Periwinkle’s New Car
Admiral Biscuit
“Um, hold on a minute. I need to talk to my manager.”
Periwinkle nodded. She hadn’t expected this to go without a hitch. Other ponies had warned her that the car-buying process was fraught with complications. Like needing a driver’s license—her pilot’s license wasn’t good enough.
Dealers would try and upsell a pony on all sorts of things she didn’t need or want, and some of them were dishonest enough to try and sneak them into the contract. On another hoof, if she bought it from its owner, it might not be as good as claimed.
Being perfidious didn’t strike her as a good idea; sooner or later everypony would know, and then nopony would buy anything. Her village had had its share of vapor salesponies; the last one had left tarred and de-feathered.
Human towns were bigger than pony towns, so maybe word didn’t get around as quickly.
She looked around the little sales office. It was more of a sales stable—low walls, barely big enough for her to turn around in, especially with an overly big desk stacked with important papers and folders and shiny brochures, a computer, and importantly, the keys to her soon-to-be car.
As long as the manager approved.
•••
Her ears turned as the manager arrived. Two sets of footsteps, easily distinguishable. Her salesman had an uneven gait and soft-soled shoes, while the manager had a self-important strut and hard-soled shoes. Less than the clack of proper horseshoes or high heels, but more pronounced than most human footwear.
“So Mayko says that you’re going to be paying in gold?”
Periwinkle nodded.
“Literal, actual gold?”
She nodded and opened her saddlebags, lipped out a bit coin, and dropped it in his hand. He hefted it thoughtfully, then turned to Mayko, back to her, and then looked in the direction of the main offices.
In her opinion, the main offices weren’t as good as the little sales stables. They might be bigger, but while Mayko had a floor-to-ceiling window that looked outside, the offices in the back didn’t have any. Just flickering fluorescent lights and even more paperwork.
“I’ll be right back.”
Without giving her a chance to object, he took her bit coin with him.
Mayko sat back down in his chair. It was nicer than hers; it had wheels that let it roll about. Hers just had skids and didn’t roll.
He was really nice and really wanted to put her in the car. He hadn’t sold any ponies a car yet, but he’d visited the car wash and he’d seen a few ponies with their Mustangs. He’d been friendly to her the moment she’d walked in the door, and he’d patiently explained all the features and benefits of the car she’d selected. After she’d walked around it and poked at it and opened the back lid to look inside and the front lid to look inside, after she’d sat in the driver’s seat and experimented with the controls, he’d gotten the keys and turned it on so she could see what it was like when it was completely powered up.
After that, he’d taken her on a test drive. It wasn’t exactly like the car she’d taken her driver’s test in—that had been a very beat-up Focus which had an extra brake pedal on the right side for the instructor.
He’d seemed nervous when she drove, and her explaining that she already had a pilot’s license didn’t reassure him at all.
“We don’t usually get customers who pay in gold,” Mayko explained. “Usually it’s cash or they finance.”
Periwinkle nodded. She’d already made this discovery; people wanted linen bills or plastic cards or base-metal disks. Using those wasn’t a problem for smaller purchases, but for a car? She’d need a wagon to carry that many bills, and she’d have to get one that was fully enclosed so none of them blew away. She didn’t know where to get a wagon like that; Wal-Mart had Red Rider wagons that could be modified to be pony-towable, but they didn’t have covers.
She’d almost bought one anyway—Periwinkle still had trouble figuring out how much gold was worth. Humans didn’t go by the face value of the coin, just its weight. She knew how much one coin weighed, and she’d asked the supposedly-smart ChatGPT. It had said that she’d need a thousand pounds of gold to buy a car.
Sunny Daze had dissuaded her of that notion; she didn’t remember exactly how many bits it had taken to buy her red Mustang convertible, but knew they hadn’t burdened her saddlebags. She’d said that stuffing her saddlebags full of alfalfa cubes from Tractor Supply Company weighed a lot more.
From that conversation, Periwinkle learned that Tractor Supply Company also sold food, that she could buy alfalfa cubes in forty-pound bags, and that ChatGPT wasn’t a reliable source of facts, even if it acted friendly and knowledgeable. Another online source, Quora, told her that four pounds of gold would be plenty, and four pounds of bits fit neatly in her saddlebags.
•••
The manager didn’t come right back like he’d promised, but he did come back, and he had her bit coin with him when he did. “So good news, Ms. Periwinkle, we can accept gold for your down payment.”
She wrinkled her muzzle. “My entire payment.” She lifted the flap on her saddlebag and started pulling out coins, laying them out on Mayko’s desk one at a time.
