kind of idiot mammal got so lost that it wandered into the abyssopelagic zone? Yes, all right, near the abyssopelagic zone. The gnats had to admit they'd been wandering a bit. Still, how could the beast have strayed so far? There was no question of losing its sense of direction. The correct direction was up. The gnats could only assume it had smelled them from far above, somehow, and decided to risk its life for one meal.
And why had their illusions stopped working? There was something about these waters that confounded their magic, and they had no clue how to fix it, and approaching the source of the disruption had turned out to be a very poor decision. The food had been good, though. Up until THAT THING had poured them into some sort of shallow container. What in the nine seas had that been? Nothing had a magic signature that large. Its simple proximity had stunned and dazed them, and its behavior suggested a level of sapience they'd only ever suspected from sea ponies and dolphins. Then another, similar being had shown up. What might have happened if the gnats hadn’t summoned the courage to flee?
But now one of the beings was following them across the sand and rocks. As was the whale just off the coast.
They were lost, terrified, and defenseless. A new concept was beginning to register for the collective entity, that of being alone—an especially alien idea for a hivemind—and this worried them nearly as much as their hunters did.
[Help us,] they thought to themselves, and wondered what they meant by that.
***
Celestia, sunhat on her head and garish aloha shirt on her back, put a coin in the beach viewer. She hunkered down and watched the creatures through the binoculars, writing furiously on a notepad she'd nabbed from the kitchen table on the way out the door. She wasn't as practiced as Twilight Sparkle at taking field notes, however.
bread
more cereal, try raspberry crisp this time
luna wants sleep mask
find way to protect raspberry crisp from new species
nonlethal bug repellent?
Whole swarm keeps trying to tap magic leyline: working together
spyhopping gray whale, bring camera next time
swarm is following coast
more whales? No, same whale
swarm is stuck on the shore like raccoon treed by dog
nonlethal whale repellant?
look up how to spell repell'nt
Celestia gave up and drew an X through her notes. She’d try again when she captured a live specimen.
***
The Collective That Was Pinkie Pie skittered en masse after the scent. She'd taken off her pony suit for speed and was now carrying it on the backs of her swarm, though she'd kept the hat on one of her vanguard drones for the sake of style.
And there, right there, was the source of the smell. Pinkie Pie hid in the crevices of a nearby cliff and observed.
... Oh.
Well, she didn't particularly like the idea of eating things that still moved. She considered it a reasonable concession to her adopted homeworld that she would remain a herbivore, and it had been decades since she'd eaten anything that might object to being eaten.
Six drones slipped into the loose folds of her suit and used the mouth to say, "That does smell good, though."
Seventeen other drones worked together to drag a spare Pinkie suit from the belly of the original suit. They disappeared into it by the hundreds. The process was quick and silent, and soon there was a second Pinkie Pie. The original stood up and dusted itself off.
"All right, let's talk about this," said Pinkie Pie.
"Okay," said Pinkie Pie.
"That's the most delicious smell we ever smelled and I want it in all my mouths right this second and I have to bake it into everything. Right?"
"Uh-huh," said Pinkie Pie.
"Except the smell belongs to someone."
"Yup."
Pinkie drooped. "This bites."
"Yuuup." The Pinkie Pie put a foreleg around Pinkie Pie's shoulders. "Listen. I get it. But you know we gotta be nice."
"Why couldn't there be some algae that smells like that?!"
The other Pinkie Pie drooped in place as well, causing both Pinkies to collapse onto the rocks.
Then one of them hopped up as the other brightened. "Idea! Idea!!"
"Maybe they have extras!!!" shouted Pinkie Pie.
"Yeah! Dead ones, or maybe they molt!"
"They might even be able to spare some! It's not like WE need every danged drone!"
The Pinkies high hoofed, the first Pinkie distended her jaw, and the second Pinkie climbed in. Then there was only one Pinkie Pie on the beach.
"Maybe we smell good to them too. We could do a swapsies. I have to convince them first, obviously." Pinkie licked her lips.
***
Swimming higher than a couple meters above the beach was out of the question for the gnats, it turned out. The air current picked up considerably there, to the point that they couldn't hold formation and therefore couldn't think straight. Even at ground level the air moved in a dangerously unpredictable fashion. Over time they'd taken to swimming closer to the rocks of the landslip, which was why the webs caught several members of the swarm.
The free gnats doubled back to work out what had happened. By the time they realized how the trap worked, most of them had already touched or landed on the webs.
