Today's writing: Daring Double (Patreon)

Need to try to wrap this story up tonight.

THIS MONTH'S GOAL THUS FAR: 37,500 WORDS

THIS MONTH'S WRITING (INCLUDING TODAY): 10,320

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All snakes come to an end, even snakes over four feet in diameter. The problem was that the end of a snake at full slither is still a very long way from the head, so the ponies who held the doors for the bewildered giant snake and his snazzy new VIP registration badge found themselves stuck there for about two minutes before the tail finally made its way into the convention center. 

The snake found this far less embarrassing, insofar as he thought of it at all, than the other thing that happened in those two minutes.

"Whee! This is fun!" 

"Mommy, mommy, let me ride the monster!" 

"Ooooh, I feel urpy."

"Take my picture, Daddy, take my picture!"

In even the short time it had taken him to get indoors, the snake had attracted dozens of convention attendees' small children, and a large number of them were riding him piggyback- or snakeyback- as he slithered back and forth across the width of the main concourse. 

The snake didn't particularly mind- nothing the foals and fillies did actually hurt- but it was a bit distracting, and he had business on his mind. Unfortunately he didn't know what to do about it. He didn't want to scare the little ones- no challenge to that- but they annoyed him. To make it worse, either their parents were more obsessed with photo opportunities than was healthy for a species in the middle of the food chain, or they wanted their own rides. 

"Please retrieve your children, I am not an oxcart," hadn't budged a single child. "I'm sorry, but I have to find Daring Do," had only produced a dozen costumed children like the first one. "BEGONE YOU HORRIBLE SNIVELING MORTALS!" had backfired badly; all losing his temper did was bring out hundreds of the bizarre instant-hieroglyph boxes the ponies had, along with requests that he do it again.

The only thing that worked, even a little, was, "Please let the other children have a turn, you've been up there long enough." It didn't reduce the child load, but at least it wasn't all the same children. 

But even as he dealt with the unwanted riders, the snake's nose kept working. His eyes were only so-so in bright light, and his hearing nothing to leave on a stone wall for one's descendants. But his nose was second to none, and he could still smell Daring Do, the actual Daring Do, in the building. Thus slowly- ever so slowly- he backtracked her trail to the room he'd first burrowed into, then began sniffing for new traces. 

It didn't take him long to pick them up, and in short order he had curved back on himself to crawl in the direction of the vendor hall. 

The large double doors leading into the hall slammed open with a crack of snapping bolts. 

"DARING DOOOOOOOO!!"

Martingale grabbed Yearling and hauled her behind a display as Shining Armor galloped towards the door. The snake reared up its head just inside, brushing the ceiling as other ponies trickled in around its thick body on either side. 

"DARING DO, COME FORTH!" the snake roared. "I HAVE TRACKED YOU DOWN ACROSS COUNTLESS MILES, AND I WILL HAVE BACK WHAT IS MINE!"

"Sir."

The snake paused in its rant and looked down at a pony in a staffer shirt who looked like she'd rather be anywhere else but where she was. "What is it? I'm rather busy," the snake asked in a normal tone of voice that so surprised Shining that he skidded to a stop on the concrete floor.

"Sir, the vendor room doesn't open to VIP shopping for another two and a half hours," the volunteer said. "Most of the vendors aren't here to run their booths yet, and some aren't even set up-"

"I understand," the snake replied. "I just have a quick bit of business here and I'll be done. I won't touch anything, I just- wait wait wait!"

Three teenage ponies had broken through the crowd gathered at the doors and begun walking towards the merchant booths. The snake lashed out at them, throwing a loop of his body around them... 

... and gently pulled them back to the doors before releasing them. "No, no," the snake said, "the nice pony says it's not time to go shopping yet. You all have to wait out there."

"Awwwww."

"Now, where was I... oh yes. SURRENDER, DARING DO! OR I WILL... I... hmmmm..." The snake looked around as if in desperate thought. Then a loud screaming and shrieking erupted outside the doors as its body convulsed, and then its tail slid in the doors next to him. With a flick it lifted a headdress off the costume of one of the ponies. 

