Or, Twilight of the Idles
“I’m really, really sorry, Twilight.”
“Uh-huh.” She watched with dull eyes as a team of pegasi lowered the massive, multicolored fumigation tent over her library.
“I know you told me never to bring food into your lab. But I figured one tiny powdered donut wouldn’t do much harm.”
“Uh-huh.” Her home, reduced to the world’s largest, most poisonous birthday present.
“But then that powdered sugar just flew up my nose! I didn’t mean to sneeze all over those potions, I swear!”
“Uh-huh.” She briefly considered teleporting into the fume-filled tent and taking a few deep breaths.
“But hey, at least we got away from that fireball, amirite?” Spike nudged her foreleg with an elbow, flashing her a toothy, sweat-christened grin.
“Uh-huh, Spike? Listen…” She took a calming breath before facing her assistant, donning the same patient, princessly smile she’d spent so much time practicing in front of the mirror. “I think I’m going to take a walk and clear my head a little. After all the… excitement,”—she indicated the library with a smoking foreleg—“I could use some peace and quiet.”
“Oh… h-hey, sure thing, Twi!” He averted his eyes and kicked at the ground with his foot. “You want me to come with?”
She stared at him flatly for one moment, and then another. Finally: “No. No, I think I’ll be okay on my own.”
He visibly deflated.
“Just go ahead to Rarity’s,” Twilight continued. “I’ll catch up with you once I’ve had some time to unwind. And make sure to thank Rarity for giving us someplace to stay, alright?”
“O-okay, Twi…” He turned and trudged off with his head held low.
Twilight watched him go, wrestling with the instinct to run after him, scoop him up in a hug, and reassure him that all was forgiven. However, memories of explosions and screaming and clouds of noxious gas quelled that little urge rather handily. She didn’t want to be too hard on him—it had been a mistake, after all. But that mistake had nearly gotten the both of them killed. Perhaps this experience would teach him to be more careful in the future.
Really, considering that she lived with a fire-breathing dragon in a giant piece of firewood filled to the brim with kindling, Twilight was surprised that they’d made it this long without an incident. Better this than being cremated in her sleep, she supposed.
“Glass half full, Twilight,” she said out loud. Then, in a rather impressive feat of combining irony and prophecy, she added, “And right now, that glass is half full of some laziness and solitude.”
With one final glance at the toxic death-trap formerly known as her library, Twilight spread her wings and took flight.
Twilight gave Ponyville proper a wide berth, deciding that she would rather have perished in the explosion than answer any of the questions the ever-gossipy citizens of Ponyville would no doubt have for her.
She ended up aimlessly orbiting the village a few times before she noticed a wide swath of green to her left, instantly recognizing it as the town park. Hoping there wouldn’t be too many ponies there at this hour on a weekday, Twilight banked in that direction. She spotted an out-of-the-way park bench and landed unsteadily beside it, then took a moment to soak in the quietude before climbing up onto the bench, curling up into a ball, and releasing all the morning’s tension in one mighty exhale.
She always enjoyed coming to the park, even if she didn’t get to come as much as she would like. The sun warmed her coat. A pleasant breeze passed through the trees overhead and sent ripples across the surface of a nearby pond. Here and there, birds chirped unobtrusively.
If it wasn’t the perfect setting was a nap, she didn’t know what was. With a cute yawn, Twilight closed her eyes, curled up tighter, and waited for the sweet release of unconsciousness.
A burning scent filled her nostrils. Cracking one eyes open, she peered at a patch of blackened fur on one of her forelegs. With the other, she rubbed at the mark, succeeding in brushing some of the charring away. Satisfied, she closed her eyes once more.
A fly started to buzz around her head. She tried to ignore it, giving only the occasional flick of her ears to shoo it away. Finally, with a snort, she swatted at it with her hoof, and smiled at the sound of the fly buzzing away.
Some minutes passed, and she noticed that her right wing, pinned as it was between her body and the hard park bench, was falling asleep.
“Ugh, darn things.”
She rolled all the way onto her back with her legs in the air, stretching the wing out to get the blood flowing.
That annoyance addressed, she again closed her eyes and waited with rapidly depleting reserves of patience for sleep to come. Despite herself, her mind was a tempest of activity, with self-consciousness as the centerpoint. Somehow, it didn’t seem proper for a princess to lie on her back like that, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. That, and her belly felt like it was baking in the unrelenting sunlight.
