Phone Companies Should Really Anticipate Unicorn Needs...
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Phone Companies Should Really Anticipate Unicorn Needs...
The Great and Powerful Trixie had a flair for the dramatic. Trixie also had a longstanding grudge with pronouns, but that was neither here nor there. Pronouns were neither great enough, nor powerful enough for a mare of Trixie’s talents. ‘Trixie’ was a perfectly cromulent pronoun, and to Tartarus with anypony who disagreed.
Trixie had crossed the portal to Earth. To hear ~~her~~ Trixie tell it, it was a miracle for all humans that ~~she’d~~ Trixie had forsaken Trixie’s homeland in Equestria to entertain the poor, huddled masses of humans.*
Trixie also ‘forgot’ to mention the part about the portal itself. It was quite the fortunate discovery on Trixie’s part. Trixie had not known it was there. Trixie was fairly confident that nopony else had known it was there either. If Trixie didn’t know about it, lesser ponies obviously wouldn’t either, and since anypony who wasn’t Trixie was a lesser pony, that covered everypony.
Though Earth lacked magic, there were performers with whom Trixie had become aware that professed to be adept at the magical arts. Trixie had quickly determined that all of Earth’s so-called magicians were naught but charlatans, a fact which Trixie was planning to use to Trixie’s advantage. Trixie didn’t need sleights of hand nor illusions to cast magic.
There was no native magic on Earth. The lone real spellcaster was the unicorn that had crossed the portal. A portal that had been magicked shut behind Trixie. Trixie’s creditors would never find Trixie now, nor would Trixie ever get another notification about Trixie’s wagon’s extended warranty nearing expiration. Best of all, Trixie would never need to see Twilight Sparkle’s smug face ever again.
Truly, Earth was a paradise where humans loved Trixie, and Trixie tolerated humans.
The one area where humans had excelled was technology. In the beginning, when Trixie had only recently set Trixie’s Great and Powerful hooves on Earth’s earth for the first time, Trixie had thought it was magic. In a way Trixie supposed that technology was humankind’s magic.
Upon successful completion of Trixie’s first magic show on Earth, Trixie rewarded Trixie by buying all of the things a showmare as Great and Powerful as the Great and Powerful Trixie could ever need. The first was a Winnebago, a mechanized wagon that Trixie could live in and not pull from place to place. It was an older Winnebago with a strange chemical smell permeating the interior, but Trixie would work Trixie’s way up to something Greater and more Powerful as Trixie continued touring. More importantly, Trixie had spent triple the vehicle’s price on a Great and Powerful paint job that depicted Trixie performing Great and Powerful feats of magic.
Trixie had also come to realize that Trixie was invisible without a Great and Powerful social media presence. Because Trixie wasn’t already locked into an existing contract, sales representatives from AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity, and Verizon fought valiantly for Trixie’s ~~amusement~~ business. When the dust settled, only one salesperson remained alive, and he sold Trixie a three-year unlimited** plan for only $99.99/month and a deposit of only $999.99 to cover the cost of Trixie’s shiny new phone.
Trixie’s hooves tingled as Trixie slid them across the slippery glass surface of the phone. The phone had not been designed to work with hooves, but that was okay, the salesman assured Trixie. There was a pre-existing voice activation module because people were too lazy to bother typing things when they could just say them instead. Trixie became enamored with Trixie’s new toy, spending hours on social media looking up Trixie on the internet. The camerawork of the fans in Trixie’s audience left much to be desired, but Trixie understood. Not everyone could be as Great and Powerful at everything like Trixie was, after all.
“Spellcheck activate.” Trixie switched to Equestrian to recite a spell.
The results on Trixie’s phone, however, were not quite what Trixie had expected…
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Trixie looked at the phone’s screen and blinked. That was not what Trixie had said. “Spellcheck, is this spell correct or not?” When the phone didn’t answer, Trixie repeated the spell.
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“Trixie doesn’t understand. This is the most basic of spells. Trixie could not come up with an easier spell if Trixie wrote it in crayon on the walls of Trixie’s mother’s kitchen. Spellcheck, is this spell correct or not? The Great and Powerful Trixie orders you to check the blasted spell!”
Is this spell correct or not? The Great and Powerful Trixie orders you to check the blasted spell.
