You Probably Know The Joke Already
It was the first time she'd seen her in days, despite living in the same house. She came into the kitchen glass-eyed and scruffy, mouthing words silently to herself and pacing as she made another pot of coffee. She never saw her before she left to go to work. She'd missed so many band practice sessions that they'd stopped calling. Bonbon would have said Lyra was just taking drugs all day, but she never saw her leave the house to get them.
She stopped her hoof as she reached for the coffee machine. Lyra tried another couple of times to keep reaching for it. Having magic didn't seem to occur to her as a solution. Bonbon frowned.
"Lyra... can we talk?"
Lyra mumbled something about turning and yawned. It was about lunchtime on Saturday, so she figured she'd just gotten up. "Yeah?"
"I... hmm. How to put this delicately." Lyra scratched herself on the chin. "You don't get out anymore. Like, I'm pretty sure that if you went outside now the sun would actually blind you."
Lyra ducked from Bonbon's steel gaze and flat brow, grimacing at the floor. Eye contact successfully avoided, she levitated the coffee pot out of its holder and took the jar of coffee down from the shelf.
"Hey!" Bonbon lifted her chin with a hoof, maybe a bit more forcefully than she intended to. Lyra rolled her head out of the grip and shied back like a cat that didn't want to be picked up. "Lyra, sweetie, I'm worried about you."
"I know," Lyra said to the floor.
"Just... what are you doing in your room all day?"
She could have sworn that in that moment Lyra turned three shades brighter. She jumped and squealed and her front legs, held to her front, knocked together. "Oh man, I thought you'd never ask! You gotta see this!" Before protest could be made, Bonbon found herself being slid out of the kitchen at what was surely a breach of the speed limit. Their house blurred before her eyes until she tripped on the threshold and landed face-first in an empty packet of hay doritos with "hay" scribbled out.
Eyes and nose burning with the acrid stench of artificial flavourings, it took a moment for Lyra's room to come into view. The curtains were pulled shut, and the only light was a soft blue from the computer screen. All the better, since there were some shapes in the heaps of human action figures and snack food packaging on the floor that Bonbon wasn't sure she wanted to know what they were. "Bonbonbonbonbonbonbon! Look! Lookie!" Lyra was bouncing on her bed and pointing at the computer.
Bonbon rubbed her eyes, tried not to think about what was growing in the Mountain Dew bottle and squinted at the screen. "The Transfer Agency, Two Dozen over Two? I don't get it."
"It's my epic fan fiction about how a bunch of ponies start turning into humans when they reach a certain age because they're really humans who were sent to the pony world because of a government conspiracy and then they have to find their way back to America and then lots of other ponies start wanting to come to America and become humans because of this and the humans set up this agency to deal with all the extradimensional immigrants and..." A gasp ensued that took in all the air in the province. "... then there's all the moral ambiguity because not all the humans want to have converted ponies living with them and then some of the ponies get there and it doesn't turn out to be as great a place as they thought it was and iHMF-" Lyra continued trying to talk with a hoof in her mouth.
Bonbon squinted at the screen again. "Two hundred thousand words... no wonder you haven't seen the light of day for weeks. That's like, Game of Thoroughbreds length."
"I started writing it on like weekends but then I got more into it and I just had to put more time into it and now I want to write all the time about humFF."
Bonbon read the description again. She recognised occasional words from Lyra's stream of babbling. Waves of discomfort washed over her as she progressed. She knew she was supposed to be like, tolerant of the closed-doors desires of other ponies, and she didn't really have a problem with humies in general, but this... she shivered. She struggled to keep her cringe silent. Everything about this room, from the growing collection of mouldy coffee cups to the odd smell coming from the bed to the human toys that she didn't want to know where they'd been to the low-quality prints of humans from the show on the walls (some of them walking on four legs with hooves) to the obsessive attention to a story about ponies turning into humans to Lyra's genuine, unabashed rapture that she'd taken the slightest bit of notice in what she was doing, made Bonbon's lunch want to come up.
She swallowed, and tried to pierce the veil another time. "Lyra... Lyra, this isn't... Lyra, listen to me." In the time she'd taken to read the blurb, Lyra had put some earphones in and was listening to one of those fan musicians. Bonbon yanked them out, and Lyra stopped dancing. "Lyra, this isn't healthy. Like, fine, write whatever you like, but this place is a health hazard and you're getting a vitamin D deficiency. You have friends that think you got into an accident. You have to come join the real world some time."
Lyra groaned and rolled on her back on the bed. The bedsheets crinkled. "But the real world is booooring."
"I'm not your mother. I'm not going to put up with you whining like a filly until you get your way. Get your life in order or..."
Lyra chuckled. "Or what?"
The next day, Lyra's door had an eviction notice on it. She didn't notice until the repo ponies turned up.
