Cuddles V
Admiral Biscuit
There were some days at work that just sucked.
I’d gotten used to being in a cubicle farm; at least it was the pony version. Sort of like a stable, although that was something I was wise enough to not say out loud, tempting though it sometimes was.
And to be honest, working with ponies was generally great. They were mostly friendly, mostly outgoing, and some of them were fantastic bakers and often ‘made too much’ at home and just ‘had to share the leftovers with the office.’
Work was casual, clock in and out times were casual, and there was a sense of team camaraderie and a sense of helping the customer rather than a strict focus on the bottom line.
Of course, that wasn’t always easy to remember. It was unfriendly to close up shop when there were still customers who needed help, and working hours were flexible, after all.
Which meant in busy times, we sometimes showed up early and stayed late.
It wasn’t a competition, nobody—nopony—was going to get a raise for consistently being the first one in or the last one out, but I’d been raised to embrace workaholism. Besides, it was easier to make coffee with hands.
And, I told myself, the silence at the beginning of the day helped me focus for the upcoming day.
Not to mention, Cami had traded some shifts with one of her work-mates, which meant that she also left early and I didn’t have anything to do at home anyway.
To her advantage, mine less so, as a result of going in early, she usually got off early and was already at home when I returned. One night, I’d found her in the kitchen with a cookbook fresh from the library, attempting to make a casserole.
She also had a ragged copy of Olsen’s Standard Book of Greens, which she was using in an attempt to improvise what was in our kitchen versus what the recipe called for.
I had no doubt that a proper chef could have turned what we had in our kitchen and what we had in the yard and what we could have borrowed from the neighbors into a fantastic dish, worthy of at least one Michelin star, or whatever the ponies used to rank foods. One Celestial star?
She wasn’t much of a cook, and was chipping burned spinach off the pan with a spatula.
“Isn’t there a spell for that?”
Cami stuck her tongue out at me, then regarded the pan. “Probably, never learned it. If I transformed the pan into something else, something that spinach wouldn’t stick to, that might do the trick, and then I could just transform it back.”
“What doesn’t spinach stick to, though?”
“Won’t stick to water.” She lit her horn and the pan dissolved, splashing into the sink. Cami looked down at the liquid and frowned. “I should have thought one step ahead.”
“Oh?”
“If I turn it back into a pan now, it’s gonna have spinach in it.”
“Can’t you turn the spinach into pan as well? Make a bigger pan?” A sentence I never would have uttered before emigrating to Equestria.
“Maybe, but it’s a lot easier to just transform organic materials into other organic materials and inorganic materials into other inorganic materials.”
“Like lead into gold.”
“You keep wanting me to do that,” Cami said, “no matter how many times I tell you that you can’t transmute anything across prime columns. That’s just how magic works.
“Not to mention you’re trying to change a post-transition metal to a transition metal, which has its own problems in mana cost. Be better off buying a goose for your gold-production needs.” She lit her horn and all the spinach flakes lifted out of the sink, through the window, and into the compost pile; a moment later, the pan re-coalesced, perfectly clean.
“If everypony could do that, there’d be no need for dishwashing soap. Or scrubby brushes.”
“If everypony could do that, my first-tier Mythic casting rank would mean nothing.” Cami sighed. “If everypony could do that, accurately and with control, I wouldn’t have a job. You know what happens with experimental magic cast above one’s skill level.”
I nodded. “You get salamanders.”
“If you’re lucky. If not, you might get squirrels.”
“Squirrels?”
Cami nodded.
“Plain, ordinary squirrels?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Hordes of ‘em.” Cami set the re-formed pan on the counter. “So unless you want to risk my cooking, what are we gonna have for dinner tonight? Chinese or pizza or something else?”
“We haven’t had pizza in a while.”
***
Since Cami had abandoned her brief attempt at cooking, and since for the foreseeable future, I was the one coming home late, I was the one to bring home our dinner.
Besides attempting to copy human Chinese restaurant names and themes—and often failing cutely—ponies with food carts stretched their theming even further, and I found myself heading home with a heavy sack of food from the Longhorn Lobster, which featured a lobstericorn on its sign and neither beef nor seafood on the menu. Unless kale was seafood, I didn’t think it was, but I always got it confused with kelp.
To be safe, I didn’t order the kaleslaw. I still got some free with my order.
Cami was sitting at the kitchen table when I got home, a stack of papers floating in her field and reading glasses on her nose. I’d never told her, but she was even more adorable than usual when she had her reading glasses on.
She dropped the papers as I stepped into the kitchen and sniffed at the food, getting its scent. “Is that kaleslaw I’m smelling?”
I nodded. “Stopped at the Longhorn Lobster.”
“She’s still selling food?”
I hesitated as I set the bag down on the table. “Uh, apparently.”
“Thought she got shut down for health code violations.” Cami opened a sack and pulled out the paper cup of kaleslaw. “Probably some jealous competitor, her food is so good, and the ants add just the right amount of crunch and spice.”
