I didn't even catch your name
Inspiration, as always.
Boredom. You'd think, after a thousand years on the moon, you'd know the meaning of it. You'd know how to occupy yourself. You'd think, that after a thousand years of sitting around, doing nothing, you'd have a safety plan for when it hit.
"And yet it still finds a way to surprise me." She thought glumly, staring out at the sleeping city under a blanket of stars. Every light out, everypony asleep.
Complete and utter boredom.
On a whim, she decided to extend her mind, sending her soul flying through a simple variation of the telekinesis spell.
So boring.
She found herself flipping from dream to dream, as if reading the synopsis of a novel. The rich only thought about money, wealth, taxes, and the expenditures of living. The children either thought of lollipops or crushes or, for lack of a better word, happy things.
To think, a place where the imagination roams, free from conscious thought, and all these ponies think about is their daily lives.
Returning to her body, she found herself leaning against the railings of the plateau which Celestia used to raise the sun, and subsequently, where Luna raised the moon.
"Oh well, might as well give it another go." She found herself, almost subconsciously speaking aloud. A side-effect from her incarceration. Sighing once more, she extended her mental reach, blanketing the whole of Canterlot in her probing aura as she sought, with a fervor nearing uncaring desperation, any form of entertainment, any form of light.
Any form of company to relieve the night's silent burden.
Her eyes snapped open. Did she just hear something? What was this? Did she just see something? Something she hadn't seen before? Something completely alien? Something wonderful? Was that just a trick of mind? A spark of her own imagination to dull the bordem she felt? Sending out the probe again, she found it. In a secreted area of an old part of the city, she heard the faintest of sounds. A wailing guitar and a crying piano, and all of a sudden, she felt herself plunging.
Her eyes. Hers, yet not hers, opened wide in astonishment. Had she just been pulled, completely and utterly into this dream? This unconscious daydream of her subjects'?
She found herself, falling headlong into what is best described as an underwater ballroom. Expensive Prancisian chandeliers hung from the ceiling as a ghost orchestra solemnly carried out their duties.
She felt herself slipping into that suit of indifference. The bordom was coming back again. "This dream was no different than any other of the nobles'. Just a different variati-".
She looked on in curiosity as the watery scene faded to black amidst the smooth strumming of what she assumed was a bass. She found herself dressed in full Galloping Gala Regalia, dancing in an empty room surrounded by paintings, with a tall, lanky earth pony with a curly mop of a mane. What amused her the most, was how the paintings moved. How their eyes seemed to dead, yet so expressive, as if the indifference was of looking through a passerby's point of view. To her great surprise, the whole room began shifting and changing, and soon she found herself walking forward, in the busy Canterlot thoroughfare.
But something was wrong. The only thing she heard was the droning of a violin and the strum of a bass. To her immense confusion, she found that she could walk through the ponies in front of her, and they would instantly turn to glass or water or oil based paintings. Bewildered, confused, and oddly enough, excited, the Moon Princess looked up into the sky, and found herself staring in slack jawed wonder.
The sky, looked as if it had been painted using some sort of oil based substance. The clouds, no, the very sky itself seemed to be moving. The pegasi, so commonly seen scurrying to and fro on their daily routines were mutated. They were changed. Some of them were tall and lanky, reaching miles upon miles into the sky. Others were disproportioned, with heads the size of mountains, eyes the sizes of entire stars. Everything around her seemed as if it'd been meticulously drawn or painted, and the strangest thing of all, was how it all kept changing. The pegasi who were tall as towers seemed to shrink and stretch, as if they were being pulled through a taffy machine while subsequently melting.
She kept walking forward, completely unsure of what she was supposed to do, or where even to go. This was a rare phenomenon, in all her years, she had only experienced a hoof-ful of times, none however, had been as vivid as this.
Again, she found him, sitting on a bench, simply staring at the ponies as they passed by, chatting with muted voices, completely oblivious to their supernatural surroundings. That tall, curly mop colt, sitting there with simply no expression whatsoever. Before she could so much as open her mouth to ask who he was, she found herself slipping again. The world around her seemed to take on a darker hue. The buildings melted and flew into the sky, forming a dadaist impression of the moon as it hung up in the sky. "The shiny glass ball in the sky. " She thought to herself with some level of amusement as it seemed to ripple as if reflected onto a body of water's surface. All of a sudden, the moon did just that; transform into a long, snaking river running down into the night-lit town of Manehattan.
She let herself go. Floating gently in the slow river as it seemed to drag her under a world of melancholy blues and water. "Now this, this is a dream." A place where time is muted. A place where the Otherness of life could flow free.
"As if on a river!" She thought to herself, smirking at the conclusion. Again, she found herself floating alongside that mop headed stallion who simply smiled, a lopsided half feeling grin. With no words exchanged, they both floated into the new waves of his dream.
She found the world changing once more, this time, down in the Manehattan streetline. This time however, she was prepared. Immediately, she set off, as the white noise of various ponies chattering served as the backdrop amidst the city full of neon signs.
Even surrounded as she was, she felt so alone, walking by her lonesome down on the dirty side-walks of the city. The tow-headed stallion had left again, leaving her to wander his mind as the soulful sounds of a saxophone reached her ears, played by a street performer wearing black shades, his case open to accept any donations that fell in. She lifted her head, and took a tentative sniff.
The smells of life assaulted her. The smell of smoke from chimneys, the hint of ozone from the Neon lights and street lamps. The various street-side vendors cooking food. The tanned coppery scent of faux leather and the all-pervasive scent of hash-hash being smoked by a laughing group of stallions sitting underneath a veranda.
Life.
Yet for all the noise, for all the sound and the hubbub, she felt empty and so alone, wandering the streets like a vagrant with no home. "I think.....this is how...he must have felt." She mused, keeping her head down to avoid attracting stares. An unconscious habit picked up from years of ridicule that preluded her.....turning.
A touch on her side.
She looked to her left, and there he was. Smiling up at her, his eyes hidden by his curly locks which fell into his eye.
"How strange." She thought, as he took her by the hoof "that I feel more kinship to him, somepony whom I never met in my life, than most of my friends?" She thought absently as he led her to a bar establishment with a big neon sign hanging above it depicting a flashing full moon.
"How strange indeed, that I never even caught his na-"
~~
She snapped back to herself. Her own body, her own mind. "Pity." She mused glumly. Yet, sitting there with her head resting on her hooves, she couldn't help but smile.
Boredom, you'd think that a thousand years on the moon would harden you to it, wouldn't you?
Nah, being bored is only half the fun. The other half's finding something that'll sweep you off your hooves.
