Ask the Power Ponies

No, but Artist Mod’s tablet isn’t working, her house is under renovation and she’s been delving into the fandom in an attempt to get some help with this project. Not necessarily this blog, but with making the comics and potentially adapting it to audio, which is exciting for her. But right now she’s been confined to voice acting while she tries to get the space and cables she needs together to do art again. She can’t even draw in pencil and paper to tide you over because al her art supplies is buried or blocked because of the renovation. Without art the blog is on hiatus, but pretty much as soon as Artist Mod can start using her tablet again, the blog will come back too. If you guys want, while waiting for the art to return Artist Mod can share some of the other things she’s been doing here as like a progress update, but right now her priority is her house and her health, so the only things she can really share would be voice clips of her reading scripts or singing as characters from MLP proper that she’s been doing for fun. or little songs and things she wrote related to this project, but part of the point of the blog is to practice the artwork, so it is necessarily stalled.

We’ve not forgotten you! The building where we answered asks blew up and we had to move and setting up an Ask Area wasn’t high on our priority list. But Hum Drum got better at art and misses you guys so he really, REALLY wanted to do something for Hearts and Hooves Day.

Matterhorn: No, but if they did, we sincerely doubt it would work. For one, Marevelous was barred from answering this because she got very, very hostile about this point, it’s a fatphobic myth that making everyone gain weight will inherently make them less healthy or functional. For example, Fillisecond is actually shockingly heavy. Her bones are very dense from all the constant impact from running and she prefers to eat to the point of being fat because she will burn it off so quickly if she doesn’t have chances to stop to snack that she could get sick from hunger before she finishes. And Marevelous herself is massive. She weighs more than me and Zapp combined. You can argue that Zapp has bird bones, I’m ALL bone and her hair’s got to be at least a small pony on it’s own, but most of it is muscle and functional fat.

If this snack is so good and so devoid of nutritional value that everyone is bingeing to the point of constant cramps, lethargy, indigestion and gastrointestinal distress, and growing weaker and having side effects of major vitamin deficiencies because they don’t have room for any other foods, the weight gain alone is not going to be the thing crippling the city, disordered eating and malnutrition will be. But okay, say that happens, or, take it a step further and say that this delicious snack is a vehicle for a poison that is in small enough quantities that it doesn’t need to be registered by food safety guidelines but the food is being eaten in such high quantities that the city is slowly being poisoned. As a team, we’d probably still be able to take down the villain.

Fillisecond metabolizes both food and poison too quickly, she’d be functionally immune. Mistress Marevelous and Saddle Rager are both picky eaters who don’t like processed foods and mostly live off fresh fruit and vegetables. Saddle Rager even grazes if she trusts the grass isn’t laden with pesticides. They wouldn’t eat it in the first place. The three of them could handle this on their own if they really had to. Radiance might be distracted or foggy from withdrawal if she’s craving the snack, and that might make her constructs less useful, but she gets stopped by pain or Marevelous before she can hurt herself by overeating, so she’d still be helpful. Zapp, Hum Drum and I are all victims to massive sweet tooths and might be fully affected, but even if we gain enough weight to affect our mobility or eat poorly enough to wreck our health, Radiance can help us with her constructs, and Zapp’s and my powers don’t require terribly great mobility as long as I can aim and shoot and he can reach his amulet.

Saddle Rager: Duh. We’re hot.

Masked Matterhorn: Could you not? I can’t say for sure that crush is the right word, but yes, there are villains that certainly seem to take a shine to certain members of the team.

Saddle Rager: Matterhorn is charmingly terrible at being hit on and some villains thrive on that.

Matterhorn: Not just villains.

Saddle Rager: Hush, my love. He’s also very much a gentleman, and a scholar, so the jilted and cynical can hope there’s still a good stallion out there for them, and it could be him.

Matterhorn: It will not be me. Moving on. Mistress Marevelous gets all kinds of unwanted attention from horrible kings for some reason.

Saddle Rager: I think they either recognize a queen when they see one, or secretly want to be strangled in their sleep because they’re being crushed by the pressure of the crown.

