Chapters * * *
This was the environment that surrounded Trixie while she parked in one of the glades of the Everfree: Trees older than most villages covered in dead wines. Ground covered with moss, save for the few precious spaces where the undergrowth could gather enough sunlight. And every now and then, a mushroom poked its head up, hinting at the massive complex of mycelia underneath.
There was a certain savage beauty in the merciless competition that went on, even among the plants. This habitat had rejected ponies a long time ago, and by the looks of it, it was much better off for it.
It's not fair, Trixie wrote in an unusually low-key entry right next to a crude sketch of what looked like a torture device with a arrow pointing to a saw-blade with the comment “PREPARED BLADE.”
I've spent my entire life mastering magic, but this place doesn't seem to use it. Would any of my tricks even work out here, or would they fail out of spite? There was something slightly bitter about this notion, and it was a feeling that followed her trough her daily routines.
First order of business: find water. It's amazing how dry the world can seem when you're thirsty. After a while, even lush grasslands start to look like deserts. This was even more problematic than usual because the water in the Everfree forest wasn't like the water elsewhere in Equestria
“There's... stuff in the water,” Trixie noted, and indeed, it had a rather worrying green tint. She scooped up a bucketful of it anyway, and studied it closely. Was there a spell she could use to make the drink more palatable?
“Well, it was possible that the tint was caused by particles in the water, and if it was solid matter, Trixie could probably control it by levitation...” She held the bucket close to her forehead and let a soft blue glow dance across the surface. She could sense the contours of the particles, but not control them.
“Why doesn't this work? the only thing this spell can't at least nudge is...” She dropped the bucket while the implications of this sank in. “Living material!” The green thing in the water was alive! For some value of alive anyway...
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Author's Note
One of the thorniest issues was how I should interpet Trixie's speech. I'm going with the idea that she only talks in third person when she wants a certain distance to herself. So she'll do it when interacting with other ponies and occasionally to herself. But if she's feeling introspective or insecure, she'll slip into "I".
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Trixie shuddered. Night was coming on fast. At least firewood was easy enough to find, even if she restricted herself to the dead branches she found on the ground. Maybe it was a silly notion, but she didn't like the idea of chopping wood in this forest. Just like everything else here, the trees seemed a little too alive.
Soon enough, she had enough debris for a fire and a thick smoke joined the late evening mist. With the fog came the cold, came the cold. Damp, insidious, creeping under her skin. Trixie huddled closer and swept her mantle around her. To pass the time, she flipped trough her notebooks and pondered ideas for her next show.
Fireworks are FINE, good opener, but we've all SEEN IT BEFORE! Isn't there's anything with a bit more “OOMPH!”?
There was a rumble in the distance as a displeased anvil-shaped cloud came drifting towards the forest. Trixie looked at her note, then up to the giant black anvil in the horizon and back to her note again. A flash illuminated the sky and made everything sharp for a fraction of a second before it went away. Three seconds later, the thundercloud roared from roughly a kilometer away.
In her mind, Trixie pictured what it would look like if a bolt like that got shot straight up towards the clouds as the opener of a show, every eye in town would be fixed on her... but how do you trap lightning in a bottle?
A thick shroud of rain had already enveloped the wagon when Trixie began working on her invention. It was hardly the most well-designed device in the world, but for something that came to her in a literal flash of brilliance, it was a pretty decent job.
The device consisted of an old vase augmented with lead (hard to find, but she always kept some around for basic alchemy) and vitriol (well, she had a lot of that, at least...). A copper wire led from the vase to a kite made from her old cape. As a finishing touch, she put a spell on it that told the laws of physics to go fuck themselves.
A massive flash of light illuminated her from the other side of the window, followed almost immediately by a loud thunder.
“No point in wasting any more time.” She darted out into the torrents of rain that whipped across the landscape. The kite dislodged from her back and the winds dragged it upwards towards the steely-gray sky. Another flash of lighting dashed past her and hit a nearby tree.
“higher, gotta get it higher,” she muttered to herself. “The trees around here are just too tall.”
The air was thick with the smell of ozone and lighting bolts darted from cloud to cloud up above her, just outside of her reach. She risked grabbing the thin copper wire to steer it towards a gust of wind. The kite climbed higher, but kept threatening to crash at any moment. The clouds above her roared. She let go of the kite, only a matter of time now before...
There must've been a flash right beforehand, or so Trixie assumed, but she never saw it. Her vision just turned completely black, she couldn't tell if she had closed her eyes or not until the shroud of darkness dissolved into dancing black dots.