“Ants?” I paused as I unwrapped my wild-caught ribeye salad. Essentially a salad-burrito, and I’d watched her make it.
“That was her secret ingredient, before she got fined for not washing her greens before selling them. Ants are okay, but if there are ants there might be worms, too.”
“Worms?”
Cami nodded.
“Like earthworms? Like you’d fish with?” That brought to mind a kid’s book I’d read way back when about eating them.
“You wish.” She sniffed the kaleslaw once again, then tilted the container to me. “You gonna want any?”
I shook my head, and she lifted it up to her mouth with her aura and munched down on it.
Sometimes I couldn’t tell if Cami was pulling my leg when it came to Equestrian things. I’d seen ants, of course, but I’d never seen ponies eating them. Maybe sometimes it was unintentional, one could never know if while they were dining an ant crawled up into their dinner . . . the kitchen table was ant-free.
Also squirrel free, and since it wasn't on fire, salamander free.
***
Thinking about what might be in the food—which tasted great; Cami wasn’t wrong about that—wasn’t the best mood for dinner, so I instead turned my focus to the stack of papers she’d shoved aside.
“Is that work stuff?”
“Eh,” Cami shrugged. “Sort of?”
“Is it TPS reports?”
“We don’t have those.”
“Believe me, you’re the better for it.” I slid a sheet across the table and started reading, then looked up at her. “What is this?”
“Well, one of my coworkers likes writing stories, and she’s trying her hoof at romance novels.”
“’Wave Function looked sulturly over at Daring Do and she said ‘aww, are you going to kiss my hoofsies?’ ‘Shut up,’ he said, his face getting red. ‘Careful, my hoofsies are sensitive!’” I set the page down. “Back on Earth, there are po—you know what, never mind.”
“Sure it needs some work, but she’s got a good heart and it’s not polite to discourage somepony trying something new. Even if they suck at it at first, they’ll get better with practice.”
“Are your hoofsies sensitive?”
Cami rolled her eyes. “Dude, you were there last time I got nailed, what do you think?”
It was a fair point, and she illustrated it by plunking a hoof on the table, shoe-side facing me. “You could just, I dunno, glue them on.” Then I thought for a moment about where glue had used to come from. Surely they made it some other way.
Surely.
“Hoof glue doesn’t hold as well as good old-fashioned nails,” Cami said. “It’s fine for the fashionistas, I suppose, but there’s nothing worse than using too much magic and melting your shoes off.”
I didn’t have to ask her if that had ever happened to her, because of course it had. Every day at the Ministry of Magic was a new adventure, it seemed.
“These babies stay on.” She tapped her hoof against the table. “Well, except that one time I blew one off, but that could have been a faulty nail.” She frowned. “Six faulty nails.” Her ears perked back up. “Farrier has a shoe warranty, though, I got a new one put on for free.”
“Okay, this is going to be weird to ask, but what is hoof glue made of?”
“Hooves, that’s why it’s called hoof glue and not flour glue.”
“Flour glue?”
“Yeah, that’s the tasty kind they have in schools. And before you ask, ‘cause I know you’re gonna, the spa and farrier keep hoof-shavings and sell them to glue-makers.”
“Isn’t that weird?”
“No weirder than a quill, where do you think those come from?”
I hadn’t thought of that until just now. “They’re not dyed goose feathers, are they?”
Cami shook her head.
***
Cami usually didn’t bring work home with her. Sometimes the residue of work was on her, sometimes she limped in, muscles or horn sore from a long day dispatching abominations and mending mishaps, but she’d never had paperwork from work to deal with after hours.
And since ponies hadn’t invented cell phones or computers and e-mails, or even home telephones, she was unreachable except by messenger, and that had only happened twice in our time together. Once in the middle of the night, a pegasus had knocked at the upstairs window and then let herself in, which freaked me out on several levels. That was also the first time I saw Cami teleport; she’d hopped out of bed, lit her horn, and then blinked away in a flash of light.
The messenger pegasus had flown back out the window, her job done, and I spent all night awake and the next day at the office that had been the main topic of discussion because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It turned out that not all unicorns could or did teleport, and also that most of my co-workers would have also freaked out if their mare- or colt-friend teleported away in the middle of the night.
I’d been meaning to confront her about it, tell her that she should have at least told me what was going on before leaving, but she wasn’t home when I got back and I sat and stewed until she finally returned around sunset, covered in lather and looking like she’d stared into the abyss and she fell asleep on the couch and I never asked what had happened. I was sure I didn’t want to know.
She’d never brought paperwork home and technically this wasn’t paperwork, but she’d volunteered to read it and I knew how much office harmony mattered, so I didn’t object to her working during what should have been cuddle-time.
Much.
