It seemed like a clear and breezy morning in Ponyville, with pegasii flying far above the chattering earth ponies and unicorns that happily started going about their day’s events. Of course, that fact was completely meaningless to the ponies hundreds of miles away over in New Manechester, who woke up to another grimy and overcast morning that pitter-pattered thick rain upon their backs mixed in with the omnipresent smell, not anywhere near as bad as the wet leaves by comparison, of magically-laced lollipops and portable salt licks. While Manechester proper was over in Equestria, not too far from Ponyville, under the peaceful and wise rule of Princesses Celestia and Luna, New Manechester was a haphazardly constructed city complex around the edge of the Land of the Griffons for a motley mix of ponies, buffalo, dragons, and other non-griffon citizens.
Noel Cloudburst sauntered down an alleyway, eyes hopping from broken candy package to broken candy package littered besides his lightly-worn hooves. He pulled his trademark black jacket, covered in pockets crammed with various knickknacks from batches of twine to half-empty boxes of strawberry mints to the occasional loosey and more, close to his dark grey body and even darker mane as he looked straight up at immense gothic spires and columns. He stepped a bit to the left as his eyes slid to the ‘New Manechester School for Young Colts’ carving in the thick granite. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. How many blasted days is it going to rain?
The only ponies that would have heard him, the throng of skinny mares with well-worn faces and neatly trimmed manes over to his right, would hardly have cared. They marched around in a big oval with the same emotionless regularity as hands on a clock, raising their black and blue printed signs every half-minute or so while crying out for their cause. As Noel leaned up against the building for a second, pushing his small, round black eyeglasses back against his handsome face, and he took in the protest chants.
“No cuts,” commented a tall, nearly bald earth pony with a thick, round nose like a light-bulb. “Justice for the city workers! Justice for the foals!” He held up his sign reading ‘Fund the Foals – Fund our Future’ a bit higher as he eyed a group of unfamiliar looking ponies coming up the street. “Ponies living in griffon lands also paid for their royal wedding between Dusk Wind and Summer Blast, bit after bit going to the griffon royalty with our taxes, yet we don’t have enough for inner city textbooks? Outrageous!”
“Listen to us Princess Dusk Wind!” hollered out a short, stubby unicorn with a very masculine face but the shapely body of a young female prostitute, or so Noel thought. The protester rubbed his sign, almost twice as big as his own body, against his scruffy brown moptop. “We are the change— we believe in ourselves! We believe in our students!”
"No austerity," a tiny looking unicorn with a bright white body piped up every moment or so. "No cuts! No austerity!"
A steady stream of ponies crossed by the protest, heading up the Main Street that graced the school for disadvantaged colts, and around half of them seemed to view the whole thing as yet another piece of scenery— much like the shrubberies around the Boardwalk Club. A good fifth of them or so, though, gave some kind of high-sign expressing support before making their way to the various shops up ahead. The teachers smiled or at least nodded at every one of them.
Noel felt pretty sure that the protesters wouldn’t accomplish much of anything, thinking that the griffon's new Princess Wind could hardly be more than a figurehead. Still, he had some hope, or at least hope kept his motor running. He kept his brains turned on, though, so he thanked goodness that the protesting teachers at least kept the fancy-language sounding left-wing jargon— ‘proletariat’, ‘assimilation’, ‘establishmentarianism’, etc— and anti-royal rhetoric off their signs. The teachers had some sense to Noel, at least in comparison to the lollipop company workers just down the street who had acted as if they’d burn both Griffon Palace (for the government austerity against non-griffons) and Canterlot Castle (for Equestrians failing to care enough about ponies outside the country) to the ground if they could, having gotten too addicted to the magically-laced versions of sickly-sweet candies
At any rate, the whole thing rustled Noel’s subconscious, and it made him magically lift up a loosey from his higher-most pocket to get back to his bearings. He fumbled about his pockets to find another lollipop to complement the lemon flavor, resolving to get a whole white package— complete with the small black Griffon Surgeon General's addictiveness warning— one of these days. I still have another thirty minutes until I’m due at the Boardwalk, don’t I? It seemed like the easiest job in the whole world— listening to music while doing some simple A/V work from clicking some amp on or sliding some fader up or something else— and kept him off the government dole (social weflare benefits that hardly paid for much anyways), which lessened his younger brother’s ribbing somewhat.