Her ears kept ringing and she could still taste the lighting as a metallic flavour in her mouth. It took her a while to even process what had just happened, and when she did, she simply fell down onto the ground. The world around Trixie was spinning, making her thoughts collide with one another as if in a centrifuge.
“Air... smell... lighting... get inside... Trixie just caught lighting in a bottle... Trixie's awesome!” She drifted into unconsciousness, lost in a mixture of alarm and triumph.
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Author's Note
I play a little fast and loose with the physics here. The description of the thunderstorm is accurate enough, and her device at least have to excuse of being magica. But I'm frankly not sure if an electric shock to the surface of a lake would fry the fish. I'm going to guess not, but meh, it's magic, I don't have to explain it!
The GREAT and POWERFUL Mass-murderer
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When she awoke the next morning, the thunderstorm was long gone. She found herself lying in a puddle of mud with a headache that only true misery and Flim-Flam brothers special cider could generate, two things that often went together. Besides her laid her invention, a home-built accumulator now containing a fraction of one of the most powerful forces in Equestria. She picked it up, still in a haze, and dragged it behind her while she made her way into the wagon.
The mirror on her make-up table showed a mare with the same colour-scheme as her, but with her mane standing on end like a stereotypical Canterlotian scientist. When she realized that the maniac in the mirror was her, she burst out in giggles. A sketch of this manestyle appeared in her notebook afterwards, next to the comment Trixie – MAD SCIENTIST?! Where to get lab coat?
Her stomach let out a growl that could match any thunder, reminding her that dinner was at least a day overdue. More than just nutrition, she longed for flavour. The meals of dry roadside grass became tedious. When she hunted trough the cupboards, it was to find something, anything, she could eat that didn't taste like grass. But no matter how many times she looked trough her kitchen, it remained disappointingly empty save for a bouquet of basil she had left out to dry and nearly forgotten about.
The basil did lend some flavour to the grass, or at least it added some texture. It was still pretty bland, but it filled up her stomach at least.
“Did I actually catch the lighting?” She asked herself while idly chewing on the slightly bitter straws. There was no indication at all that the acumulator had actually stored the charge, it couldv'e simply went straight into the ground and she wouldn't have noticed.
She had an image in her head of her letting the lighting out on stage in front of a crowd of anticipative ponies, only to have the wase cough up a weak charge of static elctricity and nothing else.
Trixie took the vase deep into the forest, where it couldn't harm anypony or gave away her position. She found a spot right by a lake where if she aimed the device over the water, there wouldn't be any trees to hit for at least twenty meters.
So, how was she supposed to do this? She only had the vaugest notion of the alchemical principles involved and rankly didn't know if it was possible just to release a quick test-spark. Caution wrestled with curiosity and as usual, curiosity eventually won out. She loosened the screws with her levitation one at a time.
First screw, nothing happened. Second screw, nothing happened. Third screw...
Something very powerful launched out just in front of her, accompanied by a sound that looked like burnt ozone. For the second time that day she cound herself lying hooves-up in the mud with a feeling like somepony had bucked her very hard in the stomach. In the edge of her vision, she could just barely catch the contours of a blue lighting bolt as it dove straight into the lake. Then everything was peaceful again, like her bottled thunderbolt had never existed.
She found herself stuck between two emotions. On one hoof, she just wasted her one shot after all the trouble she went trough to get it, but on the other hoof, that sort of violent electrical blast would've almost certainly fried and entire audience if she actually tried it in a crowd...
She was still wrestlnig with whether she should feel relieved or dissapointed when her thoughts got interrupted by a curious bubbling sound. One second later, every fish in the lake floated belly-up to the surface right before her eyes. As the death-count reached triple-digits, she felt like saying something, but the words stubbornly refused to form in her head. In the end, the only thing she could muster was:
“Oops...”
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Author's Note
I wanted to get to this chapter right away, because I teased the "mass-murderer" part in the description and I didn't want people to be let down when the found out that it reffered to her accidently killing a lake full of fish. Had it been about an actual mass-murderer, I would have put a "dark" tag on it...
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The great and powerful Trixie studied the bark of a nearby tree intently. She focused her gaze on the dark brown scales and tried to find some sort of pattern. After a while, she looked over her shoulder towards the still-dead lake, only to quckly look back again.
“The great and powerful Trixie, the great and powerful mass murderer...” she muttered to herself while parts of her mind tried to distract her with thoughts of how interesting tree bark was. Well, what was she going to do? She couldn't just leave them there. The idea of killing all these fish and letting them rot was somehow worse than the act of killing them in the first place.
