literature

EQD WTG #018: Dirty New World

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The ground is crumbly and black, with a few stalks of brittle, grey grass clinging on, spanning the gap between the stinking oily river and the potholed road that leads to a wooden door, set into the sooty brick wall. The air here is thick and carries a smell of metal and acid, with a hint of many burnt things.

The sky could be blue, or it could be silvery-black, or even bloody, gorey red – the filthy clouds and boiling fog make it hard to tell, and in any case, the noise behind the great wall never stops, never sleeps. And what a noise it is – a pounding, a screaming, a hissing, the groans of ogres and the snoring of a dying dragon, with the steps of uncounted hooves and that loudest sound of all, the silence, that silence of grey bones and yellowing teeth, gritted, and the drops of black-dotted sweat over rust and discarded slag, the silence never stops, never stops deafening the ponies walking in trapped circles behind that wall.

Behind the wall, behind the door, lies an alley – a dank canyon full of glutinous puddles, smelling of decay and the rot of the present past. On both sides, a great wall rises up, tapering and louring, with small, cracked or dingy windows, until the fog begins to swallow its heights.

Against one wall stands a rusted skip, full of the rotting and unwanted, and against it leans a pony, her bones sharp and her coat scabbed. Occasionally, she coughs, and then brings up a gob of bile to join the nearest puddle. If anypony approaches, she will give a wheezing hiss and gaze with glowering, fading eyes; her twilight must be solitary in its squalor.

Next to her is a rust-webbed, double-sided door, with a broken lock. Behind it lies a river of flowing glass.

Have you ever seen liquid glass? It isn't at all like a mountain stream, like you might think; cold and sprightly and oh, so pretty as it gushes. No, liquid glass is red and yellow, and flecked with hadean black; and it slumps in its course, and sets, and flows turgidly wherever it is forced, and breathes foul, acidic fumes that burn eyes and scald lungs.

The ponies that stir it with long, charred poles have eyes red and sore, and blink, and breathe with the rasp of moving rock. But they stand, and they stir, and dry tears drop onto the molten river as it ambles malevolently by, and drips, and complains down a chute into a heavy trough.

Long-handled spoons fish it out into cups, and long-handled pots are emptied into it, and new, colourful steam rises into the fevered eyes of the workers, and they screw up, gasp, and deliver the cups – to the furnace, the blow-pipes, the emptying lungs of a century of ponies, their breath straining to make one more vase, one more ornament, one more pretty, colourful, elegant thing for a coffee table or shop window, and when it is finished, the next cup comes, and the bellows howl again as wave after wave of treasures cools under a fan and rolls out to be packed and sent off for shipping.

And the crates rise, towed aloft by carrier pegasoids, up to the rafters, the shafts, the skylights, and out – into the stale, musty, polluted air, to the rooftop tram that rattles from building to building, factory to workhouse, from tomb to dust-burning tomb. And the earthtreader throws the little lever, and the tracks scream, and the rusty, grimy-headlit, spark-spitting caterpillar-train shoots off, down a twisting curve and a stomach-breaking dip, and past the next bricken behemoth, with its leaden and spider-graven windows.

Behind the windows rises a cacophony of cracks, of thumps, of banging, as hammers and stamps rush down upon the sheets of fire-born metal, and stamp ingots, break blocks, make the ceiling ring once, twice and again with the rage of emotionless steel. The ponies here work by sight alone – their ears surrendered to the crashing and the rending ages ago, and they have ceased to blink when the titanic blow of a hammer falls on the metal. And again, the lines end in crates ands neat boxes, pulled out of the maw of the outside world by strong ponies on carts of iron and oil, with wheels that scar the concrete ground in flaky black.

And across the channel of vile mist, blue fire burns on a legion of orbs – lightning, jumping from atom to atom, discharging madly, furiously into the brackish air. On a productive day, the bolts can kill a pony at twenty paces when they leap to their doom in a neutral ground, and hit somepony at the wrong time in the wrongest of places. It is waste – it can go, there is plenty more; it crackles along the lines and runs along its conduits, seeking out the tartarean devices that suck it greedily so that they can rend in peace.

Once in a while, a spear of lightning will spring up and assault the chimneys, the clambering smokestacks that pour forth their etching waste, that roils up and springs from a cauldron of bubbling fluid. The ponies that watch these cauldrons quiver and jerk as they watch the dials, the infinity of lights and numbers, and switch the lightning, and open and close the hatches, as the brew flows down the pipes, down into the great vats, where it is boiled and frozen and mixed with neutral powders, and compressed into little, colourful tablets – pretty to look at, like playful candy, and wrapped in blistered packs, and silently full of the power of life and death.