“Noel?” said a familiar voice over behind Noel’s shoulder.
“Spoony? Oh, my— bloody— it’s— wow! It’s really you!” Noel took his glasses off and swung his eyes up and down the tall, skinny white unicorn in front of him. The other unicorn shook his shaggy green male and smiled from cheek to cheek.
“It’s been too bloody long, Noel,” he said, and the unicorns hugged without shame. Spoony leaned back, glancing about Noel’s dark grey body and all of the various spots of muddy rain over him. “And you should get the hay inside.”
“You still playing with that sniveling little brat?” Noel asked, following Spoony’s lead away from the school along the plain concrete road over to the dilapidated brick shops.
Spoony laughed, slapping his hooves against his plain light blue t-shirt. “That’s exactly why I was looking for you.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” Noel called out, trying not to burst out laughing himself. He stepped ahead of Spoony, comically posing himself below the huge neon sign marked ‘The Boardwalk – New Manechester’s Finest Bar – Live Music All Day / Every Day’ with his legs swung up and his head turned over, same positioning as Fleur De Lis in the last issue of Celebrity Cutie Marks. “Does my little brother really think I’ll have anything to do with his crap indie rock band?”
Spoony opened the door as Noel leaned back, brushing up against the huge green shrubberies decorating the otherwise grimy looking red and brown brick exterior, and they both stepped inside. “Actually,” Spoony said, leading Noel along a side corridor to the bar’s equipment room, “he wants you as a songwriter.”
“Songwriter,” Noel said, freezing in his tracks. He glanced about the deeply familiar black seats and bright blue and white lights across the bar, a filly in a loose green striped dress leaning up against a cannery worker nursing a shot. “Yeah, like he’d really bloody say that…” The memory of Liam smacking a box of cereal upside Noel’s head when he had shown off one of his song ideas on the kitchen table flashed through Noel’s mind. What a pissy, violent wanker...
“Noel,” Spoony said, placing his body right in front of Noel’s and locking eyes with him. “Liam wants you in the band.”
Noel said nothing, just slipping out of Spoony’s hooves and going into middle of the bar. He leaned up against the counter and coughed. The filly over to his far left kept on with her game. Noel looked over, and he saw that she had those ‘three slurps of a salt lick, thirty minutes sweet-talking, and thirteen minutes upstairs’ eyes that Noel had seen so many times before.
Noel’s ears perked as DJ Pon-3’s latest hit, the electroclash sensation “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die (Pass the Drugs As We Dance)” that went straight to number one and lead The Canterlot Times to run a story on the so-called "death of rock n' roll", surged through the nightclub in which he sat. Noel hated her. He also sort of loved her. Noel closed his eyes completely for a second and let his body slide slightly to the beat as Spoony walked up behind him. Noel hated DJ Pon-3 (and other pony musicians that griffon's liked for whatever reason) for using her musical powers for the service of just nihilism, or so he thought of it.
“Noel?” Spoony asked.
Noel heard a glass sliding up in front of him. Since he had to work, of course, his friend Spring Step had merely given him some club sodar rather than a delicious, malicious, and not so nutritious salt lick container. That didn’t bother him.
The nasty electronic beats that surrounded his body bothered him. The teenage aged mare from another, upper class city and the older, working-class stallion that she milked for attention and bits bothered him. The cheap quality of the lollipop loosies that filled up his veins with too-short bursts of energy so that he had the energy to get through the day bothered him. The fact that he seemed to be living in a new age with a new Princess, a new royal wedding, a new Prime Minister yet the music sounded like endlessly-recycled garbage bothered him the most. The griffons seemed to pollute non-griffon radio stations with the most inane cultural material.
“It all feels… wrong,” Noel murmured. He kicked against the worn plastic underside of his seat. “So wrong.”
“Noel, what is it?”
I’ve reached that point. I’ve ran right past it. I should have found some mare, some beacon of kindness that could just be like… I don’t know. Some kind of ‘wonder-wall’ that could just… wrap around me… some girl that could take my depression away. Noel opened his eyes. It feels wrong. It feels incomplete. I’m wrong. Liam’s wrong. The whole bloody country is bloody going wrong. Somepony should turn it around. Somepony should stand up to the stuck up Griffon Members of Parliament and rally the non-griffons around something to advance for economic and social equality, especially some song.
