Rarity woke up to the sound of her alarm clock for what seemed the millionth time in her life. This cold, impersonal blaring was the start of most of her days, unless she took a rare vacation. It was hard to take vacation, however, when your parents always seemed to be on one and they dropped Sweetie Belle on you every week. It wasn't that she minded having her little sister around - the two were getting along very well these days - but it did make her feel like she couldn't do nearly as much.
For example, although she was sure Sweetie Belle would love to accompany her on vacation, she'd never be able to afford any sort of worthwhile vacation for two ponies. Places like the Marebean, or anywhere else tropical, were pricey, and although she made a good deal of revenue from her boutique all of this new money went to more expensive fabrics and advertisements and even charity.
Rarity needed that vacation, or at least something to raise her spirits in this most unholy time of day. Mornings were a drag more so than anything else. At best, she could hope to drag herself out of bed, slink down the stairs for a bowl of oatmeal and at least three cups of coffee before hauling herself to the shower to tame her horrid bedhead.
This morning seemed to start off in a similar manner, but it seemed that fate had other plans for the seamstress. She was munching on her bowl of oatmeal as she did every morning, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary until she noticed something on the sliding glass door leading to the backyard. In her brain-atrophied morning state, she didn't think much of it. She thought that it might be a leaf, or who knew what else; at the moment, she didn't care.
When she heard this object making noise, however, she gave it another look, only to realize that this thing wasn't really a thing at all. It was was small mouse trapped between the screen and the glass of the door. Using it's tiny claws, it was climbing along the screen part of the door, and although it was trapped in close quarters, it seemed to be having a good time. Pleasantly surprised to see the little furry creature, Rarity got up from her kitchen table to examine it more closely.
"Well, it must have gotten between them at night and never found it's way out again!" Smiling, Rarity put her hoof up to the glass as if she could touch the mouse through the glass, which she wished she could. She continued to be entranced by it's cuteness for some time, as she watched it moving around on the screen for the next five minutes or so.
Unfortunately for Rarity, this blissful state did not last for long, for another animal came into view, the worst possible animal for the moment: Opalescence.
Yes, it was indeed Rarity's cat. The fat, pampered lump of fur had just come back from another round of unsuccessful hunting in the yard, and now, looking up at the screen, saw not the cute fuzzy thing that Rarity did, but easy prey and a way to fix a disgraced cat's pride. Rarity could easily hear the growls through the glass, and the mouse could hear them as well. It's body tensed and it's head turned left and right, looking for a way out that could keep it away from the furball of death waiting below.
At first, Rarity didn't know what to do, and after thinking about it for a while, realized that although there was a screen between the two animals, the mouse would undoubtedly try to bolt, and Opalescence would undoubtedly catch it if it did. That meant Rarity had to do something about it, and she did.
The solution was pretty simple really; it didn't take a bookworm like Twilight to think of it. Sliding the door open, Rarity confronted her cat. The look on Opal's face was priceless, as if the cat way saying: "Hey Rarity, look up there, it's a mouse! can you get it for me?"
The cat seemed even more surprised when, a few seconds later, it found itself being set down inside the boutique in the glow of Rarity's magic. It pawed at the glass door to be let out, and after seeing that this would not work, started pawing at the mouse. By this point, the mouse looked as if it was going to have a heart attack. It scurried around the screen like a pegasus in the 100 meter dash. Rarity could just see the creature's small eyes flitting sometimes left and sometimes right, but more often right at the evil white menace below.
While taking all of this in, Rarity tried to formulate a plan. Although most of the animals in Equestria were docile most of the time, a mouse fearing for it's life wasn't in a position to reason or to trust anything, even a pony. That meant that the mouse would only leave if Rarity stayed away from it for a while, and yet that would cause more problems than it would solve. If a customer came into the shop, Opal would probably escape, and then who knew what would become of that mouse. No, Rarity had to make sure the mouse would be alright, if it was the only thing she did that morning.
This was easier said than done, though. Even with the cat inside, she still had to figure out how to get the mouse out from between the screen and glass. Teleportation was not an option, as Rarity wasn't nearly confident enough in her magic to use that sort of spell on a living creature. The few times she'd tried to teleport something, the object had either not come back out of nothingness or had come back in pieces. She certainly didn't want to do that with this mouse.