Matterhorn: I doubt it. She was also doggedly provoked by the Cat’s Eye burglar for maybe two or three months when it was just Fillisecond and Marevelous. We know she was doing it to get Marevelous’s attention because, according to Marevelous, she shamelessly flirted throughout the chases. She also stopped once the team expanded and she was about as likely to get Radiance or Zapp  as Marevelous or Fillisecond, and she stopped actually stealing anything. She’d break in with something already bagged up, move something that was a similar shape and size out of sight and wait for Marevelous to show up before she’d attempt to leave the building. She’s shown up a couple of times since, but we’ve never actually caught her.

Saddle Rager: Oh, and she kind of does it to all of us, but Mane-iac is like weirdly obsessed with Marevelous in particular in a way that reads almost like a bitter ex or something, and none of us are totally sure why.

Zapp has a gift with henchponies, and we like to send him out to seduce some villains-

Matterhorn: We certainly do not like to.

Saddle Rager: Don’t be jealous- who seem inclined to flirt back and therefore are easier to distract with Zapp’s wiles. By making his one job flirting, we also keep him from getting distracted. It’s a perfect system.

Matterhorn: A perfectly flawed system. It never actually works. Who’s left, you?

Saddle Rager: Yeah. I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head. Maybe Long Face, but I think his idea of a crush is less a crush-crush and more idealizing someone as a potential cure for depression. 

He did that to Radiance too when she was nice to him.

And of course, Radiance gets the brunt of all the weird villain crushes because she’s just…

Matterhorn: Good at manipulating the emotionally damaged?

Saddle Rager: I was thinking more, “really hard not to fall in love with.” Part of why we let her get captured so much is that after a while it became pretty clear that it was safe to leave her alone with the bad guys. If the main villain doesn’t end up at least a little sweet on her, it’s because they didn’t actually interact with her; but when that happens, it’s because their accomplices or henchponies did, and they usually won’t let the main villain hurt her. She just kind of baseline cares about them, and she’s pretty and sweet and clever and thoughtful and, honestly, pretty close to a perfect companion. Like unless you’re immune to lovely ponies being lovely like Matterhorn here, you probably love her. But, notable example: One time Razzle and Dazzle decided to try hypnotizing her into being their lovely assistant.

It worked, she fully thought she was their assistant and forgot they were the bad guys, she wasn’t manipulating them or trying to get them to like her because she thought they were already her friends, but their plan fell apart anyway because they both ended up getting a crush on her and fighting over her so much that they lost focus on the actual scheme, we just had to come to the show and nab them. They’re inseparable. She ruined them by accident, making Masked Matterhorn wrong. She can manipulate them if she feels she has to, or if she knows they won’t like her and needs to figure out a way to stay safe, but usually she just talks to them. She-

Matterhorn: Stop talking, you’re fawning, and giving too much away.

Saddle Rager: Marevelous isn’t here, it’s my job to talk up her marefriend on her behalf.

Matterhorn: Since when?

Saddle Rager: Since Marevelous said so. Radiance is perfect and deserves all the cults that worship her, and also the infatuation and adulation of all who witness her glory. I think that about covers it.

Matterhorn: Thank you. Get to Fillisecond.

Saddle Rager: Oh, everyone loves Fillisecond. Not so much a crush thing though.

Matterhorn: Agreed, they’re more fond of her. Kind of like a little sister.

Saddle Rager: An annoying little sister who wrecks all your plans, but she’s cute, so you can’t stay mad at her. If Radiance is hard not to fall in love with, Fillisecond is hard not to adopt. Actually scratch that, I know of ponies who have crushes on her, they just aren’t villains, and they skew younger than most of our villains do. I guess Fillisecond attracts fellow good ponies. Also, since they DO skew older than Fillisecond, no crushes on Hum Drum either.

Zapp: No. I am never tempted. I spare my opponent whenever possible. There is no dignity in victory by bloodlust.

Saddle Rager: Ritual fights to the death are also exceeding rare so there’s that. It’s a no for me too though. When I’m not mad, I generally don’t want anyone dead, when I’m Outraged, I’m so blindly emotional that I forget that death is a thing that can happen, I just kind of want to smash stuff.

