Recap / Triptych Continuum: A Good Trot, Spoiled

"So at this point, may I finally and safely presume that you are aiming for the water?"

"Ancients gore it," Torque sighed. "I could really use some golf right now."
Luna's chin now seemed to be trying to sink through the floor. "Naturally," she muttered, only partially to herself. "Yet another reminder of how much I have missed, how woefully behind I still am and perhaps will always be. A term anypony would recognize, anypony at all, anypony except —"
Celestia's head came up again. "Torque — what's 'golf'?"

While on a diplomatic mission from Mazein (the 'verse's minotaur nation), Ambassador Torque Power finds Celestia and Luna in a deep, semi-depressive funk, run down by a particularly stressful week and an upcoming anniversary of particular significance to both. As it turns out, the ambassador's more than a little stressed out himself, and the discussion quickly leads into his mentioning the single most relaxing activity he knows. The sisters, desperate for any means of shedding some part of the burden, offer to teleport him home for a few hours, staying with him for the duration so he can demonstrate this newest of sports.

Minotaurs and ponies don't necessarily have the same concept of 'relaxing'.

Read it here.

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Tropes found in this story include:

• Bait-and-Switch: Torque tells the sisters that you play eighteen holes, reach the nineteenth — and then you're relaxed. The reader would have a reasonable expectation of a bar or pub waiting at the end of the course. Instead, the nineteenth turns out to be a literal hole: a pit with padded walls. The minotaur player jumps into it, then takes out every bit of anger on their clubs, any remaining balls, the pit itself, and so on down the line until there isn't a single piece of equipment left intact. And when the screaming ends — they're relaxed.
• Ban on Magic: Players and spectators are forbidden from using any kind of magic on the course itself: the most a unicorn would be permitted is to temporarily lift their resting ball out of the way of someone else's shot. Spectators may feel for standing workings and techniques, but anypony actively participating can't even do that much.
• Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game: Invoked. Minotaurs have designed golf to be deliberately infuriating, with every inch of the course enchanted to produce the most outlandish and rage-inducing results each time a player takes a swing. Basically, take Bethpage's Black Course, throw in a little TPC Sawgrass, add in the fine manipulations allowed by earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn magic, then dial everything up to eleven. This results in a course where your putt swerved right because microridges in the soil told it to, the rough is hidden by illusion, and the wind does in fact hate you — with every countering element steadily growing stronger as you move towards the end. Celestia silently sums it all up somewhere around the sixteenth hole.
  They had to call it 'golf'. 'Insanity' was already taken.
• Determinator: If you can finish the course, you qualify.
• From a Certain Point of View: Golf is highly relaxing — because the game is designed to make you explode in a violent fury, with the final hole being a chance to rant, scream and physically wreck stuff to your heart's content, after which you feel all cleansed and refreshed.
• Golf Clubbing: If you have any left intact when you reach the nineteenth, feel free.
• Human Furniture Is a Pain in the Tail: It's hard for ponies to play golf: most of the equipment had to be heavily modified with lever systems in order to allow club swings, and so most of the Mazein resident marks manifested for the sport have been in course design. (Putting horseshoes are permitted.) Also, because the sport relies on increasingly bad weather as players proceed across the course, it's been hard to arrange for mass spectator gatherings, as anyone trying to watch the final portion of play is also getting pounded by the storm. So while golf has caught on in Mazein (and the sisters see the possibility of having it eventually reach Equestria), having it gather huge pony audiences will be difficult at best.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: As is appropriate for a story about golf, Celestia takes one look at the course's specifically branded clothing options, immediately wonders if Discord was the one responsible, and decides for the preservation of her sanity not to look at the tags, in case he wasn't.
• Literary Allusion Title: The title is one for Mark Twain, who once called golf "A good walk spoiled."
• Mundane Utility: In a way. Unlike Equestria, Mazein's weather is only regulated during emergencies: if it's not a crisis, minotaurs just take whatever comes. This meant there wasn't a lot of paying opportunities for practicing pegasus magic — until the arrival of golf, where the courses require so much daily management as to necessitate hiring flocks of pegasi. Luna notes that if the sport ever reaches Equestria, it'll trigger a short-term economic surge followed by a long-term increased number of jobs.
• Noodle Incident: The eighteenth hole.
  Later, when there was time, when they were well away from the golf course and could be sure it had not followed them back, they compared notes to see what each had managed to retain in memory of the eighteenth hole, and through eliminating differences, eventually came to the conclusion that they had been imagining both dragon and manticore within the storm. The rhino, however, turned out to be real.
• Personal Raincloud: Played absolutely straight. During their sulk in the Solar throne room, Celestia and Luna are so mutually depressed that their pegasus aspects went just a little out of control.
  The ambassador stared at them for a few seconds. Wiped his forehead as the first line of defense against the sudden onslaught of humidity, then looked up.
  "Those storm clouds are looking kind of dark," he neutrally noted.
  "So there's storm clouds," Celestia sighed, not bothering to check.
  "Of course there are," Luna wearily shrugged. "Yours or mine?"
  "Does it matter?"
  "It likely does not..."
• Rage Quit: Absolutely forbidden by the rules of the sport. As soon as you set hoof on the first hole, you must go all the way to the nineteenth, no matter what.
• Seen It All: Pile Driver, the course's club shop attendant, responds to the sight of two alicorns by tossing off a shrug and trying to figure out how he can adjust the equipment for their use.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: At the end of the story, the sisters decide that if golf does reach Equestria, they can't reasonably decide how to deal with it without having a full understanding of it — and so the last we see of them is Celestia losing her ball in the water on the sixth hole and getting a dig in at Luna for hitting so many shots into the sand traps.
• Shown Their Work: Minotaur golf is just a few years old, and so the equipment has many commonalities with the human versions from that age. Clubs are known as mashies and nibblers, while the balls are made from solidified sapodilla tree sap — actual gutties. (Celestia mentally notes that the Crusaders might have just found a new source of income, extracted from their own fur.)
• Slave Brand: Like many minotaurs, Ambassador Power wears a nose ring as both a reminder of his species' centuries-past enslavement and a silent promise of death to anyone who would try attaching a chain to it.

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