"But I do know somepony who could do that," Rarity realized. "I'm sure Twilight's up at this time, after all, she wakes up much earlier than I do."
So she went about doing just that. She hopped off of the deck and trotted across the yard, leaving the mouse to its own devices. It only took her a minute or so to reach the Library, which was a short way down the street from her own business. She knocked on the front door as soon as she got there, ignoring the sign that said "Library Closed"
Seconds passed. More seconds passed. And even more of them, but nopony came to answer. Rarity put an ear to the door, and thought she could hear something faintly on the other side, but she wasn't sure. Whatever it was seemed repetitive, but beyond that she could only guess at what it was. She looked through the windows, and saw that the lights were off. Evidently, nopony was home.
"It's probably just one of Twilight's experiments," Rarity told herself, turning around to walk back home. "Besides, if somepony were there, they would've answered."
As she walked back, she thought about how she was going to get the mouse out of that door without Twilight's help. For a brief moment, she considered asking Fluttershy. The mare lived to help animals and certainly would be glad to abet her at a time like this. But then she remembered that her chronically kind friend was off visiting somepony. Rarity couldn't remember who that was, but she did remember that they were all the way out in Cloudsdale, so that option was a bust.
"No, no, this is a good thing," she said confidently. "I don't need anypony's help to do this. After all, I'm an independent mare and I can figure it out all by myself!"
With swelling self-confidence, she stepped back up onto the patio and saw that nothing had changed whatsoever. She'd been hoping that she'd find the mouse long gone, having ran away when it saw that there were no felines or equines in it's way.
As if it would be that easy, though. Sighing, Rarity began to ponder just what to do in this situation. She already knew that using magic on the mouse was out, but when she thought about it, she didn't necessarily have to use magic on the animal itself to free it.
"Ah, that's it!" she exclaimed, grin replacing grimace on her face. "I'll take the screen off!"
Without a second thought, she closed her eyes, trying to focus her magic on the whole screen door, which for her, was a little bit of a stretch. She pictured the door in her mind, the corners, the straight edges and the mouse perched on it. And then she lifted. Opening her eyes, she saw the door floating in midair no more than a length away. If she hadn't been straining to maintain the spell, she would be beaming, but maintaining the field around the whole screen door took all of her focus.
Turning her head, she let the door go into a controlled fall, intending to law it out flat so the mouse could scurry away. The mouse had other plans, though. It wanted to jump off onto the railing on the side of the deck. That side of the yard had a steep downhill, so patio only a few feet off the ground became a deck that was three times taller than the average pony. In fact, this feature was the main reason Rarity had been able to afford her own studio in the first place. This also meant that the railing was very high off the ground, so naturally, the mouse decided to get off onto it. It scurried around nervously on the wooden surface, seemingly aware of the height, since it stayed to the middle of the board.
Meanwhile, Rarity was starting to have a lot of trouble with her spell. By this time, she had turned around, and was trying to set the door against the house. The image in her mind, which at first had been so clear, had become warped and interrupted from the strain of holding it up. If magic only took weight into account when lifting an object, she would've been fine, but the fact that it also took size into account made the screen door very difficult to keep up. She was almost to her destination when the magic finally gave out, and the screen fell with a thud into the wooden deck planking.
The mouse, who had been staring at the edge and pondering what an excellent edge it was, was so startled by the loud noise it jumped, nearly falling off the spectacular edge but grabbing onto the amazing edge with it's front claws. Rarity noticed almost immediately, running over to the edge without taking any time to notice how majestic it was. Currently, her brain was at the crossroads of sheer panic and blaming the mouse for being a stupid edge-gazer.
Rarity needed some way to save the mouse from the long fall. She ran into the house, closing the sliding door with her magic just as Opalescence was about to run through it. Somehow, she came up with an idea in her crazed state. She opened the cupboard below the kitchen sink, taking out the dustpan. Knowing her magic was too weak to lift the thing, she went about making a handle. She ran frantically over to the nearest closet. She opened it, and found, to her relief, a yardstick. She didn't really remember where she found the tape. It was kind of just there, and at the moment, she didn't really care where it was from. She ripped a piece off with her teeth, using it to tape the dustpan to the yardstick. As she rushed back outside, she looked up at the clock.
