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"In the wake of the Nightmare's most pathetic assault on Ponyville yet, Applejack is thrown into an existential crisis, despite her not knowing what the word "existential" means. So when a stranger named Stranger arrives in town, teaching a new way of coupling talent to power using complex machinery, she is quickly suckered in, along with everypony else. Now, it falls to the Most Dependable of Ponies to bring the resulting ruckus down to earth, but can even Applejack's legendary pragmatism stand up to the brain-fizzing horror that is… CONTRAPTIONOLOGY?"
A Crack Fic the way Crack Fics should be written, Contraptionology! is a finished fanfiction by Skywriter, who also wrote Princess Celestia Hates Tea. It can be found here
, and it's prequel one-shot story Infernal Machines can be found here
.
This My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In a bid to achieve immortality, Twilight creates an equuoid of living liquid metal with the intent of placing her mind in it. To be on the safe side, she decides to test the robot to ensure that her magic will still work, so she loads it with all her magic capability and a programmed personality based on Trixie, her rival who hates her. And in case that wasn't enough goading fate, she then tells it that she'll wipe her personality once the tests are done. On learning this, the equuoid promptly goes on a murderous rampage.
- The Alcoholic: Applejack's love of drink and brewing is played up to counterpoint her teetotaler Love Interest Bell Pepper. Neither is depicted as right or wrong in their convictions, though.
- Animal Mecha: Angel Bunny builds a giant rabbit-shaped mecha as his personal mad science project.
- Big Damn Heroes: In the climax, Pinkie Pie saves Applejack from falling by snagging her with her gyrocopter.
- Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Iggy the salamander produces fires proportionally powerful to the heat of foods that he eats. The Pepper family is in the business of breeding extremely powerful peppers for making potent salsas with, but even this isn't sufficient when the characters need to make fire hot enough to burn something that strictly speaking should be impossible to burn. They end up distilling hot sauce in a still made by Applejack in an earlier fit of mad science, which works more along the principles of an atom collider than anything else; what comes out of it in the end is a white crystalline sludge, with a distinct ultraviolet shade, that somehow manages to be 153.5% pure capsaicin.
- Book Burning: A clear sign that Twilight is losing it is when she has the entire content of the library burnt by Spike — to make more room, and because she thinks they disagree with her findings. Seeing as she rebuilds the library in the end and doesn't seem nearly as heartbroken about it as you'd expect a bibliophile to be, she either got replacements, or Spike teleported everything to Celestia instead.
- Brain in a Jar: While preparing to transfer her mind into her new robotic body, Twilight gets a little impatient and uses a partial teleportation spell to test moving her brain out of her own body. On the one hand, it works. On the other, it also cuts her off from the body parts she needs to channel magic, leaving her stuck as a brain in a jar of liquid, which needs to be fed hourly by having Spike sprinkle a mix of sugar and cinnamon into the vat.
- Chekhov's Gun: Lots of them. A small sampling:
- Applejack learns two phrases in honeybee dance. Later she has to talk to a honeybee hybrid using one of the phrases.
- "BRAINHUG!" Early in, Twilight uses a Journey to the Center of the Mind spell to talk with Applejack in private. In the climax, Nightmare Delicious/Applejack uses the same spell to talk to Twilight after the latter has become a helpless Brain in a Jar.
- Discord, using Stranger von Danger as proxy, makes a Pinkie Promise at the Tesseract Party, despite not having any intention of keeping it.
- Rainbow Dash forgetting what her actual element is is the real reason she was immune to the mad science.
- Iggy the Salamander, and his ability to burn even unburnable things if fed distilled essence of pepper, becomes key to solving the conflict in the climax. For that matter, Applejack's invention is integral to their final plan despite it having nothing to do with its intended purpose.
- Derpy still holding on to one mostly-spent thundercloud ends up becoming a necessary part of the heroes' plan towards the ending.
- A Day in the Limelight: The entire story focuses on Applejack, at least from her perspective, and on her frustration with having been pushed increasingly out of friend group's and town's limelight when Twilight came along. Eventually she learns that she's not as good a leader as Twilight is.
