Meteor

by Bandy

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 2924

On the day that Astral Sign got his cutie mark, a meteor fell from space and struck his home. The next day, his parents filed for divorce. The events were not unrelated.

On the day that Astral Sign got his cutie mark, a meteor fell from space and struck his home. The next day, his parents filed for divorce.

The events were not unrelated.

My attempt at imitating the style of the incomparable GaPJaxie. Much love buddy :)

Published 2020-07-26 15:30:00 UTC
Last updated 2020-07-26 15:30:00 UTC

Glowing Rock Talk

On the day that Astral Sign got his cutie mark, a meteor fell from space and struck his home. It vaporized everything, leaving a neat, smoldering ruin where his house used to be. The residences on either side of his were untouched.

The next day, his parents filed for divorce.

He didn’t like to tell the story for obvious reasons. But if someone asked him politely and he was in a talkative mood, he would begin the story two weeks before the actual impact.

He was at his desk in Ponyville elementary learning division tables when his mom showed up with a spaced-out look on her face. She exchanged a few words with the teacher and pulled him out of class, much to the adulation of his classmates.

They went all the way across town, past their home on 18 Mudbriar Court, to Princess Twilight’s crystal castle.

He had never been inside the castle before. He never had any reason to. Everything glowed so beautifully.

He wondered if the glow got less intense at night so the princess could sleep.

Inside, a guard ushered him into a formal conference room on the first floor. Princess Twilight was there, along with a pony Astral Sign didn’t recognize.

On the table in the conference room was a map of the stars. One star in particular had a red circle around it.

“This is called XJ7-46623-A,” Princess Twilight said. “It’s a meteor one-point-two meters in diameter. It’s made up of mostly silicates and iron.”

She rattled off a few more facts about meteor composition and density. Astral Sign listened with rapt attention. His mother tapped her hoof impatiently.

When she ran out of meteor facts, she turned to the stranger stallion and bit her lip nervously. “Doctor--if you would please--”

“Yes, of course.” The stallion cleared his throat. “I’m Doctor Hoofwoofowitz. I’m the chief astronomer from the Canterlot Observatory. We’ve been tracking XJ7 for several weeks since it emerged from deep space. Its current trajectory places it on a collision course with Ponyville.”

He paused, and an uncomfortable silence filled the air. Mom stared at the doctor. The doctor stared at the chart.

“That’s... terrible news,” mom finally said. “What are you going to do?”

“Well, this meeting is a good start.”

“Shouldn’t you--I don’t know, evacuate the town? If a meteor is going to hit us, we should get out of the way.”

“Well, the meteor is actually quite small as far as meteors go. It couldn’t even destroy two buildings if you built them next to each other.”

A deep frown worked over mom’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m confused. What are we doing here? Do you want us to make the policy for this? I’m a housewife. My son’s eight.”

The doctor ran a hoof through his motley ponytail mane, the only relic from his younger and more rebellious years. “We asked you here today because my team at the Canterlot Observatory have made significant improvements in the field of magical trajectory calculation.” He gave Twilight a sideways glance to make sure she heard that. “Thanks to arcane enchantment of electrical instrumentation and more advanced camera technology with adaptive optics, we can know with almost one hundred percent certainty where this meteor, XJ7, is going to fall.”

He paused for a long time, perhaps hoping Princess Twilight would finish his thought for him. But he had no such luck.

“Anyway,” he went on, “we have run the numbers, and we can say with absolute certainty that this meteor, small as it is, non-dangerous as it is, will land on--eh, sorry--it will land on 18 Mudbriar Court, Ponyville, Equestria, zip code--”

“That’s our house,” Astral’s mother said.

“Yes. That would be correct.” The doctor spoke slowly, like all those years spent at university had institutionalized his mind and made him slow. “Let me be the first to offer my sincerest apologies. I can only imagine what this must feel like. Please, though--consider what could have happened if my team hadn’t discovered this. Who knows what kind of tragedy our advancements have prevented?” He looked at Princess Twilight the way a farmer stallion looked at a cow’s udder.

“I don’t understand,” Astral’s mother said after a long moment of silence. “Princess, couldn’t you shield the house?”

“I’m afraid the meteor is moving at a speed that would shatter any shield I could produce.”

“You could laser it, then. Shoot something at it?”

The princess shook her head. “We tried. It’s simply too small. It’s like shooting a grain of dust from across the street.”

At that moment, Astral walked up to the table to look at the star map. The math looked gargantuan. Numbers swam in his eyes.

“What are those markings on the side of the map?” he asked.

Doctor Hoofwoofowitz bent down to examine the map with him. “These numbers are called cartesian coordinates. They use a system of numbers and letters to--”

The poor doctor Hoofwoofowitz never got to finish his explanation. Astral’s mother, who had been stone still in a state of shock, suddenly came to life with a tremendous roar and swung her purse into the doctor’s head.

The guards dragged her out by her mane. Astral trailed close behind.