"Okay, I've got ten minutes till," she said aloud. "Plenty of time, if I hurry."
Not that it would've mattered. Rarity loved her business, but at this point the mouse was all she could think about. She couldn't just let it die, and she wasn't going to let up until she was sure it was safe. For a moment, she was afraid the mouse had fallen, but to her relief, it was still clinging onto the edge when she arrived. It was so scared that it couldn't move. She re-positioned the yardstick in her mouth, and as quickly yet carefully as possible, she scooped up the mouse in it. She felt her whole body shaking from the pressure. If her teeth were to slip, the rodent would go plummeting to it's death.
It took what seemed like hours, but she finally got the mouse back up onto the railing. Wasting no time, it scurried away from Rarity, huddling up against the side of the house in a defensive sort of position. It took Rarity a few moments to realize that it was all over. She'd done it. She'd saved the mouse from her cat and from the ground. Smiling, she walked back into the boutique, still shaking a little. She opened the screen door with her magic, which seemed to be working again, although whether it had truly replenished or if it was just the adrenaline talking, she didn't know.
Another thing she didn't know was that in the time it had taken her to open the door, Opalescence had slipped through her legs and outside. Rarity was ignorant of this fact for only a few moments before realizing her mistake. She turned her head left and right, looking across the yard, but couldn't find her cat anywhere.
"Well, this could take a while."
As the minutes passed, it seemed that it would take a lot more than a while, maybe even forever. Rarity covered every single part of the yard. It seemed that Opal was moving around on her, because there wasn't many other places the cat could hide. As she started on her third round of the yard, she was greeted with some guests.
The first of these was Twilight Sparkle. Having come back from her errands, she'd decided to visit the boutique. After nopony came to the door, she circled around to the backyard to see if Rarity was lounging on her patio, which Twilight knew she did some mornings. Needless to say, the unicorn was surprised to find her friend running around the yard, seemingly looking for something that wasn't there. It took Rarity a few seconds to notice Twilight, but when she did, she walked over as if nothing peculiar was going on.
"Well ... hello Twilight," Rarity mumbled, panting from the unsuccessful attempts to sneak up on her cat. "How are ... you doing this morning?"
"I'm doing well," she said, not sure what to make of the situation. A brief thought went through her head - something to do with the Canterlot Asylum - but she ignored it.
Suddenly, Rarity realized how silly everything she was doing was. "Oh, I'm sorry Twilight, this must seem pretty strange,"
"Oh no, not at all," she lied. "I'm sure you have a good reason."
"Oh, I do," said Rarity. She went on to explain the events of that morning, from her morning bowl of oatmeal to where she was now.
"Well, I'll say this much: That is a very strange morning."
"It really is," Rarity replied. "I could use some help with this, would you mind?"
"Oh, not at all," said Twilight cheerfully, now confident that her friend was not crazy. As they searched, the two started up a conversation, and it naturally came to the topic of what Twilight had been doing that morning.
"Well, I just got back from running some errands. I ran up to the Apple's to get some more jam since AJ wasn't going to market today, and I restocked my quill supply."
Rarity raised an eyebrow. "Oh, you mean Davenport's shop?"
Twilight blushed. "Uh ... yeah, I guess. So I guess you heard about that."
"Yes, Dash was just telling me about it yesterday. I really don't know what you see in him. He's greedy, a mare's colt ... oh, and he's also, what, 6 years older than you?"
"Seven, actually."
"And yet you still like him?"
Twilight kept on blushing like there was no tomorrow. "Well, I don't know ... I mean, well, yeah I do, you see it's ..."
"Twilight, I know how it is. When I was younger, I used to fall in love with the oddest of ponies. But still, he's probably more odd than all of them combined. Is that what you like about him?"
Before Twilight could answer, the two heard a voice calling from over in the front yard. They looked over to see Spike running over to them. He landed with a slight hop in front of the two, slapping on a quick smile. "Hey guys! What's going on over here?"
Rarity didn't answer his question at first. "Spike ... where were you?"
Spike's eyes widened. "Well, I wasn't anywhere in particular."
"He was in the Library still," said Twilight confidently. "Right Spike?"
"Um, yes of course," said the dragon, stammering a little.