- Dead Person Conversation: Applejack speaks to her deceased father, Cortland, twice, first during a dream and then during a near-death experience, who gives her guidance and advice for dealing with the ongoing crisis. However, this is revealed to not be her father at all, but rather the Nightmare in disguise, come to trick and mislead her.
- Deal with the Devil: Towards the end, desperation drives Applejack into accepting the Nightmare on the hope that she will have just enough slivers of self-control left with which to stop Discord and save her friends. Never before in fanfiction has quite so much Emotional Torque been infused into the words "Nightmare Delicious".
- Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Applejack accidentally blurts out her envy of Twilight while facing Nightmare Scoot. In her defense, she was pretty sleep-deprived.
- Disintegrator Ray: Disjunction beams are a form of magic designed to, essentially, make every atom in a given target not be attached to each other anymore.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The extended scene in which Derpy is unable to buck a cloud to Rainbow's satisfaction, forcing Applejack to buck them both at once, is written as a parody of cheesy sex-scene dialogue. This is lampshaded towards the end, when Bell Pepper nervously asks if he should step outside.
- Dramatic Thunder: Invoked. Professor Stranger von Danger likes to have a few unoccupied pegasi around to buck a quick lightning bolt and peal of thunder out of a stormcloud when he is introduced or says something dramatic.
- Fantastic Flora: While under the influence of the Nightmare, Applejack creates a giant dark-leaved, dark-wooded apple tree that embodies the cosmic concept of Constancy. It cannot be altered in any way — it plainly cannot be cut, uprooted, or moved, but neither does it grow or reproduce. When Ponyville is rebuilt at the end of the story, they simply have to plan the new town hall around it. It also produces a crop of seedless apples each Nightmare Night — it doesn't grow them, as such; rather, they're just sort of there between one day and the next — with golden skin and black, chocolate-sweet pulp, which if distilled into cider induces intense nostalgia for good times gone by and the feeling that things would be so much better if they just… stopped changing for a bit.
- Fiery Salamander: Salamanders are small lizards that burst into flames when they eat spicy peppers. Rock farmers use them to turn sand into glass in order to make rocks easier to move, although there is a fine line between the salamander catching on fire and it just exploding. Pinkie created a living mechanical version of the creatures, named Iggy, in order to have a reliable source of fire but without the explosions.
- For Science!: The story's Science-Related Memetic Disorder functions by driving sufferers into obsessing over huge, dramatic personal projects that don't really advance knowledge in any particular way or test any hypothesis, but instead serve mainly as ego monuments and to seize temporal power for their creators. The remaining sane characters specifically note that, whatever the Ponyvillians are doing right now, it is certainly not actual science.
- A Friend in Need: When Applejack makes her deal with the Nightmare, it's to save Rainbow Dash's life.
- From Bad to Worse: Things were already pretty bad with most of Ponyville and the Mane Six suffering from SRMD, then along comes chapter sixteen in which Rainbow Dash is apparently vaporized and a badly injured Applejack is about to be killed by Robo-Trixie.
- Furry Reminder: Applejack had to have her wolf teeth removed when she was a filly. "Wolf teeth" is the term used in real life for the vestigial first premolars in horses, which are commonly present as small, useless peg-like teeth and which are often surgically removed to prevent discomfort or eating complications. Equestrian ponies do it mainly for aesthetic reasons.
- Gargle Blaster: Applejack's mad science project is a batch of "large hadron cider" made in a still reworked to function as, essentially, a particle accelerator. What comes out the other end needs to be stored in a tankard made out of shaped magnetic fields, comes with a thick head of quantum foam, and, when drunk, slices through Applejack's years of habituation like butter and gives her the ability to see magic while blitzing her out of her mind.
- Glory Days: Applejack's realization that her Glory Days are ending, while Twilight's are just starting, is what caused her to flee to Dodge Junction in "The Last Roundup".
- Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: In Chapter 12, Discord goads Applejack, while the latter in the middle of a contraptionology relapse, into claiming a nice flat stretch with no clutter or obstructions as a workspace. Several hours later, while in the middle of sketching out plans, she realizes that this spot is so nice and clear because it is open air off the edge of a cliff. When she asks why she has not fallen yet, he remarks that it would not have been funny. Now, however, it is hilarious, and down she promptly goes.