Mistress Marevelous: I have, often. But I’m also an angry, violent pony that should probably be in therapy. But with bad guys, the focus is on stopping them from doing something worse, usually that means I really, REALLY want to detain them, but if they’re like super evil and dangerous and keep escaping and endangering lives, it’s kind of hard to not just want to try to aim to kill to finally just get rid of them. You know, for the common good. But it’s not like I want to be somepony that makes that kind of judgement or decision, and I don’t actually want them dead-dead, or even actually hurt. Just not able to keep ruining everything for everyone. Unless they hurt Radiance. Then they deserve to be mauled beyond recognition.

Zapp: At the very least!

Saddle Rager: Here, here.

Saddle Rager: Anyway, Masked Matterhorn’s asleep, but we’ve heard him lecture Marevelous about it enough to know that he’s too disgusted by the idea of murder to ever consider it. Fillisecond doesn’t seem to totally get that killing things is morally reprehensible, just that keeping others from killing things is generally a good thing. I doubt it even occurs to her as an option though, let alone a tempting one. When facing the worst of the worst, her first impulse seems to be to tell their mom on them. Who knows though, she could be a wild card.

Zapp: Hum Drum has expressed the desire to kill before, but he may have been mimicking Marevelous, or being hyperbolic.

Saddle Rager: Thanks for that.

Marevelous: It’s not my fault he also thinks that anyone who hurts Radiance is scum and agrees they should die painfully.

Zapp: Oh. Radiance.

Saddle Rager: Has she?

Marevelous: Yeah. But in her defense, even being tempted for a split second in super understandable circumstances puts her in an inconsolable shame spiral for like three days, and in a funk for like another week, so it’s not like she’d ever do it for real.

Mistress Marevelous: Excuse me, the what virus? Matterhorn, you read all the science things, what are they talking about?

Masked Matterhorn: I’m not sure, it sounds like some sort of epidemic.

Marevelous: Then I should have heard about it by now. “Hit?” “Coping?” [Guff]! That’s how you talk about hurricanes. [Guff],it’s gotta be a [guff] plague!

Matterhorn: You’re getting wound up, we don’t know enough to know we should worry yet. It might be isolated to a couple of other cities for the time being and they weren’t sure if Maretropolis was one of them.

Marevelous: If anything is anywhere, I’m supposed to know about it. If the flu supposed to be bad this year, I know about it. If Canterlot has an outbreak of hoof rot, I get briefed about it. How am I supposed to keep everyone safe if no-[guff]-pony is going to tell me about a [guff] plague? [Guff], [guff], [guff]! Matterhorn!

Matterhorn: I’ll do some research. Go swear at Radiance for a while, you can check back once you get your heart rate back down, can go two sentences without swearing and stop trying to hide in your hair, it doesn’t inspire confidence.

Marevelous: [Guff] you. I hate this.

Matterhorn: Very nice. Now go. I’m the germophobe here, if I read anything concerning, you’ll know about it.

This is really exciting, thank you so much for supporting us. To celebrate, the first five followers to like this post and ask for one will get a picture of anything they want drawn by the Power Pony of their choice. Fair warning, we aren’t all equally artistically gifted, but we are all equally grateful. Below is a handy guide so you’ll have a better idea of who to ask for what.

Hum Drum: Likes colored pencils and crayons, tends to rush, but what he lacks in precision he makes up for in enthusiasm. Likes to draw lots of different things.

Zapp: Likes to paint, heavy hoofed with his implements. Prefers landscapes and portraits, only particularly gifted at one of them.

Saddle Rager: Likes ink and paper, enjoys calligraphy and mimicking illuminated manuscripts, very good at flowers and “squiggle monsters.” She refuses to elaborate on what squiggle monsters are.

Masked Matterhorn: Likes pencil for the gift of having an eraser built in, enjoys things with lots of straight lines, simple patterns and inanimate objects, like machines, still lifes, and buildings. A fan of white pencil/black paper.

Radiance: Actually not huge on drawing unless it’s for concept sketches or stenciling, but still notably good at detail work, drawing ponies, and imitating styles. Would prefer to make something pretty.

