I looked at our daughter sleeping soundly in the maternity ward. Her wings fluttered as she slept and I once again found myself wondering just how she got those. “You’re sure you didn’t accidentally have a one-night stand with somepony?” Vinyl asked, standing next to me. After the birth, we had both gotten several hours of sleep before meeting with our friends and family who had arrived to wish us well. Apparently, they had gone to several wrong hospitals due to the admittedly slap-dash nature of our pregnancy plans in Manehattan. Had this been in Ponyville, it would have been a like a well-oiled machine springing into motion.

“Absolutely positive,” I said, laughing at Vinyl’s joke. “My paternal grandmother was a pegasus, and I suppose that carried over to our daughter. It’s admittedly unlikely, but then our lives are a series of unlikely events.”

“So… no secret affairs then?” Vinyl asked as I leaned against her. After the last twenty-four hours, it was nice to have somepony to lean against while I regained my strength. Something told me I’d need it during the next two decades or so.

“None that I can recall,” I said before frowning. “We still need to come up with a name for her though. I don’t think we can just refer to her as ‘our daughter’ for much longer.”

“Yeah,” Vinyl said, nodding while keeping her eyes on our daughter. “I’m sure we can think of something, I mean, how hard is it to come up with a name.”

“It’s not hard to come up with a name, but it’s incredibly difficult to come up with a good name. I think we have something with the word racket though.” Something Racket. Winged Racket? No. Rebel Racket? Definitely not, something told me she was already going to be difficult enough. I didn’t need to encourage it in her name. Racket. Racket. Racket. Something Racket.

“Hey,” Vinyl said, pulling me out of my head. “You still worried about being a mom?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ll have you with me, so what is there to worry about? Besides, I really don’t think she can be any more difficult than you were.” It would be close, but our daughter’s mind wouldn’t be influenced by a corrupted age potion, so that was… something.

“So we’re cool right?” Vinyl asked while my mind turned over potential names.

“Of course,” I said. “I think you more than redeemed yourself yesterday.”

“Amazing how strange genetics are,” my father said as he and the rest of my family entered the room. “Never would’ve guessed we were carrying around a pegasus gene in us for two generations. Still strange that she’d have wings even though Vinyl doesn’t have any pegasi in her family tree.”

“It’s actually not that unlikely,” Lyra said. “Due to a weird quirk of pony genetics, each gene for determining race is kind of dominant. Like, the earth pony gene prevents the pegasus gene from being expressed, while the pegasus gene prevents the unicorn gene from being expressed. There are a bunch of other factors in play when determining that stuff to allow for greater pony diversity, but I’m guessing since Vinyl is purebred unicorn, her unicorn gene got cancelled out by your pegasus gene.”

I frowned, trying to visualize just what she was saying. Pegasus beat unicorn, earth pony beat pegasus, so did unicorn beat earth pony? “Does that mean we can’t have an earth-pony daughter?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, it’s possible if you have a few other genes, but… considering Vinyl hasn’t had an earth pony in the family tree for a long time, it’s really really unlikely. Like, I’d bank on winning the lottery before that happens.” Dammit. For some reason, the fact that we couldn’t have a daughter that was like me was more distressing than it should’ve been.

“Oh, she’s so beautiful,” Bon-Bon said, walking up to the window. “You two must be so happy right now.” We both nodded. “Lyra, do you think we could start working on a daughter of our own soon? We aren’t getting any younger.”

“Sure!” Lyra said, smiling. “There’ve been a few experiments on socialization that I thought would be interesting and–”

“We are not conducting experiments on our theoretical daughter.” Lyra opened her mouth to object, but Bon-Bon cut her off. “Not even experiments you insist are benign, especially since the last test you assured me was harmless involved a monkey’s paw and almost ruined our friends’ marriage.”

“Alright,” she said. “Still, I guess having a daughter would be kind of cool.”

Bon-Bon sighed at that. “‘Kind of cool’ is not a ringing endorsement for us having a daughter, Lyra. They aren’t pet rocks.”

“Wait, I’m sorry,” Vinyl said, “does Lyra actually think pet rocks are cool?”

“They are!” Lyra said as Bon-Bon just nodded. “They’re rocks, but they’re also pets. How awesome is that?”

“But–” Vinyl said before Bon-Bon shook her head.

“Don’t… don’t engage her on this, you have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes,” Bon-Bon said. I smiled as my friends and wife entered into a conversation about the various merits of a pet rock.

“So,” my mother said, walking up next to me. “Have you two decided on a name yet?”

I shook my head. “We’re thinking of something involving the word ‘racket,’ but beyond that, we have no idea.”

“Well, her coat is a lovely shade of red. Have you considered naming her after that?”

“No,” I said, running the word around in my head. Red. Red. Red. Red Racket. It worked.

“Vinyl,” I said, calling her attention away from the conversation about pet rocks. “I think I have the name for our daughter.”

Author's Notes:

And we are done. Thirty one days. Thirty one chapters. Seventy-six thousand words. It was fun and I hope you all enjoyed this little experiment. See you all for my next irregularly scheduled update, and if you will be at the Baltimare Baltimore Convention Center this weekend, I will see you there. I will also be doing a little post-mortem for this story after the weekend is over.