Indigo

By Alaborn

Standard disclaimer: This is a not for profit fan work. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is copyright Hasbro, Inc. I make no claim to any copyrighted material mentioned herein.

Chapter 1

Blue Twilight was seriously regretting his choice to enroll in Professor Rose Water’s creative writing course.

The young unicorn stallion was a computer science major at Royal Canterlot University, and with a cutie mark of a circuit board, wanted nothing more than to design new and better computers. Two decades ago, he might have been able to design something out of a workshop in his parents’ basement, but those days were long gone. Today, getting a college degree was a necessary step to doing what his cutie mark was telling him.

And getting a college degree required a balanced slate of prerequisite courses in subjects Blue Twilight didn’t care much about. He could have met his Equestrian language requirement with a standard composition course, but writing lengthy term papers wasn’t appealing. Creative writing sounded more fun.

But creative writing was a lot harder than he thought. Each assignment was devilishly difficult. The professor liked to say that restrictions breed creativity, but for Blue Twilight, restrictions bred frustration. The first assignment didn’t seem that bad, writing a 500 word story about a chance meeting between two ponies. Then the assignment was changed to cut the story down to 300 words, then 200, then 100, all while preserving the elements of the original story. It was far harder than it seemed.

Another assignment, where the stallions were asked to write a story from the perspective of a mare, and vice versa, on a topic specific to mares, proved to be uncomfortable. A later assignment, writing a story without using the most common vowel in the Equestrian language, was an excruciating exercise in using a thesaurus and writing stilted phrases.

This week’s lecture was looking up, however. The subject for the lecture was listed on the syllabus as “Out of Place”, and the readings were interesting. Blue Twilight thought back to his favorite series of books as a colt, the Buck Charger series, with a stallion from the present hurtled into a future world of space battles and epic adventure. He thought about writing something similar for this week’s assignment.

Blue Twilight sat at his desk in Professor Rose Water’s classroom and pulled out his notebook. He took a ball-point pen in his aura and clicked it idly as he waited for the class to begin.

The professor, a smallish earth pony stallion with a rose coat and curly silver mane, entered the classroom just as the clock reached 11:00. “Good morning, class!” he said in his high-pitched voice. “I hope you had a good weekend, and recharged your creative juices, because it’s time for another creative writing class!”

Blue Twilight groaned. Every week, it was the same greeting. Why wasn’t the creative writing professor more creative than that?

“Let’s talk about this week’s readings. We’ll start with a classic in the genre, Lightning Strikes, where the protagonist, White Spark, goes to sleep a unicorn, and wakes up a pegasus. Or did he? Raise your hoof if you think he did change.”

Blue Twilight joined about half the class in raising his hoof. He could easily see the arguments against the proposition, though.

“The author leaves the answer to the question a mystery. In the beginning of the story, we see White Spark’s reaction to his new appearance. He sees old photographs, all showing him as a pegasus. He discovers he knows how to fly, and when he encounters a unicorn filly struggling with her magic, he finds he doesn’t know how to help her.

“On the other hoof, we see a glimpse of pegasus life through the character of White Spark’s marefriend, Black Wing. Note that White Spark lives on the ground, while Black Wing has a cloud house. Black Wing has the same foalhood pictures, but they are shown with feathers hanging from the frame. White Spark is shown as a pegasus, superficially, but seems to lack the normal pegasus experiences.”

“So what happened?” one student asked.

“It’s left to the reader to determine,” the professor replied.

“Magic would give the answer,” another student said.

“True, but remember that this story is the product of its times. The knowledge of a pony’s true nature, that form dictated by Harmony that can’t be changed by any means, even by the likes of Discord, has only been understood for about sixty years. If White Spark had his body and mind changed by magic, powerful magic could confirm that, but that was not known to the author. Broken Quill wrote this story not long after Discord freed himself and briefly changed the world before being recaptured and later reformed, and his letters show the experience led him to question the nature of the world.”

Professor Rose Water then held up the second reading. “Time Shift is another classic from the pulp era. Now, the ‘Twenty Winks’ archetype is a classic, but unlike more juvenile works like Buck Charger, the author subverts the archetype by creating a world where everything changes, but nothing changes.”

Blue Twilight groaned; it looked like writing a story similar to Buck Charger wasn’t going to be a good idea after all.

“Time Turner, a humble clock maker, wakes up after being in a coma for 20 years,” the professor continued. “But he doesn’t feel older, and in his village, ponies are older, but nothing else seems to have changed. ‘Where is the latest and greatest clock?’ he muses.

“The rest of the story, where it’s revealed that Time Turner is a retired secret agent and he’s a prisoner of the changelings, is pure pulp, but the setup, where Time Turner uses his knowledge to pierce through the deception is an excellent example of a pony feeling out of place.

“Finally, we have our last story; it’s one that you might have thought would fit better in our Nightmare Night week. It’s a ghost story, true, but one that doesn’t read like a ghost story. The story shows a family of crystal ponies visiting a memorial to those harmed by King Sombra, with a focus on the two foals, Flint Spark and Rose Quartz. But at the end, when the father comes across the name Rose Quartz on the memorial and says it was the name of his little sister, who died decades ago, you are forced to reread the story. Rose Quartz is a ghost, and is never shown interacting with the other characters, but the clever writing conceals that fact until the big reveal. Consider the techniques seen in this story as you plan your own work.