Then there was a presence. It was another mass of magic and biological life, a horde of creatures each the size of fish, more familiar and yet more alien than the monster that pursued them. They smelled like predators. The gnats buzzed frantically.
The horde of predators stopped in place, and did nothing.
***
Several drones sidled into the empty suit. "My name is Pinkie Pie," said Pinkie.
The gnats shimmered in her webs. They gave no indication that they'd heard her.
"Pinkie Pie," Pinkie enunciated, pointing at herself. The gnats didn't respond. They had tiny, spiral bodies like seed pods.
"Look, I want to be friends. No, I want to make a trade. No, I want both! Let's be friends that trade. Did you know you smell delicious? No offense. Let's rap about that." She waggled her eyebrows.
***
The predators were releasing a sort of modulated air current at them. Some method of communication, like whale song? Why would a predator communicate with prey? Or was it calling the rest of its horde? Considering the size of their colony and the difference in total biomass between predator and prey, the gnat swarm doubted it would make a decent meal.
It hardly mattered. How to get out?
[Help me!]
***
"—and what I'm saying is that Mr. Butterwick's Superior is way way waaay better than the Dryman Especial Roast, not that I'm allowed to have any of those so I'm just going by smell, and speaking of tasty—"
[Help me!]
Pinkie Pie stopped talking. After a moment her jaw dropped.
They weren't words, really, so much as a pattern of pheromones, microvibratory impulses, and gesture-dances that traveled from speck to speck. That was Pinkie's mode of speech, her special method of communication between drones. If the entity that called herself Pinkie Pie could be said to have a singular brain, this was what it looked like.
Pinkie decided to start from the top. [Um. Is this how you talk?]
[WHAT?! You're not me but you talk to me like you are. This is impossible. And help me! And tell me what helping means! What are you?]
[I'm Pinkie Pie! I don't really understand what you're saying with that. Did you know you smell like food?]
[No I don't! I smell like me, and you smell like predator. If you understand me, let me out.]
[In a second!]
[Now!]
[In a second! Jeez! Listen, I can't help but notice you smell good. I don't want to be weird or anything, but can I eat just a little bit of you?]
[No!]
[I meant 'may I.']
[No!]
Hm. Pinkie had expected this to go differently, though come to think of it, it was never going to. [Maybe just one?]
The creatures glimmered, merged, and changed to something else, something enormous, with lashing tentacles and countless bulbous eyes spread across its face like a starfield.
"GAAAH whatisthat! fine!!" Pinkie allowed the neutralizing proteins to drip down her webs and scuttled away, dragging the pony suit behind her.
***
Celestia lowered her binoculars. "Um."
***
The whale was confused and hungry and possibly a bit lost, and the food hadn't come back yet. She dove down to drift above the sand, then angled up to dip her head out above the world to the empty place where breath came from. Yes, there it was. The food. She could almost smell it.
She was aware that this was no place for whales, but she'd spent her life exploring the world. She was old now, and she'd seen things most whales hadn't. Hostile environments didn't scare her. In the back of her head she knew she ought to be migrating, that it was such a long journey and it would be best to get on with it, but she'd ignored that impulse before and it had only hurt for a few months. Migration came third after hunger and curiosity.
There it was, out where sand met sky without any water in between. A terrible place. The food would have to come down soon enough.
***
Um.
Celestia had questions.
Celestia had numerous questions.
First, there were those questions raised by the fact that Pinkie Pie was spiders. How long had that been a fact? You'd expect it to come up in conversation. Granted, it was Pinkie Pie, for whom normal conversational principles were suspended. Maybe she'd just forgotten to mention it. And could they even be called spiders? They were too floppy and had far too many legs each. If they stopped squirming, they would almost look like a pile of mops.
There was also the possibility that the mop-spiders were only disguised as Pinkie Pie. If so, they did an unnervingly good job of it. The voice was perfect.
Celestia scratched her head with the binoculars. The weather had gotten hot.
Well, the thing to do with questions was to ask them.
***
She'd certainly messed that up, Pinkie Pie thought to herself. She probably shouldn't have led with the eating-you thing. That was the sort of suggestion you built up to. A drone adjusted its detective hat, and another contemplated the horizon.
"Would you like a snow cone?"
And now the beach was vacant.
"Oh, get back here," said Celestia mildly.
Pinkie Pie, now in costume, peeked out from behind a small rock.