Back at her wagon, she looked around for something to catch them with. But the only thing that even remotely resembled a scoop in her wagon was her net stockings. She held them up with a ponderous expression, but the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to blush. There were at least a dozen things wrong with the idea of using underwear to catch dead fish, and the fact that it probably wouldn't work was far from the first item on that list.
“No, no no no! I can't use these!” she concluded. “Why do I even have net stockings?”
She looked around for anything she could use as a net, until eventually she found one of her spare bed-sheets. It had a few holes in it, and a smell of sweat and neglect that simply refused to wash out. But other than that, it was the perfect candidate.
Trixie tied each end of the sheet to a log and tossed it into the cursed waters. Her makeshift net refused to behave. But with some difficulty, she could sort of skim the surface of the lake, gathering in the dead fishes ten or so at a time. The real problem came when she had to somehow get the fishes up on land.
She tried levitation, but all she could muster was to imbue the pile of corpses with a cyan glow that lasted for a few seconds. She briefly considered picking the fish up by hoof but shot down that idea once her mind started to speculate on how the texture of a dead fish feels. Trixie would prefer to stay ignorant on the subject, thank you very much.
Eventually she realized that she could grab a hold of the log and roll the fishes into the sheet, like extremely unappetizing sushi. (Of course, to her, most sushi was unappetizing.) The roll oozed dirty water, there was no way in Tartarus she'd want to put this thing in her wagon in this state. As she waited for it to dry, she thought what to do with her harvest.
She thought about selling it on the black market, but she was in enough trouble with the law already. Equestrian law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. And besides, pescetarian ponies crept her out.
You'd get one or two ponies here and there that got a cause of carnivore-envy and tried to “advance trough the food chain.” This urge lasted for about two months, then they generally got tired of the stomach ache. These ponies where generally quite mad in ways which had nothing to do with fighting a losing battle against heir own gastrointestinal system, and dwelled in places that were quite unsafe for a pony like Trixie.
There were only a few locations in Equestria where it was legal to sell meat, and only because they didn't actually fall under Equestrian law, being sovereign territory of the griffins. But according to her maps, there was a settlement not too far from Hoofington, only a slight detour away.
She could breathe a little easier knowing this. Sure, griffins were obligate carnivores, but at least they could generally be trusted to stay away from food that talked.... It was around this time she realized that she was standing right next to a a pile of dead fish in a forest populated by hungry monsters that generally didn’t make a distinction between sapient and non-sapient when fresh meat was on the table.
“Hurry up and dry!” Trixie demanded to the soggy, disgusting bale. She paced back and forth, half of her wanting to stay far away from the sheet that smelled like prey and the other half wanting to protect a boon that would help her stay afloat to at least the end of the month once she sold it.
A rustle in the bushes seemed to confirm her fears. Images of being ripped apart by timber wolves ran across her mind and adrenaline forced her heart to kick into overdrive. She heard the voice of a filly from the other side of the shrubs and for one excruciating moment, Trixie thought she was about to witness a poor defenceless foal being devoured by a timberwolf and suddenly got an overwhelming urge to flee.
This moment soon passed, however. From the other side of the bush, a pair of young fillies appeared, unmolested by monsters. They came face to face with Trixie, stared into her haunted eyes and nearly ran the other way in sheer terror. Trixie was just about to do the same, and it was only the brief time they all stood paralyzed with fear that prevented her from screaming in terror. Once thier mutual ears settled, they were faced with a rather awkward situation. This wasn't exactly the ideal first impression to build on
“Uhm... hello...” one of the fillies tried, a white unicorn looking like a proper Canterlot-filly.
“...hi?” Trixie responded after a moment of perplexed silence. The two ponies looked at each other and decided that if this strange pony before them was a threat, she was so incredibly bad at it that they had little to fear.
“What are you doin' here?” the other filly asked, a yellow earth-pony with an accent that obviously grew up on a farm. Trixie tensed up at the question. She eyed the slowly drying fish roll before looking back at the filly.
“Nothing, Tixie is most definitely not killing fishes!” she exclaimed, speaking just a little too fast and too loud. This was entierly the wrong thing to say and she grasped after some diversion, something she could say to prove that she wasn't an axe-weilding filly-murderer or else they'd run to their parents and call the guards, and then neither of them would get any sleep.