•••
It took longer than she wanted—each coin had to be inspected and weighed individually, as if they weren’t authentic. And she still had to sign a paper saying that if they weren’t authentic, Chapman Ford could take her car back. Before signing, she added a clause saying if they did, she’d get the disputed bits returned. Mayko was nice and she trusted him; the manager wasn’t nice and she didn’t trust him at all.
By the time all the coins had been authenticated and she’d gotten her change—in stupid fabric money, which the grocery store liked—the sun had gone down and most of the dealership employees had left for the night.
Mayko apologized for the delay and walked her out to her new car, screwed her shiny new license plate on for her, and gave her all her paperwork and a couple of his personal business cards as well.
He even accepted a nuzzle, something most humans felt was too intimate.
Periwinkle settled into the seat and turned the car on, watching as it cycled through its startup sequence. Like her computer, the touchscreen and the instrument cluster had their own splash screens; the warning lights cycled on and back off again, and then it was ready to drive.
She’d driven a worn-out Ford Focus before; her Mustang had a lot more power. She’d known it would; she’d felt it when Mayko had driven it, but she still wasn’t entirely prepared for its launch. It pushed her back in the seat, and for a moment she lost the pedals, then she had it back under control.
•••
Driving at night was a new experience for her. Just like ships, cars had navigation lights and indicator lights to let her know what they were going to do, and her car was smart and had lane change assist and in-lane repositioning, and it had warning indicators in the mirrors to warn her if there were vehicles on her flank.
Best of all, it was nearly silent. Other ponies had to upgrade their Mustangs to make them quieter; hers just whispered along.
•••
Seeing her car in the light of the new day was just as exciting as having seen it at the dealership, with the added thrill that it was hers.
Sure, it needed some customization; while the Star White Metallic paint was a close match to her coat, the Light Space Grey interior didn’t match her mane. Seat covers would fix that, at least in part. Later on, she could further customize the interior if she wanted to.
It would need cutie mark decals. Razzaroo knew a company that could make them, or she could have Toola Roola paint them on.
Most importantly, it would need a way to refuel. The instrument cluster helpfully told her how far it could go, and naturally that number had counted down all the way home.
Unlike the Mustangs that everpony else had which needed to go to the pegasus stations to get refilled, hers worked on canned lightning—that was why it was so quiet and so torquey. It could be charged overnight from a wall outlet, but that would mean stringing a cord down from her balcony to the parking lot, something she was sure the building superintendent wouldn’t like. He’d already rejected her idea of unbolting the balcony railing in order to make a more useful pegasus landing pad.
Periwinkle was a clever pony, and she’d worked up a system of hydraulics to lower it down and raise it back up. For right now, she had to push a button to make it happen; she was still planning the best method to make it work remotely.
She’d always been good at building contraptions, having an almost earth pony ability to make things. Some humans believed that after they died they came back as something else—a process they called reincarnation. Maybe in a past life she’d been an earth pony and after she’d reincarnated those skills had remained with her.
Since the car ran on canned lightning, there was no reason she could think of that she couldn’t bottle her own and feed it to the car.
Her early experiments had gotten her banned from the roof of her apartment complex. The superintendent had found her lightning-collector and followed its cord through her balcony door and he’d yelled at her a lot; her observation that her lease didn’t prohibit her from collecting lightning didn’t win her that argument.
Luckily, there were other ‘roofs’ to experiment on; for a few dollars an hour she could park on the top deck of a parking garage.
And if that failed, she could pay for a charger. It wasn’t as good as canning her own lightning, but it was a backup plan. Her car had even come with the cords she needed for that.
•••
Getting lightning wasn’t a problem; Periwinkle had worked weather patrols and in the weather factory; she knew how to tell what kinds of clouds already had lightning in them, what kinds could get lightning with the help of a pegasus, and how to safely get it out. She knew what kinds of air terminals attracted lightning the best, and how much current and heat she’d have to deal with.
Human clouds were different and less well-behaved, but the general principles still stood. Although, when it came to building her apparatus, there was stuff she just couldn’t get on Earth, which meant some improvisation.
Her Mustang could hold plenty of supplies in its trunk. Or luggage compartment, as the owner’s manual called it. It held lots more than luggage and its big hatch was more convenient than the lid most Mustangs had. Not to mention that the back seats could fold down if she wanted to carry cargo instead of friends or co-workers.
If that still wasn’t enough room, there was also the front trunk, which was more conventional and very similar to the trunks on her friends’ cars.
•••
One drawback to the parking garage was that it was easily accessible to other humans. The first time she’d visited had been in a rainstorm full of well-charged clouds, and she’d had the whole top deck to herself—people didn’t like walking in the rain if they could help it. Plenty of room to spread out her test contraption and then drive to the other end of the top deck just in case it didn’t work quite like she intended.