“Noel!” Spoony hollered, and he smacked the other unicorn’s back, brushing up Noel’s jacket against his broad shoulders.
“Yeah?” Noel said, turning around to face his friend with a very blank expression on his face.
“Quit the existential horseapples, Noel! Get in the bloody door right bloody now and play some rock and roll with us, ya plothole!” Spoony clutched Noel’s sides and pointed him over to the already open door where various tuning-up noises filtered out.
“Aw, hell yeah,” Noel replied, and he marched in right behind Spoony. Before anyone even had time to breathe or look around, Noel had pulled out a neatly folded piece of lined paper— left over from his schoolfoal days at the Manechester place for colts— marked "Final Draft of 'Live Forever' & 'Wonderwall’". And he held it up like a golden tablet from the gods.
Liam, holding an incredibly cheap bass with silly, leopard-like stripes painted along the side, merely grinned back. Spoony shut the door behind them, his hooves brushing up against a dusty stack of amplifiers. Noel reached for a nearby acoustic guitar atop a rag covered corner of XLR cables, prepared to sing through the first tune, and he could hardly recall the moment feeling so... right.
To Be Continued...
Noel and Liam Cloudburst were brothers. Naturally, that meant that they dedicated their entire lives to destroying each other. That’s what brothers were for, after all. That they were both musicians beyond obsessed with hard-driving rock n roll from inner Equestria rather than mainstream griffon-loved pop somehow made it easier to understand each other.
Oddly enough, they both seemed to come to a mutual understanding. Liam would vent his emotions into a microphone while Noel smashed his hoof down against a bright black guitar— which Liam quipped was as black as Noel’s lungs— to also vent in his own special way. Sooner or later somepony filmed the results and a rock n roll sensation began. It made sense to both of them. Or, even if it made no sense, they could hardly care.
Coming from the part of New Manechester where ponies would often lie back at night on the bedsheets, look up at the stars wistfully, and say, “damn, I wish we could afford a roof,” the brothers grabbed opportunity with all eight hooves. The highly anticipated album from the Cloudbursts, the unashamedly nostalgic ‘Take Me To The Oasis’, even managed to kick DJ-Pon3 off the griffon nation's Federal Association of Music’s top record chart. Indie-inspired ock n roll killed generic poppy electronica or at least splatted some dirt across it’s soullessly silver crown, and— like all ponies in touch with changing fashions— Fancy Pants and his coterie of ponies watched the events with wide-open eyes. Working-class unicorn heroes were so "hot" in Canterlot, especially the embattled pony minority over in the griffon nation given their rough and tumble apperances.
For Noel Cloudburst’s part, he woke up at 5am on one particular fateful Wednesday blown clear out of his mind on some sweetness-enhanced lollipops, his eyes looking like the muddled colors of a foal’s first hoofpainting, to a letter slipped under his door with a royal seal on the side. He fumbled for the nearest discarded bottle cap to some expensive Merlot, not a far reach given how his home décor seemed to have half his apartment left as an open dumpster, and sliced it across the side of the envelope.
Noel read every word aloud as he leaned farther and farther backwards in his massively stained corduroy chair. Fancy Pants planned on creating a wonderfully posh yet fun social event bringing together the best new minds in music. The stallion, with the odd combination of a big wallet and a bigger heart, wanted to promote musical education among disadvantaged foals. Noel’s eyes finally ran across the signature of Princess Wind inviting Noel personally to this special one-time-event royal griffon later that day, and he smashed the whole chair—the empty bottles and packages, cheesy crumbs, him included— over sideways into the other room.
But that was from the lollipops wearing off. It had nothing to do with the letter. Still, Noel felt deeply impressed.
“It’s not like I’m waiting,” he muttered, eyeing the shower through the open bathroom door from across the hallway, “one other bloody second if I’m going to bloody meet the bloody Princess and the bloody Prime Minister!” He hopped in, shut the screen, and magically lifted over the big bottle of shampoo over his tall, thick dark-grey body. He rubbed his short, even darker gray mane against the shower wall for a moment.