“Anyway,” she continued, sounding supernaturally calm. “What's two young fillies doing this deep into the forest? Trixie's not really supposed to be here, you definitely shouldn't be.” That was absolutely true, and now it was the two fillies' turn to look guilty. The farmfilly stepped forward with a defensive expression
“We're too supposed to be here,” she claimed. “We're pickin' mushrooms!”
“Not these mushrooms, Trixie hopes,” she said to the two ponies. “You'll be sick!” she added when they seemed to take it the wrong way and began covering the basket. The farmpony raised an eyebrow at this statement.
“Is there's something wrong with our chanterelles?” she wondered.
“Nothing, the chanterelles looks fine, the false chanterelles on the other hoof...”
“There's false chantarelles?” the unicorn asked in disbelief. At once, Trixie turned from a scared vagabond to a confident teeacher.
“Yes, look at this.” she picked one of their mushrooms with her magic, too quick for the them to protest.“ This is a true chantarelle.. But this-” She picked up yet another mushroom. “This is a false chantarelle, notice that this one is orange, not yellow. Also, see how the gills are slightly different? You'll want to avoid these. You can still eat them, but they taste awful.”
The two fillies soaked the lecture in, but afterwards, they went aside and Trixie could hear them converse in whipsers that were not as quiet as they'd like to think.
“What do ya think, is she tryin' to cheat us?”
“Well, she said this one was supposed to taste bad, right?”
There was a brief moment of silence, followed by violent spitting.
“Yuck, no, she's tellin' the truth!” The two fillies appeared again, and Trixie did her best to pretend she hadn't heard anything of their conversation.
“Thank you kindly for your advice” the farmpony said. “We'll be more careful next time.” The two ponies began to trot away while Trixie's hungry eyes followed the little basket filled at least halfway with edible mushroom.
That seemed to be enough to trigger their alarms and before Trixie knew it, the two fillies had turned on her completely. They covered the basket up with their hooves and gave trixie a toxic stare.
“No way, they are ours!” the unicorn shouted at her while the farmpony filled in with “yeah!”
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Author's Note
Full disclosure, the line about "the law in its majestic equality" is paraphrased from a quote by Anatole France. I did not make that one up, altough I wish I did.
People gave me shit for just the NAME of the previous chapter, even tough I did everything in my power to indicate that I was being ironic. I posted the chapter right away so that people could read it right away rather than be kept in suspense, I correctly lablled the story as "slice of life" and I have an "everyone" rating.
Basically, there should be no way that a human with their cognitive functions intact could interact with this story for more than five seconds and not realize I was being ironic. But the audience of fimfiction never fails to dissapoint when it comes to even the mildest inellectual challenge.
Frankly, I don't know why i should bother writing if i can replace my stories with "lorem ipsum" and still get comments juding the story based on the description alone. Literacy should be mandatory on a site dedicated to fiction, go READ the story before you downvote or comment! If people are seriously unable to recognize a basic literary technique such as irony, no wonder so much fanfiction is nothing but mindless tripe.
This chapter, tough, I can almost understand if people have a problem with, since it deals with dietary habits, a somewhat controversial subject. And even tough I don't actually come down on any side, I'm just writing from the perspective of a herbivore, I could still step on some peoples toes, and I'm fine with that. I don't mind pissing people off, frankly, I'm more proud when a story of mine gets as many likes as dislikes than I am when a story only get a lot of likes. But I'd prefer it if people are pissed off for the right reasons.
This part of the story, this and the previous chapter, was actually somewhat inspired by the very first expedition I went on as a biology student. We went to the coast to get soem hands-on experience with marine biology, and our project group proved remarkeably good at killing fish.
We weren't doing it intentionally, mind you. We where studying schooling behaviour and we needed a large number of alive fishes for our experiment. But the first batch died in the bucket, and for the second try we apparently managed to catch some sort of bottom dwelling fish, cus when we came ack to our aquarium, the fish was all gone. It wasn't until later when we cleaned it out that we found out that they had all tried to bury themselves in the sand and died.
Finally we managed ot catch an acquarium full of itty-bitty fishes and at that point we felt so bad about the veritable mass-murder of fish at our hands that instead of doing what we intended to do, which was dump the school alongside a cod to see how they reacted to a predator, we tried to put the cod in a sort of cage so that he was present but couldn't gobble up any of our fish, which compeltely ruined our result.
As a side-note, you really wanna be pissed off about something? Read about the modern fishing industry, espescially if you have a background in ecology. We're overfishing the oceans like crazy, and yet we keep setting completely riddiculus quotas based more on commersce than actual science. I recommend the book Silent Seas by Isabella Lövin, swedish politican (Green party, naturally) who's name become really funny when read without the umalaut. Isabella Lovin' hehehe....