- Green-Eyed Monster: The Nightmare uses feelings of envy and jealousy to sink its hooks into ponies, growing stronger the more they resent others. This is also the ultimate source of the story's conflict, as it's eventually set off by Applejack's repressed feelings of envy and resentment over Twilight taking over her place as Ponyville's most admired resident.
- Hidden Depths: Pinkie Pie, doctor of philosophy. It takes the other characters a while to accept that she did, in fact, get a PhD in a complex STEM field at the most prestigious technical university in the country.
- Hive Queen: After becoming contaminated by the mutated she used to create her butter-bee-bats, Fluttershy mutates into a huge version of the things, starts calling herself Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat, and decides to take up life as the queen of the teeming swarm of monstrosities she's created, which obey her every command.
- Honor Before Reason: Pinkie Pie is serious about keeping her Pinkie Promises, even if the fate of Equestria is hanging in the balance.
- The Igor: Matching Twilight's descent into a Victor Frankenstein type of figure, Spike regresses into a shuffling, mumbling, servile Igor-like figure who refers to her as "master".
- Imposter Forgot One Detail: The Cortland that speaks in Applejack's dreams is very callous about exterminating pests and unwanted things, when the real one was known for never hurting a fly and taking pains to harmlessly relocate crop pests.
- In Vino Veritas: Applejack discerns that she can make absolute liquid Honesty by making sufficiently (quantum-level) high-proof alcohol, since drunk ponies always speak their mind.
- Insane Troll Logic: A lot of it, but special points to how Applejack intends link Honesty to her Cutie Mark: drunk ponies have lowered inhibitions and are consequently more truthful, hence an absolutely drunk pony is absolutely honest, hence sufficiently high-proof booze is essentially liquid Honesty. Absoludicrously, it works.
- Ironic Echo: Derpy throws Applejack's rant from several chapters ago back at her in the epilogue, with Applejack having the same response.
- It Was with You All Along: The link between apples and honesty wasn't some abstruse technological contraption or magical trick, but Applejack herself.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: Twilight's psychoanalysis spell allows her to manifest in a psychic construct displaying the other person's mind and feelings. She uses it to psychoanalyze Applejack in the early chapters and, in the climax, Nightmare Delicious/Applejack uses the same spell to talk to Twilight after the latter has become a helpless Brain in a Jar.
- Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Professor Stranger von Danger, of course, goes around wearing a white lab coat in both work and casual settings.
- Lampshade Hanging: In the Epilogue, Applejack mentions this is the third time this year they've had to rebuild Ponyville and adds that we're "kind of getting a rhythm for it".
- Large Ham: The Nightmare, which makes ponies rave about making mundane things last FOREVER!, and von Danger, who actually hires Derpy to follow him around with a thundercloud to give his words "the emphasis they require". Once von Danger drugs everybody, all of Ponyville becomes glorious ham.
- Last-Second Word Swap: When explaining why she chose Rainbow to fly a mission into an area that causes anyone who enters to be struck by Science-Related Memetic Disorder, Applejack starts to say that she made this pick because Rainbow is too stupid for the mad science disease to have a noticeable effect, but changes to "stupendously radical" midway.
- Mad Scientist: The story centers around Ponyville being struck by a collective fit of mad science mania and turning into horror movie-style cackling, megalomaniac mad scientists obsessed with grand scientific visions and crushing their opponents underhoof as they blaze into a bright, bold future. Each character focuses on a specific project and homes in on a different area of mad science as a result:
- Applejack decides to refine her usual cider-distillation process by working her cider still and most of the farm machinery she had handy into a miniature particle accelerator, under the reasoning that, if regular cider strips away inhibitions to reveal a person's true personality, then "large hadron cider" created by smashing its component yeast and sugar into subatomic particles must be something truly revelatory.
- Fluttershy concludes that the best way to make new animal friends is to make new animal friends, which she does by using an improvised engine to mix butterfly, bee and bat genetic material into a sort of slurry that she then pumps into cocoons, where it incubates until it hatches into a swarm of physically mismatched hybrids.