Raising her head off the bench, she examined the nearby expanse of parkland. And there, not thirty yards away, stood a rather nice shade tree.
In one smooth motion, she rolled off the bench and onto her hooves, only to teeter rather un-smoothly in the throes of a headrush. She trotted over to the tree and, finding it acceptable, curled up in its shade on a bed of soft grass.
“Ahhhh…” she ahhhh’d, closing her eyes and smiling.
She was only just drifting off when something light landed on her nose, tickling it slightly. With a flare of irritation, she cracked her eyes open, finding a leaf perched on her snout. One huff through her nostrils was all it took to blow the leaf away. She raised accusing eyes to the tree above her, then stopped. One of the branches caught her attention, and it set the wheels a-turning in her mind.
“Hmmm, I’ve never tried napping in a tree before,” she mused. “I know Rainbow Dash swears by it, but…”
Finally, curiosity won out. Twilight clambered onto her hooves, gave her wings a flap, and hovered up to the branch. After some careful maneuvering, she set all four hooves onto the narrow surface and let her wings go still, keeping them spread for the sake of balance. She wobbled briefly, but found a solid footing.
“Ha!” She smiled at her accomplishment. “That wasn’t so ha—”
The branch snapped and Twilight fell to the ground with a crash.
“Owwwwwww…” she moaned, her voice muffled by a facefull of earth. She raised her head and glared at the tree. “Well, that was stupid!” She picked herself up off the ground and shook vigorously, flinging particles of dirt and grass from her body. “I’m just glad nopony saw that. I don’t know what I was thinking....”
She tongued the inside of her cheek.
“Maybe napping in trees is just a pegasus thing,” she said, quieter this time, meditative. “I have wings, though, so maybe I shouldn’t write it off after one failed attempt.”
She looked up with a glint in her eye, and a strand of hair may have sprung loose from the rest of her mane as she did. “Hypothesis: I can take a nap in a tree. Now, I just need to test that hypothesis further before I dismiss it.” She kicked at the broken branch before her. “Though, I might need a sturdier tree…”
She looked out across the park and its many, many trees. “Yes, I’ll find a better tree, and then: I’ll do science to it!”
It wasn’t easy, but after a concerted application of her keen, analytical, world-saving, royalty-tutored mind, Twilight had found the ideal tree for napping in: a venerable old oak tree. It had full, sturdy branches, just the right amount of shade, and, unlike a certain nightmare-inducing tree on the other side of the lake, was completely lacking in swarming clusters of spiders.
She looked up at the tree, her chin held high, determination burning away in her eyes. “And now,” she called like a battle cry, “I nap!”
She picked out the ideal branch and flapped up to it. She set down carefully, keeping her wings at the ready in case the branch gave out again, but to her relief it seemed to hold. Bending her knees, she bounced up and down slightly, testing it further. Satisfied that the branch was structurally sound, she ceased her bouncing and folded her wings to her sides, smiling at this one small step to victory.
Except, the branch was still bobbing from her movements, and when she moved to lie down, one of her hooves slipped out from under her, and the others followed suit.
She scrambled briefly, flailing her hooves for purchase, but alas, it was in vain. Screaming all the way, Twilight feel to the ground with a crash.
Twilight hovered above the branch, staring at it, calculating her trajectory. Ever so slowly—inch by measured inch—she lowered her belly towards it, all four legs outstretched to wrap around the branch and anchor herself to it. She made tiny adjustments with her wings as she descended, compensating for even the tiniest inaccuracies in her aim and positioning.
Before, her mistake was being too reckless. If she simply applied some caution, she reasoned, then everything would work out fine. Like a feather landing on the surface of a pond, she set herself lengthwise on the branch, then clutched her legs around it and held fast.
She sighed in relief… and then promptly spun around to the underside of the branch, hanging from it like a sloth.
“Waaugh!” she cried, squeezing tighter with her legs to keep from falling. She craned her neck to look at the ground below her, then considered the branch logistically. In her current position, lacking any leverage whatsoever and having only her hooves, she suspected she had little hope of righting herself.
“Okay… I’ll just have to l-let go. If I can spin myself upright before I hit the ground, I can catch myself with my wings and be none the worse for wear. Alright… on the count of three. One… two…”
Her hooves slipped, and she fell from the branch with a yelp. Unfortunately, she greatly overestimated her ability to spin in mid-air, and she fell to the ground with a crash.