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Trixie sighed, so much for getting a good nights sleep. If the two fillies decided to call on a guard, she'd have their copper armour hovering over her until the morning. They'd never find her, of course, but it would be a hassle. The only thing delaying her departure from the Everfree was the fish bale, which still leaked water like an over-saturated sponge.
“If I could somehow squeeze this, it would go a lot faster,” she muttered to herself.
Images of toga-clad pegasi discussing physics in ancient Pegasopolis filled her mind. Give me a something something and a place to stand and I will move the world, One of them said to the others. She looked around, there was still plenty of wood littering the ground, even after her fireplace, and plenty of rocks to use as a counterweight. A light bulb formed over her head.
Some woods-mare engineering later and she had a makeshift press consisting of a branch with one end fixed to the ground y a large rock. She leaned all her weight on the branch and let gravity do the rest. Some of the water squirted out, and the bale began to wiggle.
Turns out that some of the fish wasn't as dead as she had assumed, and the top layer struggled underneath her weight. Trixie let go of the branch and nearly fell backwards for the third time this night. After picking herself up, she went back to to studying the texture of tree bark. When she returned, the bale had completely stopped moving.
Trixie went up to the bundled sheet with uneasy steps. She gave it a poke, then detracted her hoof as if she thought the bale would bite. The fishes however, remained perfectly still, even as she levitated the bale into her wagon.
“It's okay, fish don't have a soul,” she muttered to herself like a mantra. But somehow, this thought still failed to comfort her.
“Then again, I'm not sure all ponies have souls...” she mused to herself while dragging her wagon across the bumpy trail of the forest.
Along the way out of the Everfree she kept her eyes on the side of the trail, hoping for some of those tasty mushrooms, but to no avail. If there ever was any mushrooms here, they had already been picked by the two fillies. Eventually, it became less about satisfying her hunger and more about keeping her mind occupied to silence the sound of the dead fish squishing at each bump and turn.
Finally, she learned to tune it out. Or rather, she simply became too tired to care...
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Author's Note
I'm not sure where I heard the idea that fish don't have soul, I thought it was a lyric in Nirvanas Something in the Way ,, but the actual lyrics go "it's okay to eat fish, 'cus they don't have any feelings." Same principle, but a different wording.
Whether that's true or not, I'll leave for the readers to decide, but it's fascinating to talk to vegetarians and find out what they would or wouldn't eat. A vegetarian of my acquaintance has said they'd still eat oysters, since they are going with "no central nervous system"-rule. A lot of it depends on if you're vegetarian for health reasons, taste reasons or moral reasons.
This is another chapter where Trixie is acting... ethically iffy. I'm not intending to portrait her as evil or anything, just trying to be honest about the tough decisions and nasty thoughts you can slip into sometimes. That's one thing I like about slice of life, these unguarded moments. If I could write a fic of a character picking her nose with their tounge, I probably would...
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LAIDIES and GENTLECOLTS! Welcome to the GREAT and POWERFUL Trixie's AMAZING and EXTRAORDINARY magic show, where the great and powerful Trixie will DAZZLE and CONFOUND you with tricks NEVER SEEN BEFORE by pony-eyes! the GREAT and POWERFUL Trixie will step into the cage of DEATH which will be suspended in the air by Trixie's lovely assistant.... which I don't have!
Trixie's notebook is the graveyard where capital letters go to die. On these cluttered pages, she built up a world of mystique and magic, of death-defying stunt and seemingly impossible conjuring. It was a world where individual's will triumphed over matter, where the heroic tales of yore was born again into a caped stage-mare. And it was a world that seemed awfully distant once she looked up from the pages and soaked in the surroundings.
Her mind might wander from city to city, from one street-corner to the next, But to actually get there, she had to travel trough the “flyover” parts of Equestria. The parts most ponies only see when flying from one town to the next, either by their own accord or in a hot air balloon. The roads belonged to gypsies, hobos, merchants and hustlers, and Trixie fancied herself a little of each...
At first it seemed like the world consisted of nothing but fields and orchards as she wandered on the paved roads leading from Canterlot. Then the paved road turned into a dirt road which turned into a muddy trail and suddenly she found herself in the Everfree forest.
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Author's Note
It was about time I did something with Trixie. I seem to be mildly obsessed with vagrancy, so it was only a matter of time before I did something with Trixie travelling the country.
