Detective Pony When I Feel Like It

1 month ago

OH THE HORRORTERROR!!!

This user is literally a Horrorterror.

@inspectorEquine[IE]

can fix all this, Pawnee. You will give the world a fresh start by scraping it clean. Flattening it, and becoming the Eve of that new old world, its progenitor. But instead of eating the fruit, you must refuse it. You must regain your innocence; all of our innocence. You, Pawnee Sanders, are the New Ape who Re-Sands the world.” “‘Re-sands?’ Pawnee asked. “Like, using sandpaper? A bit of a stretch.” “Look,” said Anna, “I did the best I could with what I had. Like I said, ‘palimpsest’ comes from the Greek palin, again; and psao, I scrape. Scrape again. Re-sand. It works, it’s good enough.” “Okay, fine,” Pawnee said. “Let me see if I can figure out the next one: Anna Harley, your name anagrams to… um… Hen à la Yarn? Because you… knit us together? And you make a nest—” “No, I was done with the dyslexia thing. I didn’t do one for my own name.” “Oh,” Pawnee sulked, feeling a bit put off. “It’s okay, Pawnee,” Pam whispered. “I was going to say that they were Anna-grams. Your thing was smarter than mine.” Pawnee smiled inwardly, knowing this to be true. Anna-grams. Jesus. “Well, Pam,” Anna said, hopping off the stump, “ready to head out? You know how to get there, right?” Pam nodded. “Yes, I do. But I don’t know where ‘there’ is.” “Simple,” Anna said as she picked up her fallen mechanical arm from the snow, looked it over, and tossed it aside. “We’re going to the end of the book.” ——— Jeanne Betancourt looked up at her two companions. Acorn was staring at the Lethe looking pensive, while Minos was sulking, tail curled tightly around him, at his lack of control over the story’s structure. Jeanne waited for Acorn to speak; he did not. “…So that’s their plan,” she eventually said. “Not so much a plan as a half-baked English dissertation,” Minos grumbled. “If so,” Betancourt replied, “Anna needs to give one hell of a defense.” “Now what she said makes sense,” Acorn said to himself, looking at the river intently. He turned to face the other two judges. “It’s a physical place,” he said. “The ‘end of the book’ that they’re heading to. It’s literally the final page of that—” pointing his hoof at the paperback on Jeanne’s lap “—book. Right before the back cover. And our job is to clear a path for them.” Jeanne Betancourt immediately flipped to the last page. She squinted at it, held it up to the light, trying to see through the blank sheet of paper pasted over it, but it was no use. It was completely obscured. “We need to get that that off,” Acorn said to her. “Restore the original text of that one page so the girls can make their changes, resetting the whole book.” Minos flopped onto his back in a sunbeam and yawned. “Sound like a straightforward assignment,” he said. “We just dip that page into the Lethe; I assume that’s why you brought us here, yes? In Purgatorio, passing through those waters erased Dante’s memories of his sins so that he could enter heaven. And since lately Anna has been developing a rough metaphor in which the altered text is equated to original sin, dunking that page in the river should make the obscuring sheet of paper… slough off, dissolve, whatever.” Another yawn. “An insultingly simple errand. Where does the judging come in?” “Because we could dip the whole book in,” Jeanne Betancourt said. She turned to Acorn. “Right?” Acorn nodded. “Exactly. Anna’s scheme is risky. For one thing, it all hinges on a single choice: we could do everything to set the stage, but one moment of hesitation and it all falls apart. More importantly, I suspect that Anna’s planning something she didn’t tell me. I bet she’ll try to protect herself and the other girls from the reset. Try to drag them through to the other side. (The other side of the Other Side of the Other Side?) And if they manage to get through…” “Who knows what else would get through with them,” Betancourt finished. “So we can either help the girls, knowing that they might fail; or, if we decide the book’s too dangerous or toxic to allow even the chance of its survival, we can take the choice out of their hands, destroy it ourselves, and with it, any slim chance they might have of survival.” “Theirs would be a soft reset,” Minos said. “Ours, if we choose to implement it, would be a hard one. Fair enough.” Jeanne Betancourt took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Okay,” she said at last, “let’s judge this sucker.” If you want to read every single word of their argument and slog through all the tedious back-and-forths, please see “Appendix B: Record of the Arbiters’ Discussion Oh Wait This Appendix Doesn’t Effing Exist Because Nobody Wants to Trudge Through All That Bullshit, So Here’s the Highlights.” Betancourt began by summarizing the original plot of Detective Pony. They all agreed that it wasn’t an artistic triumph, but a kid who liked ponies would probably enjoy it. Minos reminded them of Dirk’s earlier argument: that his text was better because it was more interesting, more experimental, more daring. Yes, they decided, it was all of those things. But did that make it better? #DetectivePony #ThinkingAboutHer