Like an airship rising over the edge of a cliff, Twilight’s horn appeared over the top of the branch, followed by ears, a mane, and a bloodshot pair of eyes, one of which sported a decent shiner. Using her wings to stabilize herself in the air, she reached out and grabbed the branch with one hoof, and then the other.
“Alright,” she said as she hung—flapping, controlled—from the branch. “Now I just have to kick myself up onto it. Easy does it…”
She kicked with a hindleg, rolled over the top of the branch and off the other side, and fell to the ground with a crash.
With a lavender flash, Twilight teleported onto the branch. She sat still for a moment, casting wary glances into the open air on either side of her, getting a feel for her balance.
“Huh.” Her eye gave the tiniest twitch. “Well, that was easy.”
Straddling the branch with her hind hooves dangling below her, she slowly—ever so slowly—lay back on the branch. And the jagged base of a snapped-off twig promptly stabbed her right between the wing joints.
“Ow! Motherf—!”
“Hey, Twilight!”
Twilight bit her words off with a clack of her teeth, looking down and spotting three familiar fillies standing near the base of the tree.
“Well, I’ll be…” Apple Bloom marveled.
Sweetie Belle gave her friends a smug look. “Told you I saw Twilight repeatedly falling out of a tree!”
“H-hi, girls…!” Twilight greeted them with a blush.
“What are you doing up there?” asked Scootaloo.
Carefully, Twilight sat up on the branch, turned around, and lay down in the other direction, this time managing not to impale herself. “I’m trying to take a nap.”
The crusaders exchanged a look. “In a tree?”
“Well, why not? Rainbow Dash does it.” She shifted and wriggled on the branch, trying to get comfortable on the unyielding surface. “And I am part pegasus now, technically.”
Apple Bloom looked at the ground under the tree, finding several Twilight-shaped indentations in the earth. “If you say so…”
“I’ll admit I haven’t been having the easiest time of it.” She scooted another inch or so along the branch, searching for a more agreeable contouring for her spine. “Trees don’t seem to be particularly comfortable. I guess it just takes practice. Like flying.”
“Or, I dunno…” Scootaloo spoke up, “you could just use a pillow, like Rainbow does.”
Twilight’s instantly perked, bolting upright on the branch. “Of course! A pillow!”
The fillies facehoofed.
“Except…” Twilight continued, her ears drooping, “all my pillows are currently marinating in poisonous gasses. I suppose I could borrow one from one of my friends.”
“Oh yeah…” Sweetie Belle said. “Rarity told me about the library.” She gave Twilight a concerned look. “You are… feeling alright, aren’t you, Twilight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like… any unusual twitches, or strange voices telling you to do things?”
Twilight giggled. “Oh, girls… I’m not crazy. I’m only trying to sleep in a tree.”
“Right…”
“If you need a pillow, Twilight,” Scootaloo stepped in, “There’s this place just off the town square that sells them. Like, exclusively.”
Twilight considered this. “Yeah, I think I know the place you’re talking about. Isn’t it over on—… hey, wait a minute.” She squinted at the fillies. “Shouldn’t you three be in school?”
“Oh,” Scootaloo said with a dismissing wave of her hoof. “We’re trying to get our cutie marks in delinquency.”
Twilight stared at them, slowly raising an eyebrow. “So, you’re seriously telling me that you three—Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle—are hoping to discover a special talent for being up to no good?” She blinked. “Wouldn’t that be a little redundant?”
“See?” Sweetie squeaked. “We are good at it!”
Twilight’s mouth hung open, then finally closed. “You know what? Never mind. I’ll just get to that pillow store and take my nap.” She sat up and turned so that both legs hung from the same side of the branch, spreading her wings for take-off. “Alright, and…” She rolled backwards off the branch and fell to the ground with a crash.
The Crusaders winced, then looked at each other.
“Girls…” Scootaloo said, indicating Twilight with her hoof. “Our new princess.”
The front door to the shop opened with a creak, and the stallion behind the counter gave a lethargic glance at his new customer. If he noticed she was an alicorn, he gave no sign of it.
“Welcome to Phoenix Down’s Pillow Emporeum,” he droned. “Buy one of our pillows, and you’ll sleep so soundly you may as well be dead.” He sighed. “Or your money back.”
Twilight squinted at him. “Ooooooo-kay..” She shook her head, then made her way over to one of the shelves. “I need a pillow.”
He gave her a glacial blink. “You’re pulling my leg.”
She ignored his snarkery, examining the various pillows. “Do you have a model for sleeping in trees?”
“I’m afraid we’re fresh out of tree pillows.”