The Princess being the Princess, after all, he decided to take ‘rinse and repeat’ literally for once. A third time didn’t hurt either. He mentally shelved his need to check where the nasty bruise under his right thigh came from. At least he knew where the pain in his jaw came from. Those cheeky, uptight little dragoness twerps from Wingsville— can’t respond to a right-proper pick-up line with just ‘no’. Screw them.
Had Noel not have been under such heavy sedation, he would have thought about how Princess Wind probably didn’t know his name until a junior staff member told her. Then, he would have considered how she transparently expected that surrounding herself with self-proclaimed "rock n roll stars" would pump up her sagging poll numbers.
From the point of view of the griffons of New Manechester, Wind had a lot of publicity from her recent royal wedding and natural sympathy from her treatment at the twisted hoofs of the changeling queen that had moved onto the griffon lands after the Equestrian defeat. Princess Wind even looked remarkably similar to Princess Cadance, both with slender, curvy bodies and soft, feminine voices that matched with their petite, pink-tinged figure. That didn’t make that unfortunate incident of the Wingsville schoolfoals and the swarming bees she had accidentally released look any better. Same story was true for the equally unfortunate flatulence near keenly placed microphones. Some griffons even started to crudely make fun of the heart-patterns that the Princess wore.
Not to mention, Wind’s choice Prime Minister Jet Set, taking power upon her insistence to create a far more centrally-planned, royal-directed economic policy despite Princess Wind’s skepticism, had presided over record breaking unemployment and all-around stagnation. Royal griffons sucked in resources from other cities, though, so for them the word ‘recession’ was merely a listing in the dictionary— such a different life compared to the factory workers, streetsweepers, and the like of New Manechester.
Noel had watched the public events on his dinky little tube. "Proper economically scientific administration" under "austerity" had to continue, or so Princess Wind mouthed in speeches using PM Jet Set's talking points. Her eyes seemed to dart about nervously in those speeches, looking far out of her element.
But Noel didn’t think about any of that during that fateful morning of the invite. Of course, he hardly thought about anything at all at that moment. Getting out of the shower and scrambling to put on his clothes, he made himself look as best as he could, hopping about his apartment like a frog after the fly of its life. Noel only stopped as he saw the reflection of the clock blinking 6:02am on the bright silver refrigerator.
“6:02am,” he muttered.
He looked at the letter again.
“So, if you could join us at the Wingsville Musical Revenue meeting at 5:30pm, we would be most grateful,” he read aloud.
A few awkward seconds passed as the clock hit 6:03pm.
“Well… hell...”
He grabbed the nearby telephone and tapped his hooves anxiously against the stain-spattered coffee table behind him. Liam. I’ve got to let the scrawny little sod know. Odds are that damn terrier of his ate his own letter or something, and he’s just got—aw, good sweet merciful gods— he has plenty of time. I have plenty of time. Dammit, that means I’ll die a thousand billion times in my heart just choking on the anticipation. What in the bloody hell will I say? What can I say? Will a crowd of burly palace guards stomp on me if I glance over at Cadence’s plot a little too closely?
He twiddled the cord of the telephone against his neck for a moment, feeling it almost like a hangpony’s noose. “What, no dial tone?” Noel groused, sliding his side to side on his big, broad shoulders. He slammed the phone against the sickly, cream-colored receiver and picked it up again.
Nothing had changed. A huge frown shot over his face. He took a breath, and he tried not to bite his lip.
“Bloody little New Manechester Telecom—” He slammed it again with no result. “With their bloody little plugs and bloody little cords—” He did the same thing, his frown growing ever wider. “And their bloody little receptionist trolls in their bloody little network—”
He stopped. He blinked, and he suddenly realized that something was very wrong. He calmly and slowly moved his strained eyes down past the receiver to the thick white cable that should have led into some jack in the wall. He got down on all fours right up against the ground, sniffing like a rabbit, as he traced the cable from the middle of the living room over to the kitchenette unit and finally up onto a counter.
The cord ended in the middle of a half-eaten watermelon, the plug smashed deeply into the briny sides. Noel, feeling one part angry mixed with three parts tired and twelve parts confused, poked at the watermelon with one hoof, looking exactly like a curious kitten batting a bit of string. After twenty seconds time, Noel bonked the fruit into the sink and revealed a small white paper that had been underneath.
