Salt was salt. Until it became something else. Or perhaps, it was seen another way. Dim contemplated the use of lysergic acid diethylamide, his reliable means of peering into the magic spectrum and maybe having a better look at salt, giving it a thorough examination. Perhaps seeing it in a new way would help him unlock its secrets. There were secrets there, secrets that would only be discovered by those brave enough to go looking.

The brim of his hat wobbled in the strong wind, but Dim himself seemed untouched by the gusts. To any passing casual observer, something was very wrong with the forces of nature, as it was only Dim’s hat that was affected by the wind, but not a strand of his mane nor his tail flew astray. The overall effect upon the crew of minotaurs was quite unnerving, and they gave their strange passenger a wide berth.

Ponies had an unusual relationship with salt, requiring quite a lot of it. The more magical a pony tended to be, the more salt they tended to require. This was something that Dim had learned when he began taking alchemy lessons as a small colt. When he was older, he had learned about crystal ponies after their re-emergence, and they had outrageous salt requirements—rivaling that of unicorns, no less—suggesting that they were perhaps the most magical ponies of all. For most, it was merely a passing curiousity, to an alchemist it was just one fact among many, but to Dim, who was fishing for ideas, it tickled his imagination.

Salt purified magic and Dim was certain that crystal ponies had secrets. If only he could study them somehow. Oh, not dissect them—that would, indeed, be dreadful—but to live among them, to observe them, study their diet, and observe the state of magic around them. An alchemist’s interest lurked deep within the confines of Dim’s grey matter. Ponies had strange ties to magic, most of which were still unknown, still unstudied.

Alchemy was really just thaumaton physics, just as chemistry was electron physics.

“Dim!”

Hearing Blackbird’s voice, he lifted his head and allowed a few grains of salt to slip away into the wind. The wind tugged on Blackbird’s mane, feathers, and tail, and being a creature of the air, she seemed happy. Her happiness was a precious thing… a treasure, and as Chantico would be so quick to remind him, precious things were precious things.

“Dim, we need your help.”

“Pirates?” he asked as he focused upon Blackbird.

“No—”

“Sky jellies?” A quick scan of the horizon revealed nothing.

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, out with it then,” Dim demanded as his patience ran out.

“We need you to patch a pipe—”

“We?”

“Manfrit and I.” Blackbird lowered her haunches down and had a seat in a position that was distinctly feline, tucking her talons in between her hind legs. “The pipe is part of a retrofitting and it is inaccessible to either of us, because some dope ran it through a ventilation duct. You… you’re a little pony, so we kinda wanna stuff you into the ventilation shaft so you can fix the pipe.”

Dim’s lip curled back into a magnificent, majestic, aristocratic sneer. This sounded an awful lot like manual labour, of a sort. Exile though he might be, vagabond though he was, some things were beneath him. Still… it might make Blackbird happy, and it would give him leverage to use against her when he was hungry for scrambled eggs. On the other hoof, he could just tell her to fix him some eggs, and he was rather certain that she would.

“When you sneer like that, it makes me want to pinch your cute, cuddly little cheeks.”

Behind his smoked glass goggles, Dim’s eyes blazed with murder and he did his best to bore a hole through Blackbird by staring at her. His cheeks were not to be pinched. There was much he would tolerate in his partnership with this commoner… this… disgusting primitive, but he drew the line at cheek-pinching.

“You know, Dim, you have dimples. You do… it’s kinda cute. But you can’t see them when you’re smiling, like on normal ponies, no. You’re dimples only show up when your sneering, scowling, frowning, grimacing, or glowering. It’s like your face was made to have an upside-down smile. I kinda want to boop-boop your dimples, Dim.”

So this was what it was like to be in love… one was filled with mercy where there should be rage and fury. Love was an odd concept, a confusing state of being where one felt affection at a moment when the only rational response was flaming death or disintegration. How very peculiar love was, and how weak and ineffectual it made him.

Dim was a pony defined by disproportionate responses.

“You want me to crawl into a dirty vent?” he asked, hoping to clarify things.

“Um,” she ummed, and then she hemmed and hawed a bit. “It’s also quite wet, from the steam leak and a bit rusty. That’s actually how we found the leak. We found water dripping from the vent opening and the state of the vent is kind of a dead giveaway.”

“I see.” Dim’s voice was one of surprising calm and it revealed nothing of his emotion.

Leaning in until she was almost nose to nose, Blackbird asked, “What is it that you want in return?”

“Hmm.” Dim contemplated this query and began to cogitate suitable answers.

“I’ll fix you eggs,” Blackbird offered as one of her perfect eyebrows arched. “I’ve already checked the galley. They have eggs. Still fresh. Just picked up with the rest of the cargo.”

“Fine.” Dim’s response was difficult to hear over the wind. “You have a deal.”

“And you, you have a nice meal coming. I’ll try to make it special.”

First things first: Dim cast a spell to protect him from burning himself. The vent was a cramped space, hot, and had a live steam pipe ran through it. Squinting, he tried to peer inside and the humid, dirty air tickled his lungs. He wanted to cough, but doing so would hurt his throat. In silence, he pulled off his hat, his cloak, and everything else he was wearing, save his goggles, because it was just far too bright for his eyes.

“Dim, be careful, I don’t want you getting cut, or scraped… I’m having second thoughts about this, actually. Manfrit, Dim has very thin skin and bleeding problems.”

The big minotaur shrugged in response, but had nothing to say.

“I’ll be fine,” Dim said to Blackbird. “Now lift me up to the opening so I can do what needs to be done.”