- Rarity builds a complicated array of metal, giant glass lenses and a huge diamond perched on the roof of her boutique, which she refers to as the Wondrous Lanthorn and powers by burning a tremendous amount of gems. It works as a telekinesis amplifier by effectively reducing the mass of a selected object to zero and firing it at near-light speeds to any desired location.
- Twilight goes the fully transhumanist route and decides to upload her mind into a shapeshifting, immortal liquid metal body in order to transcend the limitations of the mortal flesh. In the process, Spike ends up regressing into a shuffling Igor-like minion.
- By the climax of the story, having the entire town transform into megalomaniacal, visionary and paranoid science people turns Ponyville into a warzone. Functionally every house is turned first into an improvised laboratory and then into a fortified bunker as the overly-crowded mad scientists turn on each other in an all-against-all clash of death rays, fire, ice, weaponized music and magical mass accelerators while war zeppelins, robots and genetic hybrids fight overhead, leaving everything that is not a highly built-over mad science palace into a scorched wasteland.
- The Man Behind the Man: Stranger von Danger is revealed to be the pawn of Discord, who has been mind-controlling him for the entirety of the story.
- Messy Hair: Stranger von Danger is described as having "a wild dishwater mane" and, in an equine variant of this, unshorn fetlock hair.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Fluttershy's project for the mad science fair is a swarm of "butter-bee-bats", horrid little monsters with mismatched wings and asymmetric anatomy made by crossing butterfly eggs, bee eggs, and bat eggs, which apparently are a thing. After being contaminated by the mutagen she used to make them, she metamorphoses into "Queen Flutter-Bee-Bat", essentially a larger version of these things that also has pegasus traits in the mix.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Stranger von Danger, a name that foreshadows that this is a figure inclined towards memorable scientific shenanigans.
- No Endor Holocaust: At the end of the story, while the Contraption War and the supernatural slugging match that follow leveled Ponyville almost to the ground, nobody actually died and only Twilight required hospital time. Justified, since Discord wants live ponies to play with and consequently specifically set things up so that nobody would die.
- Noodle Incident: According to Celestia, Berry Punch annihilated all of existence, then remade it again a millisecond later, in response to a massive bender from drinking all of the remaining contaminated lemon punch. This is only mentioned in a single sentence.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: When it first appears, the Nightmare seems almost comically pathetic. This impression proves to be less than accurate.
- Oh, Crap!: Discord has a minute or so of increasing unease leading to panic once he has to face the consequences of freely breaking a Pinkie Promise.
- Oh, My Gods!: The characters swear by the usual set of Equestrian aphorisms, such as "Celestiaspeed" and, on one occasion, "Celestia's flaming dugs!"
- Order Versus Chaos: This is the nature of the conflict between Discord and the Nightmare — or, as they were known in ancient days, Change and Constancy. Constancy used to rule over the prehistoric world, keeping it in a constant, stable state of simplistic nature beneath a static moon and sun; then Change came, bringing motion to the heavens and seasons to the world, and setting existence into the cycle of constant progression and evolution that it has known since. They have warred ceaselessly against each other ever since, Discord seeking to bring randomness and constant novelty while the Nightmare drives ponies to grasp onto something, anything, to preserve in eternal and unchanging stability, resulting in Celestia's name for it, also used by the prehistoric ponies, Stagnation.
- Overshadowed by Awesome: Applejack's primary issue is that, ever since Twilight arrived in town, her showy magic and dramatic adventures quickly overshadowed plain ol' reliable Applejack.
- Power Armor: Theoretically. Rainbow tries to create a set of flight-capable powered armor, but the best that she can manage is to create an unconvicting mockup out of carboard boxes.
- Remember the New Guy?: The shy and polite Bell Pepper, and the straitlaced and formal Pepper family, are OCs introduced as long-time Ponyville residesnts. This is explained as them always keeping to themselves on their farmstead a ways away from town.
- Science Fair: The story opens with a simple science fair in Ponyville Elementary, while the early parts center around the characters preparing for a grown-up version for mad scientists where each works on some kind of dramatic, dangerous and inadvisable high-tech project to display. The later chapters have the characters deal with the fallout of these preparations. Twilight's mindscape also takes the form of an infinite science fair, representing her love for learning new knowledge and then sharing it with friends.