“As always, the best submissions will be considered for the school’s bimonthly literary journal, with the best stories winning a small prize. As a reminder, these stories must not reference any other copyrighted works. Given that it’s Out of Place week, I’m used to seeing stories about ponies interacting with the dragons of Emberfire, or the humans from the Swift Current series, or the sparkly sparkly changelings of Twilight’s Heart. Now, there’s nothing saying you can’t write one of these stories, though writing a good one is even harder. But they’re not eligible for the journal.

“Now, who wants to talk about today’s subject?”

The remainder of the class was spent in discussion, as usual, but Blue Twilight spent the time bemoaning another impossible assignment.

Blue Twilight sat at his computer, word processing program open, staring at the blank document. His hooves rested on the two circles of the hoofboard, which was normally enough to get him to start writing, but no words came. Most unicorns had switched to keyboards, where each letter and number had its own small key, but Blue Twilight had learned to type on a hoofboard, and was fast at moving the twin discs to key letters.

A world where the hoofboard was never invented, and all computers used keyboards? It certainly fit the professor’s suggestion of writing about a small change, but trying to create a reason why led to some unicorn-dominated society, and that was even more of a cliché than Buck Charger.

After some more staring, Blue Twilight closed the word processing program and pushed the hoofboard aside. He had other homework to attend to.

Blue Twilight opened his biology textbook. The chapter for this week’s lecture dealt with the interaction of harmony magic with the biology of ponies and other species, which was an interesting subject. What would pony society be like if the ratio of female to male births were 1-1 instead of 3-1? What would happen if harmony didn’t shape the pony’s tribe, and many ponies were unhappy with being an earth pony, pegasus, or unicorn? All interesting ideas, but they struck him as too broad for his creative writing assignment.

The problem set at the end of the chapter was busy work, regurgitating the material from the chapter, exactly the kind of work he didn’t like. He decided to put it off until later.

The assignment for his computer programming class was more interesting, an open-ended assignment with the only requirement being that the output made use of the 256-color palette of the Video Graphics Array card in the latest computers. Blue Twilight, of course, always had the latest computer, so he didn’t need to use the computer lab to do his work. And fortunately for him, the assignment wasn’t being graded on artistic talent.

The first idea he had was to create a program to blend colors together. Draw three circles, and then change the shade of the pixels in between to shift from one color to another. He then pictured an input function, allowing the user to move the circles, and then automatically shift the color patterns. It wouldn’t require drawing detailed shapes, and the logic to shift colors was clear in his mind. He just needed to see the registers assigned to each color.

Blue Twilight referred to the full-color printout the class received in association with the assignment. It arranged the colors in a sixteen by sixteen grid, and gave the register for each, along with a name for the color. The stallion laughed at seeing all the color names. It was the rare stallion who could name that many colors; Blue Twilight could name maybe a dozen on a good day. He thought of himself as having a blue coat, and he didn’t really care if it was properly described as royal blue, azure, or whatever made up name fashion designers in Manehattan would use.

He fired up the compiler for the language being used in this class. He rested his hooves on the hoofboard and started writing his program.

When Blue Twilight glanced back at the printout, his eyes focused on one of the words. There, next to a dark blue color square, was the name indigo. He was sure he had never used that color name in his life, but for some reason, it was familiar. He knew indigo. But from where? The color was far too dark to match his coat, so there was no chance someone had called him an indigo colt.

He couldn’t focus on his assignment, not with the mystery distracting him. He searched his memories, but nothing came to him. He looked around his dormitory room.

There.

On the bookshelf, he had a framed photograph from his high school graduation. He stood there, wearing that stupid flat hat and gown, the green color clashing with his coat. He was flanked by his parents, and they were all smiling. But Blue Twilight focused on the backdrop. The photo was taken in front of a rainbow, brought in by the school for the graduation celebration. He thought indigo, and then thought rainbow.

But that was stupid. There was no indigo in a rainbow. Everypony knew the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The blue was bright, like Blue Twilight’s coat color. Six was the right number, an even number, a harmonious number. It balanced three warm colors and three cool colors. They fit perfectly on a color wheel, with the three primary colors making the three secondary colors. The six colors were associated with the six Elements of Harmony. Six was as it should be.

But what if rainbows weren’t associated with harmony?

Blue Twilight tried to imagine it. His eyes unfocused, and the rainbow in the photograph blurred, the colors merging into a spectrum, and he imagined indigo fitting in the rainbow.

He went to his computer, opened his word processing program, and wrote a line.

Something about rainbows always bothered Morning Dew.

For once, writing a story for Professor Rose Water’s class was fun. The words flowed from his mind and onto the virtual paper. He was happy with the results, a story about a pegasus working in the rainbow factory, constantly bothered by seeing a missing color in the rainbow, one that nopony else could sense. But it remained to see if the professor approved.

The professor always kept an even expression as he passed the papers back to the class. Blue Twilight would have no idea his fate until having the paper in his hooves. The professor dropped his paper on his desk, face down as always. With some trepidation, he turned it over.

He beamed as he saw A+ written on the paper.

After he finished distributing the papers, Professor Rose Water addressed the class. “There were two standout stories submitted for last week’s assignment, Indigo by Blue Twilight, and The Shadow in the Mirror by Shining Aura. You can see both in November’s literary journal.

It was a pretty good feeling.

And the twenty-five bit prize bought a lot of pizza.

Author's Notes:

This story is set an unspecified number of years in the future, where ponies' technology has advanced to roughly the level of Earth in the 1990s.

To aid in understanding, I am using mostly human terms for the technology. On the other hand, I recognize that many people here have never used things like Usenet.