There wasn’t quite enough potential in the clouds to generate lightning, but she could fix that. Once everything was set up, she took flight and started gathering bits of cloud and stuffing them into an angrier and angrier mass. At first, it was only discernible by feel, and then it started to darken more and more.
It wasn’t strong enough to arc to the ground where it was, which was all part of her plan. She lassoed it with a home-made cloud rope—none of the hardware stores sold proper cloud rope—and dragged it over to the parking garage.
Her strike zone was still clear.
She tugged the cloud down as close as she dared, and then flew down to the edge of the parking garage and tied the rope to a railing. It was metal, which wasn’t ideal, but it was bolted to concrete instead of being grounded so it probably wouldn’t drain her cloud while she got in position.
As she took flight again, Periwinkle could already faintly smell ozone. Little pops and sparks were coming off her cloud, reaching for the rope and the air around it, but they just didn’t have the oomph to get out.
She shoved it lower, until she really felt her fur prickling, and then started jumping on it. A few moments later, she was rewarded with a brilliant flash of light and a sudden loss of support as the cloud lost most of its cohesion.
It didn’t matter. She circled down and landed next to her lightning capturing device.
Said device needed improvement. Some of the circuits were scorched; others had vanished entirely. Her homemade interleaved condenser had exploded, unfolding like a flower. The receiving jar was gone, with nothing remaining except tiny glass fragments blown across most of the parking lot and a fan-shaped scorch mark on the concrete.
To most, it would have looked like an abject failure. To Periwinkle it was a successful experiment. She’d caught the lightning and directed it into the jar, there were just some weak spots in her apparatus which needed to be strengthened.
•••
A pony in a car still drew attention; the same pony getting out a steampunky mad scientist machine and setting it out in the parking lot drew even more. The brass-trimmed flash goggles she wore on her forehead further set the scene.
She was deep enough in concentration that she didn’t notice. Positioning the canning leads was critical; in an earlier experiment the lightning had missed the air terminal and landed instead on the canning wires, exploding her apparatus in a new and different way.
The worst part was that she knew that was a possibility, but she’d gotten lazy and not been putting as much of a gap between the wires as she should have.
Somepony in town’s harvesting. The cashier at the grocery store hadn’t raised an eyebrow as she went through the checkout with another cart filled with Mason jars.
Periwinkle started pulling the jars out of their package, twisting each one onto its receiving cap. The regular metal screw-tops didn’t work, which was a shame, those were cheap and convenient. She’d had to resort to ceramic ones—a local college had a pottery class for the public and while she didn’t really need pottery lessons, signing up and paying the class fee let her use the kiln.
She got the last one fastened, checked over her apparatus one last time, and then stepped into a clear area, already crouching to take flight before she noticed a bunch of people watching her and the apparatus.
In a light drizzle, to boot.
“What are you building?” one of them asked. He had a cell phone up and pointed at her.
Tempting though it was, lying wasn’t friendly.
Even if the truth might get her banned from the parking garage.
“Lightning collector.” She waved a hoof over the array. “Lightning’s attracted to the air terminal and gets routed to the condensers, which feed it into the jars. There’s some other stuff in there as well, but that’s the basic principle.”
“Wow.” He panned his cell phone over the apparatus.
“Is it safe?” someone else asked.
“It’s as safe as anything meant to be hit by lightning,” she said.
“Does it work?”
“Sort of. It explodes a lot.”
“Can we see it in action?”
Periwinkle frowned. Science was meant to be shared and she was certainly proud of her hoofwork, but it genuinely wasn't safe for humans. She hadn’t fully insulated it and didn’t know how far the lightning’s current might travel through the cement of the parking garage. Not to mention how capricious lightning was anyway—she couldn't guarantee it wouldn’t decide one of the people watching was a more attractive target than her collector.
“It’s pegasus safe,” she said. “And you need googles.” She tapped them with a forehoof. “Or else the arc can blind you, maybe forever. There isn’t any lightning in this storm anyway.” There was enough potential for her to make weak lightning, but she wasn’t going to risk anyone’s life trying it.
•••
Periwinkle had ridden on a few Wild Ponies Club cruises before. Having a pony car wasn’t a hard requirement, and while pony-themed cars made up the bulk of the club, they weren’t all pony-themed. Mustangs, Broncos, and Pintos were obvious choices—if any of the ponies in the club were aware of the Colt, they pretended they weren’t.
Having a car named after oneself was also obviously acceptable; Avalonia’s Toyota almost carried her name, and Denim’s Gremlin had actual Levi denim fabric for its seats.