"Yes, you," said Celestia. She had two snowcones, one blue and one pink. She bit into the blue one. "Mm. Would you like one? "
The very picture of nonchalance, Pinkie Pie sidled up and accepted the snow cone.
"Here for the day?" asked Celestia.
Pinkie polished a hoof on her chest. "Maybe."
"Your zipper is showing," said Celestia, and took another bite of her snow cone.
"Nuh-uh," said Pinkie.
"Look, right there."
"I don't have a zipper."
"I meant metaphorically," said Celestia.
"No zippers here! No zippers at all of any kind. Thanks for the cone, great to catch up, the girls probably say hi. Anyways—"
Celestia chuckled. "I won't keep you. But out of curiosity, can you introduce me to the flying, sapient hivemind of amphibious organisms? I know you're friends with everyone."
"Maybe not with everyone," Pinkie mumbled, despondent. For a moment she'd forgotten. What was she to do? The pursuit of exotic flavors aside, she didn't like being disliked, and she hated to be feared.
Celestia nodded understandingly. "Sometimes creatures don't get along. Or they start off on the wrong hoof."
Pinkie watched the ocean for a while. Then she tipped forward and planted her face in the sand. "Grmphmrr!!"
"The whale is still out there," said Celestia. She folded the empty paper cone and put it in her breast pocket.
"Th' mfwhat?"
"Look."
The whale spouted in the distance.
"Huh?" said Pinkie Pie. Sand caked her chin.
"It's been there for some time," said Celestia. "I suspect it wants to eat our new friend."
"Maybe."
"No? You don’t often see them this close to the shore."
"I mean, yeah, maybe it's trying to eat them," said Pinkie, her voice rising slowly to a shout, "or maybe it just wants to be friends, except the flies smell really REALLY good and it's distracting and maybe that smell is why it came here in the first place but now it sees the little flies are an actual person, and it still smells way too much like food even though it talks like a new FRIEND but then I MESSED UP and then I messed up in a DIFFERENT way and now there's NOTHING to talk about except—"
"Pinkie."
"Yes?" said Pinkie, disarmed.
"I've spent this entire conversation trying to think of a polite way to ask you what species you are."
"I'm Pinkie Pie!"
Celestia laughed. "I know you are. I watched you capture somecreature in a large pink web and then gabble at it about sugary drinks for several minutes." Celestia brushed the sand out of Pinkie's mane. "I had other questions, but, you know, I think you just answered most of them. You're Pinkie Pie. Now, would you like to be the one to chase off the whale, or would you like to try again with our prospective friend?"
"I wouldn't know how to deal with a whale."
"The trick is to be gentle," said Celestia. "You can't just throw them, because any significant impact with the water can injure a creature of that size. You have to herd them."
"Okay, so you get the whale and I'll," sighed Pinkie, "try again."
Celestia hugged Pinkie. "I believe in you."
***
It was far too hot for sea gnats, whose preferred mode of heat regulation was to find somewhere colder. They sheltered under the shaded leaves of a patch of coastal grass and wondered which cause of death would be the quickest. The whale? The horde? That great god-thing of magic? The latter might at least be an interesting way to go, but the being had gone out into the sea.
The horde approached in its husk, though other drones wandered behind. The gnats idly wondered if such a covering would work as a cooling method. Was that why the horde hid inside it?
[So,] said the predators.
[This is it,] said the swarm.
[What do you mean?] asked the horde.
[What do YOU mean? You've come to eat us. I don't understand why you're still talking.]
[I don't want to eat you.]
[I smell your hunger.]
[Well, okay,] said the horde with a collective shrug, [but I'm not going to. My friend and I just want to help you. My name is Pinkie Pie.]
[What are names? What are friends?] The gnats' wing-fins shook and glittered in the breeze.
The drones jumped up and down. [Ooh, ooh, I teach creatures stuff like this all the time! Names are what other people call you, and friends are the people who love and help you! Everyone should have friends.]
[What is "teach?" What is "everyone?" I thought we spoke the same language, but I'm not sure we do, predator.]
[I'm not a predator. I'm Pinkie Pie.]
The gnats flickered in thought. [Interesting. You consider the categories of Pinkie Pie and predator to be mutually exclusive. This makes sense if we treat "predator" as a mode of behavior rather than a preference, since, after all, we have yet to see you eat anything. What's a Pinkie Pie?]
[That's my name! I'm a friend.]