- Science-Related Memetic Disorder: Pervasive throughout the story. In-story, the field of contraptionology can actively induce a condition called convolvment when an individual working on a project grows increasingly obsessed with it, becoming more and more drawn into endless tinkering and grand plans until their project becomes entirely disconnected from what it was originally meant to be. This last step leads into an increasingly worse spiral as the contraptionologist tries harder and harder to force their project back on track but only succeeds in worsening their obsession, which eventually consumes their thoughts until it displaces everything else that used to be important to the sufferer and drives them into becoming increasingly competitive, driven, narcissistic and unstable. Normally, this does not work nearly as fast as it happens in Ponyville, where Discord is speeding up the process. Lampshaded early when Applejack puts together a Jacob's Ladder for her lab just for the heck of it.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: Applejack's narration is very specific on the fact that she most certainly did not scream like a little filly while shooting around on Rainbow's cloud scooter. It was the Cloppler effect distorting the pitch of her voice, thank you very much.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Twilight Sparkle becomes very verbose when she talks in science. This also applies to pretty much anyone under the spell of contraptionology. Applejack's versions of this, such as her description of subatomic theory and the Clopper (Doppler) effect, are the source of a lot of the story's humor.
- Shout-Out:
- Rainbow Dash tries to use the Voigt-Clopff test to check whether Applejack is a robot.
- When Twilight finishes her robot, she lets all of Ponyville know with a jubilant scream of "It's alive! ALIIIVE!"
- Signature Headgear: Applejack is very attached to her hat, which was given to her by her deceased father, and goes off her shits when Rarity not-so-accidentally incinerates it.Rainbow Dash: Come on, admit it. You sold your soul for me and a new hat.Applejack: That I did.Rainbow Dash: It is a nice hat.
- Smart People Build Robots: Twilight, the smartest person in town, constructs a liquid-metal robot body to transplant her brain into in a bid for immortality.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Twilight, while in complete OCD mode, realizes that Applejack has some idea of Pinkie's education. Since she would like to keep this a secret, and tries to deny this... by telling a thorough and detailed description of the truth and trying to pass it off as a random fabrication.Applejack: [...] I ain't all book-learned like you, or apparently, Pinkie Pie, is.Twilight: drops everything she was telekinetically holding Oh, that Pinkie Pie! Has she been regaling you with some of her random and totally untrue stories again?Applejack: Uh, maybe?Twilight: Hoo hoo! What a laugh! Boy, she was telling me a real whopper earlier today, I don't know, maybe it was the same one she told you! It was just some crazy and, let me stress, totally non-true, story about how she's secretly a doctor of advanced contraptionology with a degree from the Maresachusetts Institute of Technology and how while she was in college she made a mechanical lizard that makes 'squonk' noises and breathes fire when it eats hot food and it came looking for her and that's what started the forest fire last night and so now we have to return it to her thesis advisor in Maresachusetts and that's why we're going on a road trip! It was funny because of how patently not-true it was!Sound From Kitchen- SQUONK!
- Talking Is a Free Action: Rarity stops running from the mutant bees long enough to complement Applejack on her outfit. She then promptly goes back to running away while screaming in terror.
- Technicolor Fire: When the Everfree Forest catches fire in Infernal Machines, Twilight's narration describes it as burning with "a peculiar citrusy hue".
- Transhuman: Twilight's grand Mad Scientist plan revolves around the conclusion that natural flesh is unacceptably weak and mortal, which she decides to resolve by creating an artificial body out of liquid metal into which she can then upload her mind so as to live forever as an immortal, shapeshifting equuoid entity.
- Unreliable Narrator: Applejack spends most of the story under effects of first sleep deprivation, then three different forms of mind-altering magic. Generally it's made clear to the reader what's going on but the significance often flies over her head as she narrates.
- Villain Decay: The Nightmare, once a genocidal threat to Equestria, is now the terrifying filly of darkness: NIGHTMARE SCOOT! She recovers most of her dignity in the story.
- Whale Egg: According to Fluttershy, she made her "butter-bee-bats" by crossing butterfly eggs, bee eggs, and bat eggs. Applejack protests that bats don't lay eggs; Fluttershy disagrees.