Fillisecond: Not great with staying still and steady enough for small drawings. Expect anything you get from her to be a photograph taken from several stories up involving some version of pointillism and either sidewalk chalk, paint or artful arrangement of random objects and ponies. She works best off of reference pictures.

Mistress Marevelous: Mostly thirst-doodles at work. Will draw classic middle school crush pages for ships, mean caricatures of ponies you don’t like being eaten by apex predators, food or pretty girls.

We appreciate you. Please note that this is one piece per follower. By default your prize piece will be posted here as a response to your ask requesting it unless you request that we reply privately. We also ask that you don’t bundle your request with a question for the team, though if you have something to say to whomever you commission, I’m sure they won’t mind hearing it. You can ask for a collaboration, but they might not all draw well together.

Our Ask Box is here. Thank you again for your continued interest and support!

Hum Drum: I thought we were based on us?

Masked Matterhorn: Maybe they mean our costume designs?

Saddle Rager: I don’t know, but I think they somehow managed to describe me twice with the alliterative names of strangers.

Mistress Marevelous: Look, we don’t know any of these ponies. If you were trying to get our secret identities out of us, you should have gone with ponies a little more locally famous.

Saddle Rager: We do Meet and Greets sometimes at the park, in schools, or at city hall, but we don’t leave the Maretropolis area for them. Unless there’s a strong possibility that we may one day accidentally bust a hole through your living room, there isn’t enough demand for good publicity for us to go on a Good Will Tour. We don’t leave town often enough to justify it.

And honestly, we love Maretropolis and its citizens, but only Fillisecond, Hum Drum and Zapp have the time and energy to socialize with huge crowds for hours on end. The rest of us just don’t handle large groups very well, so even though we’re technically celebrities now, we aren’t all built for the celebrity lifestyle and the public appearances that entails.

Masked Matterhorn: No, not here. I’ve heard stories about it happening in Manehatten, but, long story short, due to labor union concerns about automation dating back dacades, Maretropolis is severely behind in fields of technology that would produce, well, any of the things you mentioned. The closest thing they’ve got to it is, well… me. And believe me, the unions aren’t a fan.

But my set up doesn’t even have electrical components, or any form of motor or operating systems. It’s strictly removable, over the skin, and while it COULD augment a biological system or two, they’re more like prosthetic wings and a horn brace. it’s nowhere near the level you’re talking about. As for sparringZapp: Sparring?!?!?!Matterhorn: Zapp lives for sparring. He’d be happy to.Zapp: Spar?!?!?

Matterhorn: Down, boy.

Marevelous: Technically no, but Hum Drum did once after being supplied an age changing ray by a mysterious stranger in a lab coat. Then messed up changing us back, broke the device, and Matterhorn had to fix it. Which was difficult, because the age changes messed with our memories. We were all over the age range that day. If Hum Drum's right, Zapp’s going to go bald, Fillisecond’s going to somehow get shorter, teenage Saddle Rager wore a ton of make up, Matterhorn has always been the most awkward of babies, and Radiance secretly wants to live in my hair because she disappeared in it at every stage of her childhood and again once she went senile.

But yeah, we think a villain's accomplice slipped him a prototype. At the time we figured they must have tricked Hum Drum in order to incapacitate the Power Ponies so they could pull off some massive crime spree, but it turns out that there was no spree around that time. Now we’re pretty sure that it was a final test to make sure it worked without side effects, and they chose us because if there weren’t side effects, we’d still be out of commission if we remained children, and if there were bugs or side effects, then their enemies would be the one dealing with them and it could be used to their advantage at some point. We’re pretty sure the age ray was made by the same ponies that hatched the clone scheme that we can’t talk about around Radiance. At the very least, they must have also figured out a way to artificially age and de-age things.

This year we posted our event announcement a little late

Hum Drum took on an important mission

We talked date night childcare

Marevelous got real sappy

Radiance did not beat the curse, but did co-write a dating guide and go to sleep at a decent hour. She woke up very sore, but very happy.

