Twilight Sparkle and the Stupid Original Pony

By the time Eric the security guy and Leslie emerged from Tanna’s shack, the crowd had dispersed.

“Welcome to the planet Gallop,” he said to his wife, “the furthest distant human colony resulting from the Longshot project. Tomorrow morning if you would like to gather before dawn we can point out Sol in southern sky. Let me tell you a little about your new—”

“Too late for speeches,” she said after another kiss.

“After all the work I put into writing and memorizing, it’s a shame to waste it.”

“You can recite it to our children. I have no complaint about the welcome I received. I wonder if everybody got greeted so warmly?”

“I guess that wasn’t the plan, but I dunno. So, uh, how long have you, uh, had a vagina?”

“About an hour! I dunno how that was for you, but I thought that was some kind of alright.”

He ran his fingertips up her thigh, behind the fabric of his loincloth that she was now wearing, and cupped a handful of moist curls which hid her new sex.

“I liked you before, but this was even better. I hope that’s okay,” he said, with mix amusement and speculative shame.

“Of course it’s okay for you to like this—” she pushed her hips forward, increasing the pressure against his cupping hand, grinding slightly against the ball of his thumb “—this is exactly what I always wanted to be!”

“I should go check in with the prez, and then I can show you my place. It’s too small for a family, but I can expand before the baby’s born.”

“What’s it like here?” A new planet might be a secondary thing, in comparison to reuniting with her lover, but her sense of wonder was waking.

“The weather has been warm and mild so far, though we’ve only been here a couple weeks. As you noticed, we don’t bother much with clothes anymore.” Though she had borrowed his garment, he had left her topless like most of the colony women. “Terran plants are sprouting in the soil here, we’re watching them like hawks, to see how they grow. No dangerous critters and so far nothing notably toxic in the local environment. There are a few things that’ll make you itch, that’s the worst we’ve run into. We’ve already found a few native plants that seem to be edible. Of course there’s far more we don’t know than what we do. This circle of trees is Founder’s Park where Tanna first landed. That’s north—” he gestured “—the wreck of the Seven is that way and then a little to the west is First City and we’ll find President Howe at the Rotunda…”

—

For lovers, sundered by duty and brought back together by a coincidence so impossible that it was a dead certainty, there was no need to rush. The first time had been sudden, and perhaps the second too, but now they moved at at a pace of long familiarity reforging a bond that had stretched between stars.

“Madam president,” a voice called, “I’m coming in.”

The tent flapped open; Eric and Leslie found themselves staring at the president’s naked buttocks.

Her knees were apart, as she surmounted one of the newcomers. His face was planted in her white pubes and she gyrated as she humped his mouth. Without pausing the motion of her hips, she raised her head from his groin.

“Who let you in, Mr. Choi? Didn’t my receptionist tell you I’m sucking dick for the next twenty minutes?”

The president’s ‘receptionist’ was a self-service clipboard propped up on a rock next to the tent door.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t check the board, I’ll go!”

“Hold your horses. Can we pause round three?” she asked her lover. “Matters of state.”

“If you kids are done already, you’ve got a lot to learn,” the man in the President’s bed groused as she rolled off of him.

“Of course they have a lot to learn,” she said, retrieved her belt and cloth from the floor, “they’re just children, barely half a century between the two of them. Anyway, Eric, this is Eric Choi, my head of security. Eric Choi, this is—”

“We’ve met,” both Erics said.

“Eric used to work for me,” Eric Landers explained to the President. “For reasons of his own he never told me that he’d be leaving on a Longshot mission, let alone that he was on your flight.” Before the attempted introduction, Eric Landers had been digging through his clothes. Now the took an object from the pocket of his shirt and dropped the garment back to the ground – he wouldn’t be needing it again.“I think this is yours, Eric.” He tossed the slender metal object to the younger man. “You left it in my office.”

“I’m sorry sir—”

“Forget about it. The warehouse is two centuries and gods know how many light years—”

“About a hundred.”

“—away. If you think I crossed the galaxy to chastise you for an act of petty vandalism, I can assure you that I have more important matters on my mind.” His eyes, and one hand, wandered to the President. It was disappointing that she had gotten dressed again, but at least the local attire didn’t cover much.

“I apologize for the childishness of it. I was upset about leaving Leslie, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Thanks for bringing my scribe back, it was my grandfather’s.”

“It’s an intriguing piece.” The crystal structure of the tungsten tool indicated that it had been injection molded at high speed. The conditions required to make such a non-ductile metal flow must have been hellish. “Where’d he get it from?”

“Uh, a non-human installation he was salvaging in the asteroid belt.”

“You boys can talk space adventures later,” President Howe broke in. “What do you need, Eric?”

“I’m sorry about bailing out on welcoming the newbies. How’d it go? Any sec concerns?”

“Don’t be sorry, I handled it just fine, extemporaneous speeches are right down my particular alley. They are good people, and I’m delighted to have them here. We’ve got them all teamed up with their host families to help them get settled. Hopefully in the mean time you’ve gotten this young lady good and pregnant?”

“I hope so!” Leslie gushed, one hand idly resting low on her belly. “But we could go a few more times just in case.”

“That sounds like an excellent plan,” Eric Landers said, “why don’t you get to it?” His hand, which had been on the President’s knee a moment ago, had almost reached her belt. “Now, where were we?” he asked as the young couple stepped towards the door of the tent.

Before he could turn his attention to the belt clasp, on his way to prize worth crossing a small arc of the galaxy for, there was a sound of running feet.

“Daaaaaaad!” the woman barreling into the president’s quarters made beeline for Eric and threw herself into his arms. “I thought it would be centuries before I’d see you again. Is Tanna here?”

He frowned. “There was some trouble getting off Terra. I don’t even know if she’s alive, all we can do is wait and hope. But how are Guy and the brat pack?”

“I told you not to call them that!”

“It’s been two hundred years, it must have slipped my mind. I’m guessing you’ve got another on the way.”

“Can you believe it, dad? We didn’t know if we would even find a habitable world and we landed in fucking paradise.”

“Speaking of what kind of paradise—”

“Dad—” she refused to look down at whatever had brushed dampness against her leg “—is that your…”

“Yes, it is,” Howe said, “how about I tag you out? We’re still catching up, Diva.”

“I’ll be back in a week,” she promised.

Outside the tent, Eric Choi held President Howe’s schedule clipboard.

“Eric Landers” he wrote at the first open timeslot and entered “Fucking” as the purpose of visit. From there he drew a line down to the bottom of the page indicating that the appointment would last out the rest of the day and that nobody else should interrupt them. They could figure out their own schedule after today.

—

In the Founder’s Park, a cargo cube sat abandoned, its lid ajar. Empty, save for a pair of small data storage devices, it rocked unstably on the ground.