He read it aloud. “Next time, big bro, use the better acid. Orange = Evil, Yellow = Live / That’s what They give / Four a fish and finger pie / One and one until we die.” Noel recognized the children’s rhyme-style language of the Manechester club scene in less than a second. “Lay of the magic-laced sweet-enhanced lolipops, you wanker! P.S. It goes without saying that I’ll be at HeartFlanks’ little shindig as well, you twerp! Love (the Beagles said “All We Need Is Love”, after all) Liam.”
Noel’s head started quivering first. The horrible itchy and scratchy sensations leaked all down his shoulders into the rest of his body. It left him as jittery and sweaty as a prostitute in church.
“Shove your ‘four a fish and finger pie’ up your plothole, Liam,” growled Noel, his thick eyebrows arching up and down again and again. Not seeing anything nearby with which to destroy the note fast enough, he shoved it into his mouth and ate it.
That didn’t nearly feel enough. He magically lifted up the watermelon and smashed it against the carpet besides him, leaving a watery pink crater as if he had made sloppy love to a pixie on the spot. He turned around, adjusted his corduroy chair back into place, and plopped across it with a sigh.
“Liam, you bloody coltcuddler!” HeartFlanks? Referring to our beloved Princess, special guardian of the New Manechester area, as… come on. That’s third-grade humor even for you, Liam! Noel stopped himself. Well, that’s not fair. I’d have said the same thing. He fought back a smile. Her special talent is magical brainwashing of lust, after all. Or that’s what it boils down to. Noel mentally pictured himself standing in a Wingsville ballroom shaking hooves with the Princess. He saw her turn around in her mind’s eye, her tail decorated with fancy silver braids and glitter along her backside.
He wondered about getting inappropriately noticeable in a certain area. Wait, didn’t Soarin’ tell me a few weeks ago to take some extra dexyl-spry-thorazine whenever I’d have to worry about that? ‘Pancake flatness for a day’ or something… what the hay did he exactly say? Noel tried to recall his cousin's exact words, but he simply felt himself drifting back into sleep.
In what felt like thirty seconds, a loud buzzing sound burst out. Noel leapt straight upwards, almost bumping into the dirty black pants hanging loosely from his ceiling fan, and he made a cartoon-style combat stance. He stopped to cough, his eyes scanning the whole apartment.
His clock read 11:00am.
“Well, what’s the bleeding point!” Noel shrieked. He magically swung over his trademark black leather jacket and small black sunglasses from the end dresser besides the door to his bedroom. He made way for the bathroom, already bringing his toothbrush and toothpaste back to him. “I’m going out to get a proper bloody breakfast before I even think about anything else!” He glanced out through the blinds, predictably covered in mysterious stains like the rest of his apartment, and picked up the various foodcarts down below on the city street.
You know, it’s more like lunchtime already…
“Buck you brain, give me another top twenty single already,” Noel muttered, finally getting all ready and casting his eyes upon the door. What? ‘Shakermaker’, ‘A Bell Will Ring’, and ‘Rock n Roll Star’ aren’t enough for you? And it's not like 'Wonderwall' won't have the masses cheering if you would ever finish the blasted track!
“Whatever,” he replied, massaging his temples in his doorway as the cold wind smacked into him. Talking to oneself will eventually get them to put you into a mental institution just like what the bloody housekeepers did to mum. Noel shut the door behind him, magically locked it, and leaned his body up against the top of the freezing metal staircase.
Noel opened his mouth to argue, but then the full meta-irony of arguing with himself over the merits of arguing with himself. He just wished that his brain didn’t sound like Liam to him so bloody often. He tossed his scarf closer against his neck and stepped down the stairs.
He scanned the same familiar neighborhood as he had so many times before. He leaned up against the familiar blue and white rain drain on the side of his red and brown brick apartment complex so many times before. He closed his eyes, and he already knew that he had three more complexes to his right as well as exactly twenty foodcarts in front of him.
He already knew that everyone in his neighborhood worshiped in the same way, earned the same income, listened to the same music, watched the same sports, rooted for the same teams, wore the same clothes, and studied the same half-hearted garbage in the same piece of waste school with the same virtually impossible dreams of getting out. It sickened him in some profound yet subtle sense, like a dull throbbing pain from a splinter that never came out, to know that all these facts only depended on the streetname where one grew up in. He opened his eyes again and scraped his mane against the cold bricks, trying to force himself back to reality.