The gnats struggled to grasp the concept of a pointless conversation, but eventually succeeded. Here was a predator, or perhaps a Pinkie Pie, that could inflict foreign cognitions on another entity. A truly novel hunting and defensive strategy, to make its victims stop and think. How unfortunate that true communication between two beings was impossible!
[Look,] said the Pinkie Pie. [I understand, and I'm really sorry for scaring you. My friend is chasing off the whale so you can get back in the water. You can go as soon as she finishes with that, and then we won't bother you anymore.]
[What is sorry?]
[It means I wish I hadn't done that. And you don't have to talk to me anymore. I'll go.] The husk and the drones turned as one to leave.
[Stop,] said the gnats. [Your mode of communication is alien. You transmit information out of yourself, and we have trouble internalizing this concept. We regret all of the misunderstandings that have followed from our difficulties. Rather, we're sorry for not understanding.]
The drones didn't turn, but the husk's head did. What really drove the horde to do what it did? Not hunger. What did they want, and how could the gnats give it to them?
[We don't understand,] said the gnats. [Help us. What does it mean to help? Help us. If not, can we help you?]
[I don't need help! I need you to be okay. Why are you lying in the grass, anyway? That's not a very good hiding spot.]
[Too much heat can injure us. It's gotten hotter, and now we're stuck. There is nothing you can do.]
[You should have said!!] The husk spat out a roll of material and unfurled it—another husk. [These have air conditioning.]
[I beg your pardon?]
[I'll show you how to put it on!]
[What?]
Carefully, the Pinkie Pie gathered every gnat and dropped it into the husk. The swarm didn’t resist. It was completely dark inside, and, when the gnats found the switch, they learned about air conditioning.
***
Six minutes before Luna's alarm went off, she awoke to loud voices from the kitchen.
"Diurnals have no consideration," She growled to herself, and staggered out of bed. She walked to the door and cracked it open to witness two Pinkie Pies, one blathering happily to the other.
"Okay," one of the Pinkies said, "it's usually best to have at least two hooves on the ground unless you have wings. No, I mean wings on the outside. Okay, that's a little better. The head goes the other way, though. You can't really twist it around like that. Also you're upside down. And you're being way too floppy, cuz remember, most ponies have bones. And you shouldn't crowd around the inside of the eyes like that, because creatures can see you. Hi, Luna!"
"You woke me up," said Luna, without coming out from behind the door.
"Sorry!!! Hey, we made friends with the little flying guys! They want to see more of the world now that they figured out how to make their magic work here and they have a costume to keep them safe. Also I'm here too."
"Good evening," said Celestia, sipping tea at the table. She looked pleased with herself. "Meet Luster Dawn."
"Luster Dawn?" said Luna.
"We named them that because their carapaces are quite lustrous, and because they left the water for the first time at dawn this morning. I'm told they plan to spend some time in Equestria now that they have a disguise and they've gotten used to the nature of Equestrian leylines. Did you know ambient magic has a completely different thaumic structure in places that have never seen light?"
"Yes," said Luna. "Has Luster Dawn bought us another box of oat puffs, or do they not intend to take responsibility for that?"
Celestia laughed. "Luster has apologized, which is good enough for me. As for replacing it, I'd love to see you try and explain money to them, let alone how to get it."
One of the Pinkies hopped up and down. "Did you need breakfast? I can make pancakes! I'm a bag of aliens, by the way. Celestia says it's okay to tell you. Do you like big pancakes or small?"
"I know, and I prefer large pancakes, thank you," said Luna.
Celestia set her teacup on the saucer with a sharp click. "You know. What do you mean you know?"
"I thought it was obvious."
Then the wall exploded. Luna ducked under a flying fence post and squinted through the dust to see the enormous, open mouth of a baleen whale. Celestia’s back leg stuck out from under the table cloth, and one Pinkie Pie was dragging another wriggling Pinkie away by the scruff of its neck.
Celestia crawled out from under the table. "Stupid beast! What was the second step to your plan here? Luna, help me drag her back to the ocean."
Luna's alarm went off behind her. She shut the door, got back into bed and hit "snooze.”
Author's Note
I've been wondering how Luster Dawn could spend years as Twilight's student and fail to learn that it's worth it to have friends. I've come to the obvious conclusion: it's because they're plankton. They've spent years learning how to be in society. Don't make fun of them, they're doing their best.
I might but probably won't write a fic about how Lil' Cheese is in fact a fungal network on a big adventure. I don't want to get soft by continuously writing variations of the same idea, you see. Also no one is reading these.