The snake grinned a wicked reptilian smile as it dangled the headdress on the very tip of its tail. "OR I WILL USE THE LEGENDARY DOOMED DIADEM! COME BEFORE ME, DARING DO, OR ELSE I SHALL PLUNGE THIS LAND INTO A THOUSAND YEARS OF DARKNESS, AND THIS VILLAGE, THIS... this..." The snake bent its head down to the convention volunteer. "What is the name of this place again?"

"B-b-baltimare," the volunteer said, going from cerulean blue to white almost instantly.

"THIS BALTIMARE SHALL SINK INTO THE EARTH FOREVERMORE!" The snake nodded in satisfaction. "WHAT SHALL IT BE, DARING DO?"

"My name is A. K. Yearling!"

Shining Armor's jaw dropped as Yearling walked past him, looking not the tiniest bit afraid of the monster. "Ms. Yearling, get back!" he shouted. "It's not-"

"Move over," she snapped, walking around his outstretched hoof. Her eyes remained locked on the snake's. "I write the Daring Do books, Mr. Apep, but I am not Daring Do. And that thing you are holding is NOT the Doomed Diadem."

"WHAT? OF COURSE IT IS!!" Apep the snake roared. "I SAW IT MYSELF THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, AND THIS-"

"and THAT has only fifteen vertical chains on it," Yearling continued. "The real one has forty-nine vertical chains of much smaller gauge, plus a row of sapphires braided inside the horizontal chains." Yearling pointed at the pony who had been wearing it, who looked on the verge of crying, and said, "And that pony almost certainly made it herself, with lots of money and hours of work and careful craftsmanship and love, so give it back to her right this instant before you break it!"

The giant snake's head cringed backwards. Its tail began to droop.

"DON'T YOU DARE DROP IT, MISTER!"

The tail froze stiff.

"Give it back to her properly!"

The tail slowly lowered, offering the headdress to its owner, who carefully took it.

"Now apologize for what you've done!"

"But you-"

"APOLOGIZE!"

Apep bowed its head. With an effort it turned away from Yearling's stare and looked down at the teenager in the Somnambula costume. "I shouldn't have taken that diadem from you," it said quietly. "It was a thoughtless thing to do, and I'm very sorry."

"Good." Yearling walked a bit closer. "Now if we can get these ponies out of the way and get the doors closed, maybe we can discuss this like sensible adults."

Shining Armor still couldn't believe it. 

Well, he could believe the part where vendor ponies were working around the giant snake who was using his coils to block the broken doors at the front of the hall. The single biggest problem he'd had when he was captain of the royal guard was getting the guard to perceive a threat as a threat if it went more than five minutes without actually hurting somepony. 

But the rest of it? An otherworldly double of A. K. Yearling having a polite conversation with an immense snake monster that claimed to be a god from prehistoric times? And Groom Q. Q. Martingale, whose voice had taken on a Mexicolt accent almost as thick as Dr. Caballeron's, joining in to fill in the occasional detail?

He just sat and watched. There wasn't much else he could do.

"As far back as I can remember," Apep said, "Amon the Hawk and I fought every morning deep in the Underworld." The snake smiled a little. "It's a nice place, the Underworld. It's quiet, it's dark and cool, and you get all the blind cave salamanders you can eat."

"Eeew," Yearling muttered.

"Do you remember why you always fought for the Ankh?" Martingale asked.

"Well, he never let me play with it, did he?" Apep said. "He'd wave it about, and there was this bright shiny thing in the Underworld! Like nothing any of us down there had ever seen before! But as soon as it appeared, he'd want to take it away again, up the hole to wherever he went each day. And I didn't think that was fair. I wanted a turn! Don't you think I should have had a turn?"

"So you tried to take it away from him?"

"That's right. And so we fought over it. And it was so much fun!" Apep's snaky smile broadened, showing rows of relatively tiny teeth. "Every time I thought I had him, Amon would dodge or block or use some sneaky little trick. And then- whoop! up the hole and gone with the sun! It was always a close thing, and I kept thinking, if I'd done just one thing differently, I'd win."

