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Maud Pie (March 15th 2014 22 minutes)

Starting right off with absolutely modern safety goggles. Normally made of plastic, these are often used for liquid or small particle protection. Sometimes they come with little filters on the sides for very small particles, but that's not quite as common.

Making rock candy is actually a pretty simple, but tedious in it's way. You're basically making a sugar/water solution (a syrup) and then spending a week or so precipitating the sugar out of the solution as large crystals. The amount of flavor or color added is actually quite small relatively speaking. Making rock candy takes a *long* time. You're not going to be able to do it in a hour or so.

Actually having rocks in the rock candy? Okay, here we get into a couple of strange facts. Horses, in real life, do on occasion eat rocks. I'm not kidding. They can try to eat sand and gravel. This is usually a sign of poor diet or serious blood conditions, and it's called geophagia. Being herbivores, horse digestion is a bit more... aggressive than a human, and they can if necessary pull dietary minerals like iron and copper right out of gravel. But even after the condition has passed, horses have a tendency to form very strong habits very easily, so they'll keep doing it even if it does them more harm than good. This is the leading cause for impaction colic in horses. Also, horse teeth grow continuously and need to be worn down to flat surfaces by the mechanics of eating. Supposedly if they aren't being worn down by their regular diet horses will try to deal with it by chewing gravel. I've not seen this one myself, but that's what our vet has told us. Modern horses are often fed less coarse food than would do this teeth maintenance naturally, so you regularly have to get your horse's teeth filed or they will have trouble eating properly. This is called 'floating', as that's the name for the specific kind of file used.

Ah, but these are *special* rocks. I'm starting to get suspicious here.

Maud is being presented as an older sister, it seems. This maps to the Pinkie Pie and the Rockin' Ponypalooza Party novel, as expected.

Maud is pursuing and actual degree in 'rock science'. Typical that Pinkie wouldn't use the term geology.

Uh. Okay, Rarity and her hats. Fine. Rather large clear crystals there. Quartz, maybe?

Maud apparently moves at geologic speeds as well.

Maud is either extremely literal and had difficulty expressing herself, or she has the driest, most wicked sense of humor I've seen in a long time. Given she 'expresses herself through clothing' and yet 'It doesn't speak. it's a dress.', I'm going to go with the dry humor.

That, and she's actually playing with Boulder. Giving the pebble the chance at the sandwich. Oh lord... sand-wich.

Uhm. Okay, if that was actually quartz, this girl is *strong*. She's picked up the Dragon habit of eating gems. As I said before, I'm starting to get suspicious that most gemstones aren't aluminum silicate like in RL, but are something more like hydroxyapatite.

Yep, I'm really going with a *wicked* sense of humor here.

Actually, it does suit her. Almost a camouflage pattern of earth tones.

And that is what a lot of spiders to do in real life as well. No, not the flowers. Keeping more dangerous or annoying insects at bay.

Standard emo poetry. I'm not going to say it's 'good', because I know nothing about poetry. However, after seeing this episode I ran into this comic, and I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt there.

The puns. The puns are killing me.

That's pretty impressive, RD. That rock must weigh quite a bit. I used to do heavy events at Highland games when I was younger, so I appreciate a good toss. She was using a hammer throw spin, it seems.

The heck? Okay, yeah, this girl is *strong*.

If all that rock candy only weighs 200 lbs. then either it's extremely light, or we have another example of scale issues where measurement systems aren't translating between Equestria and here. Oh, historical note, the reason why 'pound' is shortened to 'lb.' is because the Roman weight measure of 'libra'. We use 'pound' because of a Germanic misunderstanding of the Latin phrase 'libra pondo' where it was supposed to mean 'a weight of libra', pondo being Latin for weight, but was mistranslated as being the 'the weight of a libra'.

RD's now into puns. Well done, Maud.

Well, do something then? The Mane 6 are displaying the same 'stand there and watch' habit they picked up in Daring Don't.

Yeah, RD's got my reaction there. What, how, what? Well, she is related to Pinkie. She breaks physics.

And explicitly saying that Maud is Pinkie's older sister.

Still not clear on exactly where the rock farm is. but I think I have a good guess. What we're seeing looks a lot like the Painted Desert in Arizona, so I bet the rock farm is in the San Palomina Desert region on the opposite side of the Ghastly Gorge from Appleloosa (going by the official map). They seem to have a train station of their own, which doesn't match up with the tracks on the map though. Likely it's a minor line that didn't get onto the map. Huh, I just noticed the official map has a track running south *past* the map right through a mountain range. I wonder what the heck's going on down there?