This blog gained 4 followers(!) We’re now two short of 150, an exciting milestone.

As of midnight, Radiance succumbed to the curse. She could not walk by the end of Hearts and Hooves day. Chiefly, because she was asleep, but also because at that particular point in time Mistress Marevelous’s hoof would have been decreasing circulation to one of her hind legs had she been awake.

But before that happened, our last ask got Mistress Marevelous very, very sappy, and Radiance tapped that sap for several hours, ultimately gathering the material she needed to create this:

Radiance: I don’t know. I don’t really put expectations on them, I just want to see her. We do have a Bad Date insurance policy though. They aren’t allowed to be over until we’re both asleep. Even if an outing goes really badly, usually by the time we get home and go to sleep we’ve done something else that’s more fun or had a conversation that makes it better. I like the bad dates just as much as the good ones, so the only ideal is that it brings us a little closer together.

Marevelous: Yeah?

Radiance: Mmhmm.

Marevelous: Well, I keep thinking about going to the garden, and we dance and it’s not because I want to dance, but because you’re so happy you aren’t afraid to, and you lean on me everywhere we walk, and we end up going to this ivy covered old shop and you talk to the plates and spinning wheels and jewelry display and we make up stories about people in framed pictures and when we get home you sing for me and I brush out your hair and we cuddle and you fall asleep first and I watch you for a little bit and put on the sleep muzzle so I can’t suck you black and blue in my sleep, and THEN we do it again when we’re like really old and we get deja vu but can’t figure out why because we’ve done so much stuff like that, but I learned from my mistakes and we do it again, but even better.

Radiance: You know, you’re weirdly obsessed with us as an elderly couple.

Marevelous: Well, that’s the goal, right? Stay together for as long as we can. As long as we can could be a long time if we don’t die doing something stupid while we’re young and fighting evil. Ideally, we’re going on a weirdly nostalgic date when we’re eighty and we’ve somehow managed to not completely ruin your joints.

Mistress Marevelous: No offense, but don’t you have reality bending powers? Why don’t you just make a babyproof dimension or manifest a nanny or something?

Radiance: Maybe they’ve had bad experiences with past conjured childcare. There’s bound to be a lonely teenager somewhere available to babysit. Maybe your friends are busy, but one of them might have a referral for you. Maybe a niece or nephew or a sitter they’ve used in the past?

Oh! I don’t know if you have it, but if you’re in Maretropolis there’s this childcare agency that has an arrangement with a bunch of local restaurants. So if you call ahead you can request a specific sitter for the restaurant you want to eat at, but there’s a staffed children’s room at each of them. It’s supposed to be for things like if you have a lunch meeting or a job interview or a date, and there’s a fixed price for the room and the children’s food, so they can order whatever they want off the kid’s menu without you and it won’t cost you if they order like ten extra cookies and a chocolate shake for their friends.

Marevelous: Kind of sounds like someone just remembered a time they got ten extra cookies and a shake for a friend.

Radiance: They had so many good cookies. The babysitter referral thing is more likely to work out for them though. They don’t even have to ask for a babysitter, just someone who’s good with babies or might have a very young sibling. Chances are if they have a sibling they’re already stuck at home babysitting anyway, adding a couple of babies they get paid for can’t hurt. I wasn’t even a babysitter but my aunt mentioned I was good with babies to a sleep deprived mom, and I still get asked to watch fussy babies.

Marevelous: Fussy is kind of your specialty.

Radiance: HA! You would know, fussypants!

(P.S. A gift from Hum Drum and Zapp, it was to be your reward.)

Because this is the only time of year we’re always here, we’re on for our Annual Hearts and Hooves Day Event. This year, Mistress Marevelous has decided that she and Radiance will be taking questions all day in order to protect Radiance from the Curse that has plagued her every year prior. Radiance never ends the day able to walk on her own, and now Marevelous is paranoid about it; she put the others on hero duty and it is her personal mission to keep Radiance standicapable until midnight.

To help her, keep them entertained! Ask them for advice, ask them about themselves, about their thus far invincible relationship; the good, the bad, the mundane, the funny, their favorite and least favorite things. They will need it.