Astral Sign went out to play in the yard that afternoon like he usually did. But that day found himself unable to make up any compelling adventures for them to go on.

Instead, he abandoned them in the grass. He walked to the edge of the property, turned around, and promptly ran as fast as he could back to the house. Then he repeated that process from a different spot in the yard.

By the time his dad came home from work, Astral Sign was panting and sweating and wobbly in the knees.

Dad was an earth pony, tall and stout and stoic like earth ponies were. He trotted up to Astral and said, “What are you doing?”

“The doctor,” panted Astral, “said the meteor moved really, really fast. I was trying to see what the house would look like from the meteor’s point of view.”

His father let out a sigh and looked up at the sky. It didn’t seem like he was looking for anything in particular, like Astral so often did. He just looked up at all that space and got lost for a second.

Then he came back down to earth and went inside.

Astral’s parents fought a lot. But they said that was normal. They never got really bad, like married couples sometimes got on TV. His mom and dad would talk, and escalate to shouts, and usually they made up and laughed about it.

Tonight, they didn’t make up.

His father sat at the kitchen counter, nursing a glass of water and something else Astral wasn’t allowed to drink. Mom had a glass of the same thing, except hers had a lime wedge in it.

“You’re being insane,” dad said. “We should pack up and move tonight.”

“I’m making dinner,” mom replied. She stormed over to the stovetop and checked the pasta and tomato sauce. “If you want some, you better change your tone.”

“I don’t want any, actually. How can you be hungry?”

“Astral’s hungry. Aren’t you Astral?”

Astral froze. “I dunno.”

Dad looked his way briefly. “Fine. We can eat. Then I’m going to start packing.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

“You can’t be serious. The princess said--”

“She’s been wrong before.”

“They did the math.”

“Who did? Some professor in Canterlot we’ve never met before?”

“Why are you doubting them?”

“Why are you believing them?”

They went on like this for some time. Astral pulled out a model of the solar system his parents had given him for his previous birthday. The planets were all attached to little tracks via metal wires. Each could spin independently of each other.

His favorite thing to do was line them up and then spin them all at once. The bigger planets slowed down quicker than the slow ones. For a dizzying second, they formed a gravitic whirlwind of celestial bodies.

It would be nice, he thought, if whoever made this mobile could include all the little meteors and comets flying in between the planets. But he also understood that the mobile would need to be huge to fit them all, and some of the comets didn’t orbit the sun the same way the planets did, so everything would be all out of shape and impossible to line up correctly the way he wanted to. So he was okay with them not including those.

Mom threw her wooden spoon at dad. It missed and landed with a plop on the floor. Red sauce soaked into the carpet.

“What’s wrong with you?” dad shouted.

“You hate this house,” mom said, her voice dripping with venom. “You hate this house and you hate me.”

“If we stay in this house we’re gonna get crushed by an asteroid.”

“Actually,” Astral interjected, “once it hits the house it’ll be a meteorite.”

Mom burst into tears. The pasta boiled over.

They ordered take-out and sat around the dinner table, chewing loudly, not saying a word.

Astral was disappointed to learn the meteor would not be visible until a few moments before it crashed into earth.

“But this book says some meteors are visible, even during the day.”

“Some,” said doctor Hoofwoofowitz. “But this one is too small. If we could see it during the day, the whole town would have to evacuate. Maybe even the entire region.”

“We’re not leaving,” mom grumbled.

The three of them, mom and Astral and the doctor, sat in the living room. In the corner, dad had piled moving boxes and duct tape halfway to the ceiling.

On the coffee table, mom had put out teacups and some of her nice breakfast tea.

“This is happening,” the doctor said to mom. “Whether you think it’s going to happen or not. I need you to understand the gravity of this situation.”

“I need you to understand that this is my home.” Mom’s tone was even, but Astral could tell from experience there was fire behind those words. “I bought this with my own money. I raised my child in here. I will continue to live in this space.”

“This space is going to be gone in four days’ time.” He pulled out two manilla envelopes. The first one contained a set of detailed schematics and graphs.

The second contained a money order with a great deal of zeros.

“This is the actual calculation we did to chart XJ7’s trajectory,” the doctor said. “I can walk you through it if you would like, or I can refrain from doing that. The one thing you should be aware of is this number on the bottom here. That is the map coordinate of where the meteor is going to land.”

“What map are you using?”

“An Equestrian one. It’s going to land right where we’re sitting.”

Mom looked down her nose at the map. “I’m not a cartographer. Or a mathematician.”

The doctor nodded. Then he pointed to the second envelope. “This is Equestrian emergency relief aid. Seeing as this event is utterly out of our control, the crown is willing to extend to you this compensation package to you so you can get back on your hooves as quickly as possible.”

The doctor went on: “Included is the lump sum payment you see on the check. Behind it are the receipts for two rooms at the Ponyville Suites hotel, paid for sixty days following the day of the impact. Behind that is a receipt for a storage pod at Fussy Bunker’s Military Surplus, Pet Boarding, and Self-Storage. I’ve heard his attached pastry cafe is also quite good.” He paused. “But that’s not really what’s on your mind, I’m sure.”