"And so it continued for thousands of years," Yearling said. "The two of you always fighting, and Amon always winning."

"Yes." The snake's smile faded away. "Until the day I won."

Yearling and Martingale jerked forward where they sat. "You won?"

"I won." The snake's eyes rolled back in memory. "I threw out a coil, knowing he'd block it. I didn't put my full strength into it, so when he blocked it and made to climb up the hole to the surface world, I whipped my tail around and caught him in the head. Knocked him unconscious. And I took the Ankh, and then the sun did whatever I wanted it to."

"So the sun never rose," Shining Armor muttered. "I wonder if that's when the unicorns began raising and lowering the sun and moon."

"I doubt they could have done it if someone else still held the Ankh of Amon," Martingale said. "And yet the sun rises and sets now. How did you lose the Ankh, Mr. Apep?"

"I didn't lose it. I had my turn playing with the sun in the Underworld, but you can't play with one toy all the time, now can you?" Apep made a snaky attempt at a shrug. "Besides, it wasn't mine. It belonged to Amon, so I went to give it back. I figured he'd have woken up by then.

"But when I went back to where we fought, Amon wasn't there anymore. I thought maybe he'd gone up the hole to the surface world, so I went up there." The snake leaned forward, and in a softer voice he continued, "I don't mean to insult you mortals, but your surface world is really weird, you know? And it was weird even then. No ceiling, no giant cave salamanders, lots of gritty sand and- well, it's your world. You know it better than I do.

"That's when I saw ponies for the first time. They were crying and wailing, and when I asked way, they told me that Amon, who brought the sun, had told them he wasn't going to do it anymore. That he had walked away into the desert, never to return." Apep lowered his head almost to the floor. "And he never did. I never saw Amon again."

"And that didn't make you happy?" Martingale asked, a little surprised.

"No," the snake said miserably. "When Amon was gone I realized he was the closest thing to a friend I ever had. The fights were always so much fun. But until I listened to those ponies," he continued, looking directly at Yearling and Martingale, "I never realized that maybe he didn't like the fights as much as I did. I think he hated the fighting, now. He was just trying to get the sun up to his friends the ponies, and Apep, Ruler of the Underworld, Ruler of Darkness, and Big Fat Idiot, kept messing with him."

The snake gave a sigh that rippled down his entire length, running out one coil and back in the next through his gathered-up body. "I wanted to apologize. I wanted to make it right. So I used my power to raise a pyramid, and I mounted the Ankh inside it near the top, so a hawk could see it easily. And I taught the ponies how to use it to raise and lower the sun and moon.

"Then I made a place for myself deep under the pyramid to wait for my friend Amon. I thought that, if I left the Ankh out for him, one day he'd come back. But he never did, and at some point I guess I went to sleep."

"What woke you?" Yearling asked.

Apep's voice grew a little stern. "You did," he said. "After sleeping for, I don't know, thousands of years I suppose, I felt the Ankh of Amon leave the pyramid. That woke me up, but I waited a while hoping that Amon would come back into the Underworld now that he had his ankh back. But he didn't, so I went up to the surface to find out what was going on.

"The ponies I met were different than the last time I came up here. They didn't know about using the Ankh to raise the sun."

"Possibly the knowledge was lost when Celestia and Luna took over the duty," Martingale mused.

"I remember the ponies telling me about Celestia," Apep nodded. "And this new princess, Twilight Something-or-other."

"Sparkle," Shining Armor said. "Twilight Sparkle. And she's my sister!"

Apep looked directly at Shining for the first time. "Really?" he asked. "She raises the sun now? Does she like fighting?"

"She hates it," Shining said flatly. "But when someone forces her to do it, she's very good."

"She hates it," Apep repeated, slumping. "Never mind, then." Turning back to the writers, he continued, "But I didn't care about that. I don't care who raises the sun. If it gets done at all, that's fine by me. But I cared greatly who stole the Ankh of Amon. And when I asked the ponies, they told me it was Daring Do. And I could smell a particular pony all over the inside of the pyramid."