Trixie looked at the text. Trixie’s obviously defective phone had merely repeated the words back to Trixie. This wouldn’t do. Trixie’s phone was at least useful enough to provide the location and hours of the nearest branch of Trixie’s service provider, but of course they were already closed for the evening.
The next morning Trixie materialized inside the cell phone store. Trixie had made quite the production of it, as Trixie was wont to do. Being a showmare of Trixie’s renown meant always making a dazzling entrance. Which is how Trixie explained Trixie’s smoke bombs to the police as Trixie was waiting for the fire department to clear the building for re-entry. For once, Trixie was glad that Trixie had run out of fireworks – without magical fire-resistance spells, Earth’s buildings were more prone to catching fire than those of Equestria. It was an important lesson, and one that could’ve landed Trixie in a not-so-Great, nor all that Powerful jail cell. Fortunately, the only damage was inconvenience and the loss of an hour’s worth of sales as everyone stood around in the parking lot, so Trixie was let off with a warning to never do so again.
Trixie then drove Trixie’s smelly recreation vehicle to another store where the staff wasn’t predisposed to hate Trixie. It cut Trixie to the core, but Trixie limited Trixie’s entrance to merely teleporting into the store like a common unicorn with no stage presence whatsoever. It was enough to make Trixie sick.
“Greetings! Welcome to Verizon! My name is Joe! How may I help you today?”
“The Great and Powerful Trixie’s phone doesn’t work correctly.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“Spellcheck isn’t working.” Trixie repeated the incantation, and the phone displayed the slightly different gibberish than previously.
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“Spellcheck isn’t configured to run in whatever language you were just speaking. Was that Latin?”
“That was Equestrian. And pray tell, how is Spellcheck supposed to check English spells? I was under the impression there weren’t any magic spells on Earth.”
Many of the customers, and even some of the employees, laughed at the Great and Powerful Trixie’s misunderstanding.
“It checks the spelling of words. It’s struggling with your wording because it isn’t in English, so it’s giving you the closest words as it interprets them.”
“Then this phone is practically useless.”
“I wouldn’t say that, miss.”
“Trixie does not get addressed as ‘miss’. You will address Trixie as ‘Trixie’ or ‘the Great and Powerful Trixie’. There are exactly seventeen videos of the Great and Powerful Trixie on TikTok. Trixie watched all of them last night. There are only three articles about Trixie, and Trixie read all of them last night. Trixie continued refreshing all night, and yet no additional Trixie content appeared. There is nothing else of any interest on your internet.”
“You…” Joe withered under the gaze Trixie gave him. “I mean Trixie can make phone calls with it.”
“And who is Trixie going to call? Trixie is a recent immigrant to Earth. Trixie knows few people, and none that Trixie would want to call.”
“Trixie can use it as a GPS when Trixie is driving.”
“Trixie could just buy a GPS. Trixie thinks that would be significantly cheaper. Trixie would like to cancel Trixie’s service and get a refund.”
It was then that Trixie learned about three-year contracts and early termination fees.
Trixie didn’t know about the Better Business Bureau, nor did Trixie know how to utilize social media to launch a nationwide boycott on a company. What Trixie did know, however, was that buildings on Earth were more combustible than their Equestrian counterparts.
For the second time that day, fire trucks raced towards a Verizon store. This time they were greeted by a store fully engulfed in flames.
Trixie had abandoned Trixie’s RV in favor of galloping flat out across the landscape. The Great and Powerful Trixie was adept at running, and Trixie could easily have been a contender in the Equestria Games if Trixie really wanted. Trixie had had enough practice outrunning irate ponies in Equestria, after all. Ponies who were neither Great nor Powerful, nor particularly fleet of foot.
Once Trixie had outrun Trixie’s pursuers Trixie opened a portal back to Equestria. It had been a few months; surely that was enough time for things to have cooled down in Pintosford. If Trixie were really lucky, the portal would open up on the other side of Equestria entirely.
*Trixie conveniently left out the part about the angry mob with torches and pitchforks, the Royal Guards’ massive ponyhunt for Trixie, and the three nights Trixie spent laying in a ditch eating pinecones until the coast was clear.
**Unlimited being defined as ‘whatever network bandwidth we give you at any given time’.
Author's Note
A new not-a-contest? You know I’m in.
Story notes: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/1005122/story-notes-spellcheck
