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Stare Master (February 25th 2011, 2 mintues)

Reference to Trottingham.

Wait, Rarity has to *make* the gold silk? That's interesting. Under normal circumstances it would be raw cultured silk fabric dyed with a blending of 'mosaic gold' and maybe even actual powdered gold as pigments. Mosaic gold is a tin sulfide that is often used as a gold pigment substitute. Either that or there are insects that produce a literal gold silk fiber in this world. Actually weaving new cloth from thread though would take a lot longer than the apparent deadline for these clothes. So I'm going with dying her own fabric. Still takes a long time, but not as long as weaving it from scratch.

Valid question, it seems Fluttershy hasn't actually met the CMC before.

That's a pretty big cottage, being as large as any of the houses in Ponyville. A sod roof, that's interesting. Sod roofs are not exactly what they appear to be. It's actually a bark roof, especially birch bark which is excellently weatherproof, but the bark isn't nailed down or attached in any way. That's what the sod is for, as a weight that grows together into a tough insulating layer on top of the birch bark. This used to be, and in some areas still is, a very common roofing method in Nordic areas like Scandinavia and Finland.

They could teach Fluttershy how to cheer.

As an animal expert, Fluttershy should really be more used to this kind of thing. Animals play quite a lot, and that cottage should be play-proof with all those animals living there.

Sweetie Bell, gospel singer.

And the Stare.

Horseshoe marks on the ground. So at least one of the CMC is shod. Unshod horses leave quite different marks.

For all her ditzyness, Sweetie seems the brightest of the three.

Cockatrice. An English monster with roots in older Greek stories. The Greek version was called ichneumon, and descriptions were basically of a crocodile, this version came to England from Roman Latin as calcatrix. It was in the twelfth century England that it got mixed up with the draconic basilisk and ever since the two creatures have been interchangeable. Both the Cockatrice and the Basilisk are described as being hatched from a cockerel's egg by a toad and able to petrify with it's gaze, or with it's breath, or touch depending on the exact story. This one appears to have made it here via D&D again.

Twilight, Twilight. You need to be way more careful in the Everfree.