He had made it. Liam had made it. He had changed it around, at least for them. He had gone from Noel Cloudburst, shovel jockey, to Noel Cloudburst, singer-songwriter. Goes to show what useless pieces of trash cutie marks are for caste-placement of your future. He stepped over to the other side of the street, his hooves crunching the wet leaves one after the other. The sound felt so comforting in its rhythm— almost like his brother’s drumming. Crunch. Whack. Crunch. Whack.
“So, the Hoofington-inspired burger and fries place,” he murmured, finding himself looking down at the hundreds of little reflections of himself in the streetway puddles. “Or the Coltsville-inspisred city fried steak and potato skins place?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter which place you go to, you’ll always come away wishing that you’d gone to the other one,” Cody Cloudburst had said several times to passersby with that typical dry sense of humor of his. Noel smiled at the memory. His dad had been quite the witty jokester. Cody’s lines had worked pretty well with a 4/4 backbeat and banging tambourine, or so the record sales would tell Noel.
“Mister?”
Noel turned around in place, going from facing the ground to facing an unfamiliar looking tall tree dotted in peaches that popped up from nowhere. He blinked, feeling his hooves slide a bit in the water. “Uh… yes, mate?” he asked the unfamiliar voice as he twitched his nose. The peachy-smell seemed overwhelming, finally waking him up one hundred percent.
“Little to the left, darlin’,” said the melodious voice in its quirky, odd-sounding accent. Noel sucked in a small breath before stepping to the side and getting the leaves off of his face. He made out a small red cart underneath the massive tree and a bright orange mare sitting beside it.
Noel eyes moved inch by inch down from the bottom of the earth pony’s hooves up her sides, looking so strong yet so curvy, over to her pretty, swishing tail and up her back to her smiling yet confused face. He blinked. He focused deeply on her beautiful features— teeth so oddly white, dimples so oddly soft, eyes so oddly big and filled with some kind of pure optimism, and so many other things. The mare’s country hat and simply wrapped mane, forming a perky ponytail around her neck, complemented everything else perfectly.
A powerful sensation like having a warm blanket wrapped all around his body just lifted Noel’s spirits. He wanted to say something. He simply stood there, not sure how to put words together but still knowing that his trademark scowl— something as iconic to his image as DJ-Pon3’s flashy glasses was to her— had vanished.
“Is somethin’ wrong?” the beautiful mare asked, pushing up her hat and meeting Noel eye to eye. “Ya’ll was walkin’ down the street with eyes straight on the concrete, like somethin’ was—”
“Oh, it’s bloody good,” Noel replied, standing up straight. He shifted his shoulders to emphasize his suave-looking black jacket and smiled back. “Bloody nice, actually, way more than usual— happy to get out of the apartment! It’ll be a fun day for sure, and my name’s Noel, by the way.” More than a fun day, meeting the bleeding princess and all!
“Alright,” replied the orange mare, and she trotted over to the other side of the tree-filled cart. “Jes’ wonderin’, that’s all.” She tipped her hat for a second and moved her back hooves to start tugging the cart along, but she hesitated less than second later.
“Miss,” Noel began.
“Oh,” she said, motioning Noel closer. “If you don’t mind my askin’, how in the hay do I get out of these apartment complexes and back to the main street, you know, besides the train station? It’s really—well— it seems like a maze ‘round here.” She waved a hoof about, pointing at the rooftops of the very generic-looking big buildings. “No offense.” She immediately added those words in the way, meeting eye to eye with Noel once again, of someone who clearly felt pride in her own heritage and wouldn’t want to insult anyone else.
“None taken,” Noel said, returning to his mission, “so— miss—”
“Applejack,” she quickly replied.
“Applejack,” he repeated. He scratched his neck for a moment, letting his scarf go a bit looser. Alright, time for a decision. Am I going for this?
“Straight forwards at first, right?” she asked as she tugged the tree a few inches.
“Yeah, you just go to the end of the road first. Then, take a left up the hilly thing. Then, right under the tunnel,” Noel said, dotting his hooves against the pavement as he mapped it all out. He paused as he realized that Applejack had nudged herself even closer to his right side. He felt bathed in her positive aura, the warm scent of apples filling up his senses.
“Yes?”
“Oh, I am so bloody going for this,” he whispered, speaking so quietly that he couldn’t even hear himself.