And these, too, are sent out into the world – sent in compact, professional boxes and dispensed to those creatures that now stumble and bellow up the narrow, spiralling ramp, one pricking another's hide, fat and loaded with a lifetime of bulking out, and so, so many colourful little pills, and as they finally reach the top, a meteor strikes, just behind the ear, where the skull is softest, and all the memories of lush, creamy meadows are gone forever as they are hoisted and hooked, heads and legs dingle-dangle, and sent whirring off into the rooms where the starving unicorned stick and pull and stick and pull, ichor dripping into the drain and thence into the turbid river, knives red and blunting by the hour, and minds blank and blunting by the minute.

The former creatures will be treated, with a miraculous formula that lets ponies eat anything, even that once-forbidden ambrosia that crowds this pillar in the sea, and then wrapped in cellophane and shipped – off to Canterlot and Fillydelphia, to Baltimare and Las Pegasus, and even abroad to Koom, Fance and far Griffony. And on the boxes will be two faces, of a pair of handsome young stallions, one with a moustache, both with straw hats, both with a green glow upon their horns that nopony noticed until it was too late and it had come.

And on the unwalled side of this brick inferno lie the partwork towers, wind whistling at night through the unbridged beams. And now the whistles cry to the heavens, and the bay doors open, and columns of blank-eyed and bone-broken ponies will set out and ascend – back to the damp and freezing apartments, to the overcrowded rooms, full of the too-young and the too-old and the soon-to-die, to the meagre portions on a cracked plate and the swirling happiness in a cold bottle, to rage and misery and coughing and nightmares and an end that never comes.

And from the windows of the apartments, some can see the black and decaying ground, poisoned by the dripping and eating and roiling water, and the sun that can rise or set, but will never light another life, and, far off, maybe a golden sliver of what might be an untouchable hope of relief; and, nearer than all that, they see the gate, with its proud sign and alicorn-statue wardens.


PONYVILLE

Proud Partner of Flim Flam Industries

Per laboram nostram satiatur Equestria


And they sing.


And we're living here in Ponyville

And the fumes are making ponies ill

As the dirty smoke begrimes the sky

Black rivers flow, pegasoids fly

Smokestacks tower like the giants of old

And we trudge along and do as we're told

And the rusty gears are grinding sparks

Pistons hiss fear, steam in the dark

As we work our shift in Ponyville

And our backs bend to a higher will

And the ashen grass was always grey


Shift bell rings out over Ponyville

And the ponies walking home from the mill

Know that they'll be up again by four

Bellies all void, hooves full sore

And the tenements are damp and decayed

But each month, the rent still has to be paid

And the wind blows cold upon the height

Chilling the dawn, freezing the night

As the moon shines down on Ponyville

And the diggers make more graves to fill

And the ashen grass was always grey


Foals are screaming in their beds

Blood is pounding in our heads

And the generators crackle like fire

Celestia, this town's a stinking mire


One more sunrise over Ponyville

Cut your organs out to pay the next bill

And the ashen grass was always grey

And the ashen grass has died away

As we live to Death in Ponyville

I'm back! Finally! How did I manage to miss two WTGs in a row? Man, University is taking it out of me.

Anyhoo, today is the First of May, a day associated world-wide with the rights of workers and labourers. And since I'm a bit of a leftie and have a thing about nightmarish factories, I decided to give you one. The challenge was to write a piece assuming that somepony had been imbued by the Inspiration Manifestation spell, and I chose Flim and Flam - if anypony in the canon MLP universe would build an Industrial Revolution factory town in Equestria, I'm pretty sure it would be them.

I hope this one doesn't twist any sensibilities too far, but I did try to base it on things that go on in the real world. Especially that last one. I'm not saying that everyone has to be a vegetarian - in fact, I eat meat. I like meat. But I'm convinced that it doesn't have to come through a factory, or be laced with antibiotics. And I also believe that it's possible for us, the ten percent, to live a life in reasonable comfort without making this beautiful world a lake of fire for the ninety percent.

Okay, enough rambling. Time for the credits. Oh, and whoever guesses the title and singer of the song at the end gets a free sonnet on a subject of their own choice.

This has been a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic belongs to Lauren Faust and Hasbro.
© 2014 - 2024 4ScarfAce4
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