“Okay, Dim… but please, be careful. If something happens to you, I’ll feel really bad about this.”

If something happened to him—if—Dim had already planned it to milk it for all that it was worth.

For the first time in his life, Dim realised that he might be somewhat claustrophobic. This was a dreadful realisation to have when one was crawling on their belly, wiggling through a duct like an inchworm with a steam-filled pipe mere inches above them. He felt ahead with his telekinesis and found nothing that might snag his tender flesh, which left him both relieved and disappointed.

So, this is what disgusting primitives did for a living. Dim did not like it, not one bit, being in cramped, dirty confines such as this one is what made primitives so disgusting in the first place. He would have to find some way of getting clean on this ship and he wondered how bad he was at weather manipulation spells. It had been a while since he had practiced, because they seemed so common and mundane. He had other spells, far more important spells, that he had prioritised for practice, such as conjuring and concentrating raw hydrogen.

These things were complicated and required a great deal of practice. If one got lazy and failed to stay in practice, one might go to conjure hydrogen and get hydrogen sulfide instead, and that was bad. Dim had done that once when he was younger and his mother had punished him for such lax, offensive-smelling magery. There was just no way to apologise for such a thing and one was forced to live with the shame of it, the bitter, degrading shame of failure.

Ahead of him, he saw it. The pipe joined together and there was a curl of steam shooting out of the spot where the ends of two pipes were fitting into the connector thingy. That was easy enough to fix, as having two sections of pipe at this point was foolish. Reaching out with his magic, he turned the brass pipe into a malleable liquid form, shaped it like clay, then turned it back into a solid that was smooth and perfect.

That was it. Rather ambivalent about whatever it was that he just did, Dim realised that he had just used the spells of a common tradespony for their intended purpose. He had not melted metal for the sake of war or battle, but had performed the spell in exactly the way it was designed for. He had done manual labour—well, by unicorn standards—and now he feared that he might have the stink of physicality about him. Where would this inanity end? Smithing? Farrier work? Cleaning? Housework? Cleaning dirty windows? Sweeping the street? Thankfully, he had his cutie mark already, lest he end up with some distasteful brand of shame.

As much as it bothered him to conclude this, he now had some understanding of his mother’s rage at learning such mundane, common spells, tradespony spells. He had done so out of defiance, thinking that there was some greater mystery within the simplest of spells, or maybe he had done it to drive his mother to distraction… but now that he was older and a little bit wiser, he saw the danger of what he had done. He might have earned himself a cutie mark as a pipefitter, or a plumber, or whatever it was that disgusting primitives did for a living. Suffering a simple twist of fate, he might have become like them, destined to be a dullard.

Still, would it have been so bad?

Yes, Dim surmised after but a second. It would have been dreadful being mundane and not having the means to go off on some grand, epic adventure and find Blackbird’s mother, Starling. Still, fixing a pipe like this wasn’t so bad, not really, it was fulfilling in its own way and he could see how a common, garden variety unicorn might be proud about getting paid for doing this and making a career of it.

This is what he wanted to protect in others that could not protect themselves. Perhaps knights and wizards should do manual labour to have a better understanding of what it was they were protecting. That said, a wizard that gave up all of his time for study so he could garden was utterly useless. There, at that moment, crammed into a dirty, dusty duct, Dim saw the crux of the problem, or at least he thought he did. For one glorious moment, it was like the clouds had parted and his vision had cleared. But that moment passed and he was filled with a million new questions.

Distraught, Dim let heave a sigh in the dark and regretted the very nature of enlightenment. This was as good of a place as any to do a bit of thinking. Wait, what was he thinking? No it wasn’t. Hissing in contempt, Dim began to back himself out of the vent.

Back up on deck, Dim had a vacant stare, focusing upon nothing at all from behind his goggles, because there wasn’t much to see. The ground was beneath the clouds and up here, all that could be seen was blue. The air was thinner here, but not too thin, and the ship made good speed at this altitude.

His experience in the vent had changed him, but he could not say how. How could such simple things, such mundane things, how could they be so profound? Were the great mysteries of life hidden in the most banal of acts? What happiness did the disgusting primitives have that he did not? Puffing away on his cigarette, Dim tried to compare these feelings he had now to the feelings that he had on that terrible night when he had and Blackbird had been betrayed.

He had felt so alive that night, laying waste to everything around him. Free to act without constraint, he had been able to unleash the full potential of his magic and try new things. Dreadful things. Terrible, terrific things. Ears twitching, Dim could remember the taste of the air that night, sharp, bitter, and rather metallic. The heavy stench in the air after the dynamite had exploded, mixing, mingling with the stench of burned hair, feathers, and fat rendering from crispified, blackened flesh.

“Ship!” a voice cried out, pulling Dim from his thoughts. “Ship off of the starboard bow!”

Turning about, Dim could never remember which direction was starboard and he wished that such things could be announced in plain language. Turning about, he saw something off to his left, but it wasn’t his left, no, when Dim got his bearings he saw that the approaching vessel was off to the ship’s right. These things were confusing, but Dim didn’t have time to think about them, as he had a ship to potentially blow up.

How hard could it be?

Captain Melvin came stomping out on deck, pulled out a telescope, and had a look. After a moment of peeping, he pulled the telescope away from his eye and chuckled. Dim did not relax his guard, but he did wait for orders, he awaited clear instructions before he let go and filled the skies with fire.

“Prepare for rum, sodomy, and the lash… Captain Jolie Rouge is coming by for a visit!”

Author's Notes:

Hooray for rum, sodomy, and the lash! Yay!