Others just picked what they liked. Bifröst’s 1968 Mercedes-Benz 280SL oozed luxury out of its pores, while Frisco’s black 1979 Lincoln Continental wasn’t quite as well appointed but defined the category of land yacht.
There were also parents naming their foals after cars now. None of them had yet made it to Earth, but maybe one day there’d be a pony driving a classic Oldsmobile hatchback.
As tradition demanded, the group met up at an all-you-can eat restaurant, and the cruise would end at another one.
She’d kept her new car a secret—there was no reason to show it off until it was at least partially customized, and until she’d gotten her lightning catcher functioning. Bragging about a device she was going to build was the same as bragging about weather that didn’t exist yet. ‘Look what I made’ was a lot more effective when it was made.
And in truth her lightning catcher wasn’t fully ready yet. It usually worked, but it occasionally still exploded, melted, or caught fire. Sometimes all three at once. Graduating from hoof-made clouds to feral lightning was a learning curve, especially since the bolts often had multiple leaders and they didn’t always settle on her air terminal. Sometimes they liked the other circuitry more.
She’d ridden with Meadowbrook in the last cruise. Meadowbrook had a beat-up Grabber Yellow 1971 Boss Mustang which was loud and uncomfortable and broke a lot. Meadowbrook said that it was the best Mustang and could out-drive every cop in Los Angeles and come out the winner even with significant body damage, something that Periwinkle was very skeptical of.
Meadowbrook insisted that there was a whole documentary about a school bus yellow Mustang named Eleanor that proved its durability. She hadn’t named hers Eleanor; it was instead named ‘Bossy.’ Periwinkle thought that was because it was always demanding fuel, oil, and air in the right front tire.
It was also the only Mustang that competed with hers in the size of the rump.
Meadowbrook’s Mustang wasn’t in the forefront of the group—Wysteria’s convertible had that honor—but Periwinkle’s eye was naturally drawn to it. In part because the hood was open and Meadowbrook was feeding it coolant.
She knew that everypony in the group kept an eye on who was pulling into the lot. It was, after all, a public restaurant, and plenty of people who weren’t in the club were showing up to eat. Or maybe to gawk at the collection of cars clustered in a corner.
Nopony paid her car much mind until she drove over to the group. Somepony spotted her through the windshield or else took note of the vinyl cutie marks on its flanks; everypony was watching as she pulled it into a spot.
Periwinkle hopped out and into a gaggle of confused ponies.
“What in Equestria is that?”
“It’s a Mustang.” Periwinkle said. “As you can clearly see by the pony on the grille.”
“Not a real Mustang,” Rainbow Stars opined. “It doesn't look like a real Mustang. It doesn’t smell like a real Mustang.”
“That’s because it doesn’t burn mineral spirits.”
“It’s got a fatter rump than Bossy,” Meadowbrook observed.
“Everypony on the forums says that a Mach-E isn’t a real Mustang.”
“Why? It’s better.”
“It’s got too many doors,” Meadowbrook said. “Mustangs are supposed to have two doors only.”
“So you can’t get in the back seat, unless you have a convertible.”
Violet Twirl, who owned a 2022 Bronco Sport, nodded. “Four doors is better if you’ve got lots of friends.”
“My front seat folds to let ponies in the back.”
“No it doesn’t.”
Meadowbrook snorted. “It will when I fix it.”
“I can put lightning in mine.”
That got the attention of the pegasi.
•••
By and large, ponies were friendly, and by group consensus they had finally decided that Periwinkle’s new car was indeed a Mustang—the badging and registration didn’t lie—and while they weren’t all sold on its appearance or its electric motors, it was allowed in the cruise.
Maybe she needed a flashier exterior; Wysteria’s Mustang was a glittery purple that a pony could get lost in, sparkling as much as wavelets on a pond.
Or maybe everypony else needed to re-think their options. The group straggled into the parking lot of the all-you-can-eat restaurant, several of the ponies opting to stop at a pegasus station to feed their cars first.
The restaurant was future-proofing their parking lot; they already had a space for cars to charge. Said space was currently occupied by a Tesla roadster—its owner was still tethered to a fueling nozzle of sorts.
She wasn’t.
Periwinkle popped open her rear hatch and slid the excelsior-packed box of jars towards the rear, then unspooled what her building superintendent had called ‘an electrical hazard, fire hazard, and tripping hazard all in one package.’ After plugging the cord into the side of the car, she went back to the hatch and propped the funnel end over one of her jars of lightning, spun off the lid, then went inside to get a well-earned dinner: she’d be filling her belly while her Mach-E filled its batteries.
Author's Note
Pre-read by AlwaysDressesInStyle!
click HERE for story notes