“Oh, oka— Wait, really?”
He shrugged. “They’re always a hot seller this time of year.”
“Huh. Who’d have thought?” She turned back to the shelf, then picked out the fluffiest pillow she could find.
“Ooh, excellent choice.” He gave her a waggle of his eyebrows. “That one’s real popular with the ladies, if you know what I mean.”
Without taking her eyes off the clerk, she put the pillow back on the shelf. She grabbed the next one over, then looked at him with something like curiosity.
“Huh, well, whatever rocks your boat.”
Twilight blushed without even knowing why. She paid the clerk in a hurry and bolted out of the shop.
The new pillow flopped onto the branch, right where it split in two directions. Twilight carefully got into position and lay her head on the pillow.
“Ahhhhh… that’s the ticket.” She nestled deeper into the plush material. “Now, maybe I can get a little shut-eye.” She closed her eyes, smacked her lips, and felt a wave of relaxation washing over her.
Chitter-chit-chitter.
Twilight opened one eye, searching the neighboring branches for the source of the sound. Thinking she must have imagined it, she closed it again and sighed.
Chat-chitter-chit.
Both eyes opened this time, making another search but once again finding nothing. She furrowed her brows, closed her eyes deliberately, and lay completely still.
Chitter-chitter.
“Aha!” she cried, sitting up in time to spot a bushy tale disappear from view within a hole in the tree trunk. She snorted and lay her head back down.
"Just a squirrel", she muttered quietly. "Squirrels live in trees; it’s only natural. I’m sure Rainbow’s dealt with squirrels tons of times, with all the trees she’s napped in. I bet Applejack’s are full of squirrels. They’re probably just curious. If I leave them alone, they’ll me al—"
An acorn bounced off her horn.
“Hey!” She glared at the whole. She sat up, shimmied over to the hole, and peeked inside. “There’s no need to throw things,” she said, her voice echoing in the hollow space. “I’m not here to hurt you. If we just respect each other’s boundaries, I know we can co-exist.”
Twilight heard something deep inside the hole, turning an ear to listen. From within, a repetitive, chant-like chit-chitter-chat chit-chitter-chat was audible, but only just. Twilight bit her lip, sent a pulse of magic into her horn, and cast a purple light into the hole to see better.
With a squeaky war cry, a squirrel leapt from the hole and latched onto Twilight’s face.
“Waaauuggghh!” she screamed, flailing backwards to escape the rodent’s clutches. In her recklessness, her back hoof slipped off the branch and she began to fall.
Everything seemed to go into slow motion. The squirrel, its face mere inches from her own, appeared to flash her an evil smile before kicking off her face, performing a backflip and landing in a crouch on the branch, all in the time it took for Twilight to hit the ground. The impact knocked the air from her lungs, and she lay there, wheezing, as the squirrel above her barked its little squirrel laugh.
Once she caught her breath, Twilight got to her hooves with a growl and flapped back into the air. She looked her attacked square in its beady eyes.
“Hey, you! I was trying to be nice! There’s no need to—!”
She heard a ripping sound to her left, and looked to find two more squirrels tearing her pillow to shreds. Her cheek twitched, and a few more mane hairs sprung out.
Swooping over to the downy massacre, she snatched the remains of her pillow from their paws with her magic. “What do you think you’re doing?!” she shrieked. “That’s my pillow! Is it so much to ask that we all behave like civilized creatures?”
One of the squirrels gave her a rather rude gesture with its paw, and Twilight raised the pillow to retaliate, then suddenly froze. With a sweating brow, she watched as another face, and another, and another poked around branches and leaves in every direction—dozens and dozens of squirrels, by her admittedly frantic estimation. The pillow fell from her magic as she found herself at the center of a veritable army of squirrels.
“Uhm…” she muttered feebly. “Truce?”
One of the squirrels have a shrill bark, and Twilight was instantly assaulted by a volley of acorns, twigs, and little balls of what she could only hope was dirt. She held her forelegs up to shield herself, not having the wherewithal to fly away under the sheer intensity of the sciurid bombardment.
“Stop! I just wanted to take a nap!” she sobbed amid a choir of squeaks and barks.
The squirrels showed no mercy, however. They continued to shell the intruder, and few of them even leaping onto her as if she were a rodeo bull. Twilight clenched her teeth together, something deep inside her pulling taut, quivering. Finally:
“Enough!” She opened her eyes, and they shone with light. A wave of violet magic washed off of her, sweeping the squirrels off her body. The branches of the tree swayed in an unnatural wind. “If you wanted a fight, you picked the wrong pony, and you picked the wrong day! Now, stuff this in your cheeks until winter!”