"I see," Yearling said. "So you came here and found a person- I mean a pony- who smells almost like her-"

"Exactly like her."

"But I don't have the Ankh."

"The real Daring Do is... let's say she's Ms. Yearling's twin," Martingale explained. "She collected the Ankh because, with Twilight Sparkle now raising the sun and moon, it was important that artifacts which might interfere with that duty be made safe. The Underworld may do well without the sun, but the surface world would suffer greatly." Martingale fixed Apep in his gaze and concluded, "And Daring Do told me that no other pony had set hoof in that pyramid for well over a thousand years. Nobody, Mr. Apep."

"You're saying Amon isn't coming back," Apep said in a very soft voice.

"A few archaeologists think he went to ancient Fleece," Martingale said. "Since that was the ancestral home of the harpies. But after that he disappeared completely. Nopony knows what happened to him. Nopony even knows that you defeated him. All the legends say that he always won- because if he ever lost, the world would be destroyed."

"I see." Apep sighed. "That's probably for the best. He deserves to be remembered for his fighting. He was the best." The snake let his head drop all the way to the floor. "I've made a lot of trouble for nothing, haven't I?"

Yearling tapped her chin with one hoof, eyes narrowed behind her glasses. "Not for nothing," she said. "Just outside that door are thousands of Daring Do fans who think you're the villain of her next adventure. How would you like to make sure that your friend's legend gets spread around the entire world?"

"I don't believe you!!"

Shining Armor had to stifle a laugh. There was Daring Do, the actual genuine oh-golly-gosh-she's-really-real Daring Do, aka A. K. Yearling, shouting at the human-world A. K. Yearling who had spent most of the day accompanied by an ancient serpent from the Underworld. 

And if anything, Shining Armor thought the human Yearling was more fearless than the pony Daring Do.

"I was two-thirds of the way through my first draft of Daring Do and the Perilous Pyramid!" Daring shouted. "And now you tell me I've got to throw it out and start again so I can wedge in Apep as a surplus baddie! With this tragic twist ending about how Apep just wants to meet his old foe in battle one last time? Do you know how hackneyed that is?"

"Look," Yearling said, "in my world you're a fictional character, all right? But here most of the stories are real. And out there," she jabbed a hoof at the doors leading into the autograph room where Apep was still dealing with huge lines of photo opportunity seekers, "is a very sad and lonely person, a real person, who deserves to have his story told!"

"He's really not a bad person," Shining Armor put in. "He won't attack anyone unless they're a fighter on his level. He's just a bit thoughtless."

"And lonely," Yearling continued. "Even I don't live as isolated a life as he does. He needs to be around other people. And if you do your job fairly, he'll be in high demand."

"And who knows?" Shining asked. "Maybe Amon is still around somewhere. And maybe he's a reader. You might get to make a sequel about the rematch!"

"UGH!" Daring Do threw up her hooves in frustration. "Fine. I suppose I should thank you for covering for me. Twice over. I mean, you did stop the monster I was hunting for."

"Yeah, you did," Shining Armor said, looking at Yearling. "I always enjoyed the Daring Do books because she was a brave fighter- a strong, heroic protector of right and justice."

Daring Do shifted her gaze away from Shining. "Uh, yeah, trust me," she muttered, "nopony's perfect."

"But you," Shining continued, "Ms. Yearling, you stood your ground and didn't fight. You talked the monster down. I think that took a lot more courage."

"I didn't really think about it," Yearling said. "But I take costume props very seriously... and I take my fans even more seriously. I couldn't stand by and let Apep mistreat them."

"Well, all I can say is," Shining Armor said, "this weekend I got to meet not one but TWO of my greatest heroes! And it's still only Thursday!" He grinned his goofiest nerd grin and shouted, "Best. Anniversary. Gift. EVER!!"

Yearling looked at Daring. "Anniversary?" she asked. 

"Yeah," Daring Do said. "He's Prince Consort to Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, co-ruler of the long-lost Crystal Empire."

It was Yearling's turn to grin a goofy nerd grin. "Long-lost empire?" she asked. "Tell me more!"

And around them, Con-Venture began to really get into gear.