Mom stared at all the documents for a long time. Slowly, one wrinkle at a time, her face shriveled up like she had bitten a lemon, until her eyes finally squeezed shut and the tears started flowing.

Doctor Hoofwoofowitz looked down at the floor. Astral wasn’t sure what to do. He was frozen, half on his seat and half off.

Just then, dad walked in.

“Honey,” mom said, sniffling, “I thought you were at work.”

Dad eyed the papers on the table, lingering on the check. “What’s going on here?”

“Doctor Hoofwoofowitz was telling us about the aid package the government is giving us.” She motioned for Astral to come closer, and pulled him tight to her side. “They’re going to set us up with some funds and storage and a hotel.”

“You don’t work for the government,” dad said reflexively.

“That’s correct. But the princess deemed it appropriate to contract out my team and I for the purpose of studying this incident. We want to prevent disasters like this in the future. That, and...” He grasped for the right words. “I feel personally invested.”

“Do you now?”

“Yes.” Doctor Hoofwoofowitz shuffled the papers on the table. “Now, you are not obligated to accept the aid--”

“Then we won’t.”

“I would advise you to accept it. The coming months will be difficult, undoubtedly. Think of your family.”

“We don’t need government loans.”

“This is not a loan. It’s a lump sum payment,” mom said. “It’s disaster relief. We have disasters all the time.”

“Why are you so excited all of a sudden?”

“I’m not excited. But we’ll need the money.”

“We can make do on our own.”

“Dear--”

“I said no.”

Doctor Hoofwoofowitz stood up and straightened his tie. “I will leave these documents here. If you change your mind, you may put in the money order at any crown-backed bank.” As he reached the front door, he turned to dad and said, “Remember, the meteor will arrive in four days.”

“I have some questions about the meteor,” Astral said all of a sudden.

“Not now,” hissed mom, and Doctor Hoofwoofowitz shut the door behind him with a quiet click.

The day before the meteor arrived, Astral went to princess Twilight’s castle and asked one of the guards to speak with doctor Hoofwoofowitz.

The guard, having heard about the meteor event and the family involved from the other guards, took pity on Astral and led him inside to the office where the doctor had set up a makeshift lab for himself and his team.

He was reading a book of physics in a crystal easy chair lined with pillows when they arrived. He looked over the tome with a small, surprised, “Oh.”

“Hi,” Astral said, “I’m Astral. I’m the colt whose house is about to get smooshed.”

“So you are,” the doctor said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was wondering if you’d teach me about meteors.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. “You’re quite an inquisitive colt. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Mom pulled me out to help pack stuff. But I tripped and broke a vase, and then mom and dad started fighting again, so I snuck out.”

A strange, distant look crossed the doctor’s face. He put the book down and motioned for the guard to leave. “Alright,” he said once they were alone, “I’ll tell you what I know. Do me a favor and grab the first three books on that stack over there.”

He motioned to the large crystal desk in the corner, piled high with ancient scrolls and freshly-printed textbooks.

Astral took off like a light.

The morning of the impact arrived without fanfare. Mom had insisted they all spend one final night in their old home. She got up extra early and made a massive breakfast in the almost-barren kitchen.

They ate heaping stacks of pancakes, crispy haybrowns, and berry parfaits off paper plates with plastic utensils.

They had a few pancakes leftover, which mom wrapped up and put in the fridge for never.

Suitcases in tow, they walked out the front door and waved hello to the several hundred spectators lining the nearby hills and paddocks. A few waved back. Most just stared.

The family joined doctor Hoofwoofowitz on the nearby hill. He and several of his graduate students had set up a covered observation post, complete with outlandish-looking sensors and scanners and magic crystal-lined telescopes.

A stopwatch sat on a rickety card table, ticking softly.

“Ten minutes,” a graduate student with a bullhorn shouted.

“Five minutes,” that same graduate student shouted five minutes later.

“Two minutes,” three minutes later.

“One minute,” one minute later.

The crowd noise swelled, then went silent as the count reached thirty seconds. The sky, clear and blue, betrayed no hint of danger.

As the countdown reached fifteen seconds, Astral’s mother said, “We’ll have to rebuild.”

“In the same spot?” his father replied.

“We can hire contractors to fill in the crater.”

Doctor Hoofwoofowitz opened his mouth, then thought better of it.

Dad sighed. “Maybe we... maybe we should just leave it.”

The meteor fell from the sky in a brilliant flash of light and sound.

In that moment, watching the glowing rock tumble through the air, Astral Sign knew he wanted to look deep into space. He wanted to see more than anyone who had ever looked before. He wanted to see every meteor and chart its course, to better understand the heavens and the strange forces at play.

Then the meteor of silicates and iron met the house of thatched straw and wood. The house disappeared.

When the smoke cleared, Astral Sign had gotten his cutie mark.