Her horn began to glow, the very air around it trembling. Then, there was a flash of light.
Rainbow Dash saw the explosion.
At the time, she was sitting on a cloud, overseeing the efforts of the weather team. She watched as a concussive wave of displaced air rippled across the land and sky, nearly knocking her own cloud out from under her. A great plume of smoke rose into the air somewhere in the vicinity of Ponyville Park.
“The hay was that?!” she squawked.
The other weather flyers merely shrugged.
Applejack saw it, too, out of the corner of her eye.
It took a few seconds for the sound of the explosion to reach her all the way on the farm, but the force was still enough to knock a few apples off the tree above her.
“What in tarnation?”
Pinkie Pie didn’t see it—being indoors at the time—but she sure heard it.
Every customer in Sugarcube Corner yelped and held onto their tables for support, and the twins began crying upstairs. Pinkie watched Mrs. Cake head up to see to them, then her eyes widened and she looked into the oven. The cake she had been baking had collapsed.
“Awwwwww poop...”
Being both indoors and farther from the park, Rarity felt it more than anything.
She and Spike turned and watched as the windows of Carousel Boutique rattled in their frames, and little bits of plaster rained down from the ceiling.
“My word!”
Spike looked out the window with dull eyes. “Why do I get the feeling that this has something to do with Twilight?”
Fluttershy, however, hadn’t witnessed anything.
Nevertheless, she dropped her teacup to the floor. The animals sitting around the table from her gave her concerned looks, and Angel Bunny hopped to her side to check on her.
“Oh my…” she said quietly. “I felt a great disturbance, as if dozens of tiny voices suddenly squeaked in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
Angel looked to the other animals and shrugged.
Five ponies and a dragon converged on the blast site. A debris field, littered with burning pieces of wood, stretched for fifty yards in every direction. At the center of it all: a hunched-over alicorn and a burning tree stump.
“Twilight?” Spike said, approaching her slowly.
She simply sat there, watching with hollow eyes as a family of squirrels hobbled into the nearby foliage. She sniffed, then turned to the others.
“It’s been a long day,” she said.
“What happened, sugarcube?”
“I… I just wanted to take a nap in a tree.”
Rainbow gazed at the scorched remains of said tree and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know who taught you how to take naps, Twi, but I don’t think you’re doing it right.”
The others gave her a reproachful look.
“What?” she said defensively. “It’s true! I’ve taken thousands of naps and never once have I caught things on fire!”
“Well, there was… more to it than that,” Twilight said lamely. “I kept falling out of the branch, then I needed pillow. And the whole thing with the squirrels...”
The others exchanged confused looks.
“But, why’d it have to be in a tree?” Pinkie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe… maybe because I can’t nap in my own tree. I miss my library. I miss my books. I miss how peaceful it is when I nap in it. I know it’s only been one day, but still. I guess I just didn’t handle it very well, and I let myself get obsessed with napping in some other tree as a… coping mechanism, or something.”
Spike winced. “I’m sorry, Twi…”
“It’s okay, Spike,” she said, smiling and pulling him in for a hug. “We all cause explosions sometimes.”
“Not while freakin' napping…” Rainbow muttered under her breath.
“Well shoot, darlin’,” Applejack said. “I can understand what you’re goin’ through, bein’ cut off from your home n’ all. But they’ll have that fumigation thingamabob down in no time, and you’ll be able to take naps in your treehouse for years and years and years.”
“Applejack’s right,” Fluttershy added. “Things will be back to normal soon. And don’t forget that trip to the Crystal Empire next week, to meet with those dignitaries from Maretonia. That's something to look forward to.”
“I guess you’re right,” Twilight said with a small smile.
“Now come, darling. Let’s head back to the Boutique and get you all cleaned up.”
The seven of them began to make their way out of the park.
“Hey, Twi?” Spike asked as they walked. “You wanna write about this in the journal?”
“Not even a little bit, Spike,” she replied. “Not even a little bit.”
Their giggling voices faded into the distance. A small cloud of smoke continued to rise from the ruins of the tree, mourned only by the squirrels who had lived there.
Author's Note
Welp, after more than two years in this fandom, I post my first fic, and it's some popcorn fart of a story that I wrote in one sitting. My life dumbfounds me.