She blinked, feeling confused by his changing facial expressions. “I suppose I might be way off right now, darlin’, but we—”
“Ah, silly me!” Noel suddenly burst out. “I’m going to the train station myself anyways.”
“Oh, great,” she responded.
“Just follow me, Applejack,” he said. Oh, damn, saying that name felt good. Applejack. Applejack. Applejack. A-P-P-L-E-J-A-C-K. Sweet-scented cutie of the brightest ranch, Applejack! “So, yeah, I’m actually heading off for Canterlot.” And, dear gods, look at that plot on her. Cadence eat your bloody heart out. Soarin’ was right. They don’t call it ‘country comfort’ for nothing.
“Me too,” she replied, tugging the cart along. Noel made motions as if to help her along, but she wagged a hoof in refusal. “This big sweetheart here—” She looked up with pride filling her eyes, almost bringing her to tear. “Is going to a close friend of a close friend.”
“Sure,” he said as they made their way leftwards up a large embankment. Noel’s eyes bounced about the various offices above him. It must be so different for her. The grey life— ‘just drink, dance, and screw / knowing there’s nothing else to do / no point to climb high / nowhere else to fall / why I even try / my life is a wall’ as The Pulps put it— is as alien to her as one of those science fiction films. I’m sure she spends half her life under one of these trees. “I wonder if it’s someone I’d know. But, then, I’m going over to a thing with Fancy Pants, and that bloody brilliant stallion knows everyone. So I guess ‘friend of a friend’ means thousands to me.” Not to mention the bleeding millions that know my music. But you don’t know, so I’m not spoiling it for you.
“Fancy Pants?” Applejack repeated, a bright flash coming over her face making her somehow look even cuter than normal. “Aw, shucks, that’s exactly where I’m goin’!”
“Really?” Noel asked, the ponies heading under the large white and grey brick tunnel. As the various waterworks flowed over their heads, Noel tried to hold back his excitement. I’m going with this. I’m running as far as I can with this. I’m holding on and I’m not letting go until she lets go. Miss 'country comfort' is mine! “Anything to do with the foals’ event?”
“This beautiful monster here,” Applejack said, gazing upwards at the huge peaches, “is a testament to time, good luck, creativity, and— most of all— patience. Something to symbolize the growin’ talent in those foal’s minds and hearts, or so Fancy Pants would tell ya. Both decorative and something for their horticultural related exhibit, so there’s that.”
“Bleeding impressive if I say so myself,” Noel commented as he nodded. It’s one thing to sit around in an office pushing papers around or a dirt pit burying literal waste around. This sweetheart actually grows things. She makes them. Life springs up under her talented hooves. She can look back at something months later and say, “Yeah, I built that. I did that.” Such a completely bloody different world! The ponies came to the end of the tunnel, Applejack finally letting Noel help pull their precious cargo. “So, we just go up these ramps here and the station is right in front of us.”
Applejack grinned and started her way along the slick white concrete into the huge mass of ponies in the distance. Noel went on right by her side. As they bumped up against the edge of the massive black and white checkered platform, a multicolored array of ponies darting along every which way in front of them like fish going for flakes at the top of their tank.
“So—” Applejack began.
“Are you hungry?” Noel asked.
“Come again?”
He pointed at a small and, oddly enough, sparsely populated café booth at the side of the train platform. “It would be bloody fantastic if you could have lunch with me.”
Applejack stared out into space for a moment. Noel had the type of personality that he decided things in a matter of seconds— knowing what he wanted and how to get it. And he wanted Applejack— badly. It hardly took more than one look with him. He somehow managed to sense that she had the same mindset, judging ponies like the snap of two hooves.
“Well, ah,” she said, rubbing her side against her tree-filled cart. She seemed to realize that Noel, grinning profusely, took her lack of a ‘no’ to be a ‘yes’. A second later, she realized that her gut told her to take her brain’s lack of a ‘no’ to be a ‘yes’ as well. It couldn’t hurt—although she wondered if she’d ever get to the bottom of what Noel meant by ‘bloody’ and ‘bleeding’ if not the red stuff under ponies’ skin. “Sounds nice.”
“And it would also be bloody fantastic if you would see our Princess with me.”
Applejack froze completely. “Come again?”
To Be Continued...