“Are you lonely?” I was sitting on the couch, mesmerized by watching her quill. Most of the unicorns in the office picked theirs up when they needed to write something, then set it back down, either flat on the blotter or in a little holder. Some of them were habitual dippers, dunking it in the inkpot before they’d try and write with it; others would start and then decide if they needed more ink.
Cami kept her quill aloft, floating beside her head until she needed it, then she’d drop it down to make a note or two, and return it to its appointed spot in the air, where it would slowly twirl around its axis. Whether she was doing that intentionally or if it was just an effect of telekinesis, I didn’t know.
Her utensils didn’t do that when she was eating. Granted, it would have been hard to tell with chopsticks, but it would have been obvious with a fork or spoon.
And that led me to wonder why unicorns even had forks and spoons. It wasn't to fit in with polite society, since earth ponies and pegasi didn’t use them. Maybe it was to show off, although the one time we’d seen a movie in the theater together, the individual popcorns levitating to her mouth were as fascinating to watch as the movie itself.
“Only a little.” I patted the couch cushion where she usually sat to watch a fire in the fireplace.
“It’s not easy to write on papers when they’re in the air,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
I nodded. It wasn’t easy to do with hands, either.
“I can, though. But I’m too tired to put that much effort into it. And it’s messy and hard to read.”
“Can you print on paper without the pen?”
Cami nodded. “And without the ink, too, although that’s a more advanced spell. Especially if you want it to be in plain Equestrian and not Aeolic.”
“Aeolic?”
“It’s an old pegasus dialect, and the normal spells kinda default to it.”
“Pegasi made unicorn spells?”
Cami shook her head, and the quill stopped turning. “Legend has it that some of the early spells were created by cloud-crossed lovers, a pegasus and a unicorn, doomed to be apart because of their tribe. Ikaria, the unicorn, found a way to write with her magic, and carry on the romance that way. Chios . . . well, the legend doesn’t say, but I suppose she probably spelled things out with clouds. Most unicorns back then couldn’t read Aeolic anyway.”
“They can now?”
“When they’re at my level.” She stuck out her tongue and then went back to work.
I watched her for another page, before finally getting off the couch and sitting on the floor beside her, which I should have done long ago. Ponies, even ones who were first-tier Mythic casters, weren’t too good for sitting on the floor, so why should I be?
She snuggled up against my leg and then went back to work while I ran my hands through her mane, scratched her behind the ears, and then booped her horn.
She slapped me with her tail, and I kept it up until she levitated the ink pot and the word βρόδον appeared on my hand.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll find out later,” she said. “I was gonna say τράγαις, but you don’t really smell like a goat. Not today, at least.”
I crossed my arms. “So you’re saying sometimes I do smell like a goat?”
“Sometimes we all smell like goats,” Cami decreed. “It’s not always an insult, depends on the circumstances. Like if it came about from hard work rather than just not wanting to bathe.”
“What have you got against goats?”
“Well, they smell funny. And they eat glue.”
“You admitted you ate glue as a filly.”
“Maybe I used to be a goat.” She set down the papers and looked me in the eye. “Maybe I got cursed by an evil wizard into a pony form and if you kiss me I’ll turn back into my true goat-form.”
“You’re a silly pony.” But I kissed her anyway, and she didn’t turn back into a goat.
“Huh, maybe I was a pony all along.”
But now my curiosity was piqued. “Can you turn into a goat?”
“Yes.”
“Can you turn into . . . could you turn into me?”
“You know what I love the most about you?”
“My hands?” I scritched her ears.
“Close.”
“That I can’t do any magic whatsoever?”
“Yes, that. Because if you could, if you somehow got granted the ability, the first thing you might do is try and transmogrify yourself into somepony or somebody else and you have no idea what the complications of that spell are, magically and morally and psychologically, and I’m glad that you don’t. You should be glad that you don’t. If used wisely, for the right reasons, transmogrification spells can be very useful. If not—well, things get complicated.” She looked down at the pen and papers. “Did you know that some unicorns find themselves accidentally sleep-writing or writing in a trance? Back in olden times, some ponies thought that they had the gift of prophecy.”
“I prophesize that there’s a silly pony sitting on the floor, right now, with a quill floating in her magic.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Tell me more, oh seer of wisdom.”
“Hmm, I foresee that pony getting scritches on that spot on her withers that almost nobody knows about.”
“I like where this is going.” She leaned up against me and I put my hand on her back.
“And then, that very same pony might learn that someone she knows ran into a Filly Scout on the way home from work, a filly Scout who happened to have a box of cookies for sale.”
“I knew I smelled gingersnaps over the kaleslaw.” She narrowed her eyes. “You weren’t gonna hold out on me and eat them all yourself, were you?”
“Of course not.” I ran my hand between her shoulder blades, finding that spot on her withers, and she melted into me, the novel-in-progress completely forgotten.
She rolled over on her back and let me rub the fluff on her belly, proving once again that Cami was really a cat at heart.
Author's Note
Story Notes!