Rarity did a double take. "But Spike, I came knocking and you didn't answer. Why not?"
Twilight seemed surprised at this revelation, and her voice dripped with a parental sort of scolding tone. "Yes Spike, what were you doing in the library all by yourself?"
Spike looked from one mare to the other, visibly nervous. "I was uh ... well, I ... You see, I was busy doing, uh ... stuff."
"Stuff?" Twilight asked. "What sort of stuff?"
Now Spike went from nervous to blushing. Rarity didn't seem to notice, but Twilight did. At first, she didn't seem to know what to do. She just stammered as Spike grew more and more embarrassed.
"Spike?"
"Yes Twilight?" he said, nervously twiddling his claws.
"We'll talk about this later, okay? Right now, Rarity needs our help."
"Yep," Spike said awkwardly. As he walked away, Rarity called after him: "We're looking for Opal, alright?" Hearing or seeing no response, from the dragon, she turned to Twilight. "What was all that about?"
"It's nothing important," she stated matter-of-factly, now herself blushing. Rarity still had no idea what was going on, and that bothered her. But it was also clear she wasn't getting an answer out of Twilight, so she decided to open that can of worms another time. She, Twilight, and Spike continued to comb the yard, looking for any signs of the cat.
Even with three sets of eyes, the search was unfruitful. After a good 15 minutes of searching, Rarity was about to give up. After all, the mouse had probably escaped by this time, and it had a pretty good chance of avoiding the cat if it stuck to the longer grass.
"Spike! Twilight! I think I'm going to head back in. You two can come in and get some lunch if you want." When she said this, Twilight glared over at Spike and the dragon seemed to wince under her gaze. Although part of her offer was just her trying to be friendly, she also wanted to know what was going on between the two. All she could really tell at the moment was that it was awkward and they didn't want to talk about it. That only made he want to know what it was even more.
Sadly, she wouldn't get the chance. "Yeah, I think we'll have lunch at home, if that's alright. You and me can talk some other time, okay?
Sighing, Rarity nodded, and Twilight started walking away, her assistant following close behind. As she watched the pair go, Rarity had a sudden idea. "Twilight! Spike! I just figured it out!"
The two turned around, both looking like they'd just been caught doing some sort of crime. Rarity was a little offput by this, but she continued. "I just remembered a trick I used to use when Opal was a kitten. I had this container of treats I used to shake. It was a really easy way to get her out of the studio when i needed to focus. I think I might be able to make it work."
Twilight smiled, seeminly shedding the awkwardness for at least a moment. "Now that you mention it, I used to do the same thing with Spike when he was a-"
"Twilight!"
Spikes interruption startled her a little, but she recovered. "Oh, never mind. So you know where the treats are, right?"
"Yes, I believe I do." Running back into the house, she fetched the treats from the last place she'd left them all those years ago, in a desk drawer in her studio. Within moments, she was back outside. It only took one of two shakes before the cat came running from under the deck.
"Oh, I didn't think to look under there!" exclaimed Rarity as the cat jumped up to her, trying to get a paw on the treats that Rarity's magic held just out of reach. Walking over, Twilight opened the lid and floated a treat out of the container and through the open door. And like a charm, Opal jumped in after the treat, and Spike shut the door trapping the cat inside.
Finally, the mouse was safe.
Spike and Twilight ended up staying for lunch, despite their awkward exchanges beforehand. The three had a fun time recounting the experience, and talking other things. To Rarity's disappointment, Twilight and Spike seemed set on skirting the unknown awkward topic, although Rarity was pretty sure she'd pieced it together by this point.
When the three separated, Rarity walked from the kitchen table out to her patio. She was relieved to find that the mouse was no longer huddled up in a corner, and had seemingly escaped, although she couldn't really know for sure. One thing that was for sure, however, was that it had been an excellent morning, and definitely one to lift her spirits.
Dear Princess Celestia,
This one will be a little short, but I had the most interesting morning today. I won't go into the details, but I defintately learned something. Although friends are always great to have and rely on for ideas, sometimes your friends won't be there for you. It's times like those - times like this morning - that require your own creative thinking, and what creative thinking it was! I did have a little help from Spike and Twilight, but I was able to figure out everything myself, which is something I don't normally do. Sometimes, it feels good to do something all by yourself.
~Rarity
