The Tales of a Dubious Traveling Soda Salesman

With that figured out, I started heading towards the library I mentioned earlier. Walking was an interesting experience. I had first tried to walk on my hind legs, which worked well, but I realized that most ponies don’t walk everywhere in this manner, so for legs it was.

This was also easy. It was almost as if my brain had developed pony instincts instantly, which was fine by me. In no time at all I was at the entrance to the capitol city, Canterlot. At this time I said something quite random: “Canterlot,” pause, “Canterlot,” pause, “Canterlot…It’s only a model. Shut up.” I still don’t know where this came from.

Anyway, with that, I trotted into the city. I didn’t know what to expect, cupcakes and rainbows everywhere?  To my relief, I was wrong. The city was actually wonderful; medieval with modern flashes thrown in.

After walking for five minutes on the main road, which had many vendors selling their wares, some of the food was looking wonderful.  I was flat broke, so I figured library first, financial troubles later.

Finding the library was actually pretty easy, or else I was just extremely lucky. It was one of the biggest buildings on the street, and one of the finest, I might add. As I stepped into the library, I was run into by a unicorn. Wham!

“Oops, sorry,” was the reply of the lavender purple pony.

“It’s alright,” I said, picking up some books that had flown in the collision. “Here you go. Uh, have a good day.” I turned to walk into the library.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

Before I realized that she was talking to me, I had closed the door behind me.

I walked up to the main desk (the only desk, for that matter). Behind it stood slash stat, what I presumed to be the librarian. She was an elderly, tan colored mare with graying hair and spectacles. In short, a stereotypical librarian.

“Hello, could you direct me to the history and/or lifestyles section, please?”

“Of course, but you need a library card first, dear.” Her voice was sweet but stern: a perfect grandma character.

This caught me off guard a little; I had thought that library cards were for checking out books. “Um, right, can I have one?”

“I’ll need your name, dear.”

“My what?”

“Your name.”

“Right, my name.” I broke into a sweat. I couldn’t give my real name; it would be too weird. I quickly made one up. “It’s…Hermes.”

“Was that Herpes?”

I winced. “No, Hermes.”

“Just checking.” She finished whatever she was doing and handed me a library card. “Here you are. The history section is three shelves down.”

“Thanks.” I slipped my library card into my hat, much like reporters do. As I walked, I thought about my new name: Hermes, messenger of the Greek gods. My real name was something to do with messengers, so I thought this was fitting.

When I got to the history section, I found that it was small; non-fiction never does well in libraries. I scanned the shelf and picked the book entitled The History of Equestria. With the book in hoof, I sat down and read the book. Man, was it confusing. Talk about a screwy timeline. Despite this, it expanded my knowledge.

I then found a book called Villains of our Time. This book was much more interesting and knowledge-expanding. Believe it or not, I learned about Nightmare Moon, Discord, and the queen of the changelings, whose name is hard to spell. I learned that all three were stopped by the “Mane Six,” with some help from Princess Celestia. I thought this to be odd. Didn’t they have some form of military? And Luna the princess, didn’t she contribute at all?

With more research, I discovered that Nightmare Moon was actually Luna after escaping a thousand-year banishment on the moon. What?!! I needed to know more.

I soon found out that when Equestria was very young, Luna had had a mega temper-tantrum, so her sister Celestia had used the Elements of Harmony to banish her to the moon forever.

Uh?!! Where’s the logic in that?!! It seems a bit harsh and suspicious. Almost like King John and King Richard, but I shan’t get into a history lesson.

When I reread the facts I realized that it had to have been overdone just a little bit; banishment and whether or not Luna went insane and revengeful. This disturbed me. Was the world of MLP not as perfect as my friends thought it was? More reading was in order.

After a while, I found that the two other villains mentioned mostly got what they deserved. I say mostly for the following reasons: Discord is like the spirit of dis-harmony, so can he help it if he causes chaos and higgledy-piggledy? Secondly, the queen of the changelings was, in a sense, just trying to feed her people. Granted, it was the very emotions of other ponies that they fed on, but it was kind of a vampire paradox.

So one out of three wasn’t so bad, but I still had my doubts. I did even more reading and discovered that there has always been one ruler in Equestria, and that ruler is Princess Celestia. No other ruler has ever been required. What’s more, the only royalty I could find were alicorns, pegasi and unicorns, most of them female.

This seemed, well…dare I say racist/sexist. I had serious doubts that the Princess, or any other pony for that matter, was racist, but I still had questions, and books could no longer answer them. Right then and there I decided to ask the only one who could answer them: Princess Celestia herself.