Two Background Humans Adamantly Refuse To Eat Cookies
"TWO BACKGROUND HUMANS ADAMANTLY REFUSE TO EAT COOKIES"
In spite of it being a bright and sunny spring day with clear skies and plenty of warmth, Canterlot High School had honestly been better. Right now what few students who weren't gathered in the auditorium listening and/or waiting for their turn in the first ever Battle of the Bands were milling about the school campus being unhappy, argumentative, and downright grumps. After all, ever since lunch the other day things had gotten rather testy and competitive to the negative extreme around school, with the only major exceptions being a certain seven friends and three girls wearing heavy eye shadow and perpetual "for-the-evilz" looks on their faces.
Among those were two young men, one green and one blue, seated with their arms crossed and frowns on their faces, their backs to one another, in front of the school statue. Both had their expressions twisted into angry scowls and glared off at nothing, clearly not interested in talking to each other or looking at each other, much less eating cookies or talking about inconsistencies. For a long time, the two were totally silent.
Finally, the blue one grit his teeth.
"Booed out of the preliminaries, Carl. Didn't even get a chance to compete..."
"Maybe your drum playing was so horrendous someone's ears started to bleed, Sam."
Immediately, he snapped his head around to the green one. "My playing?!"
"You should have left the drums to me like I agreed! Now I was stuck out there with the only other instrument I can play!" To accent this, he reached to his side and held up a cowbell.
"It's not my fault you bowed out of singing, Carl! You told me you were going to sing! You can't do 'Don't Fear the Reaper' with just a cowbell and drums! No one could even tell we were doing anything up there! Even Superbitch's minions did better than us up there!"
"Then why the hell didn't you jump in?!"
"I didn't know I had to learn the lyrics!"
"That song's infamous!"
"All I can do is remember that stupid Christopher Walken SNL skit when I hear it! Although you're just perfect for the cowbell part!"
"Oh yeah? Well I've got a fever and the only prescription is Sam-Shuts-The-Hell-Up!"
"You're such a dumbass you can't even think of a good insult!"
"I can think of lots of insults! Like you're a dirty-"
"Guys! Guys!"
Both young men turned to see a sun-colored girl with a sunshine-embroidered t-shirt approaching them both with a plate of freshly-baked cookies.
"Both of you cut this out! What the heck has gotten into you?"
Sam pointed out an accusing finger at Carl. "He was supposed to sing and got us kicked out of the competition in the first place, Dawn!"
Carl pointed an accusing finger at Sam. "He was supposed to leave the drums to me and got us kicked out of the competition in the first place!"
The girl sighed as she set the cookies down in between them. "You guys have been driving me nuts with this constant bickering. I don't know what's gotten into you...or everyone, for that matter. I don't know why you two thought you could win this stupid competition in the first place. Sam, you haven't played the drums since you gave up lessons when you were 9. And Carl...you manage to misplay kazoos. And you both could have at least been good sports and stayed for the rest of the competition."
"I hate all the other competitors!" Sam shouted.
"Me too!" Carl shouted back. "...Except the Dazzlings for some reason."
"Yeah, I think I'll go back to watch them compete. They're not on now, are they, Dawn?"
The girl rolled her eyes and sat down nearby. "Another thing...all anyone does when they're not fighting now is praise those new girls. They don't play sports, they don't eat in the cafeteria, they don't go to class...although no one ever went to class before here, which was kind of odd to begin with... But when the principals changed the Musical Review just because they talked to them, I thought that was weird. Then when they called them out pretty much just to say how much they loved them, I thought that was a bit overdoing it." She reached for her side and pulled out a school bulletin. "Now they have an official letterhead announcement saying the newest school regulation is to offer a 10% tithe to..." She squinted. "'Our humanized siren overlords...sorry, I meant to write new students'... That's not even subtle!"
"...You weren't around at the cafeteria the other day. Their random song made a good persuasive argument." Carl responded.
"Why weren't you in the cafeteria, anyway, Dawn?" Sam asked.
"Sam, I've told you I have peanut allergies so I brown-bag it outside." She frowned. "But forget about all that! The worst part is how you two are letting this ruin your friendship! I don't believe this! Sam...Carl...you do everything together!"
"Well, not anymore." Sam huffed.
"What he said." Carl grumbled, both of them turning their backs to each other again.
"Aw, come on, guys..." Dawn suggested as she pushed the cookies more in between them. "You two have been inseparable since kindergarten. You go perfectly well together over a plate of pastries! Carl..." She leaned in closer to him. "You always rambling about the latest inconsistency in the world you've found, and Sam..." She leaned to the other side. "You always...um...listen to Carl ramble about the latest inconsistency in the world he's found. Can't you do that again?"
"I don't feel like it." Carl griped.
"Me neither." Sam answered.
Dawn formed a rueful expression. "Can't you at least try? Look around, um...er..." Immediately, her head darted about, searching for something. Finally, she looked up. "What about the fact we're all still pissed at Superbit...er, Sunset Shimmer..." She sighed. "I knew I'd pick up swearing if I stayed around you two long enough... We're all still mad at her but we gave Snips and Snails a pass?"
"Feh, that's nothing." Carl snorted. "I'd think about it for only ten seconds."
"I wouldn't even slow down eating my cookies." Sam snorted.
Dawn frowned, looking around a bit more. After a time, she noticed the seven girls talking and making elaborate plans on front of the school steps. She lit up at that and turned back to the boys.
"What about the fact that Twilight Sparkle and the girls are clearly worried sick about the Dazzlings finding out about their power when the secret's not only out...it's practically on vacation?"
Both young men looked up a bit to the girls at that, and then turned their heads slightly, seeing the three new students talking to one of the normal students.
"Oh yeah. Last Fall Formal. Whole school saw it." The student explained. "The purple kid? She's really an alicorn from another dimension. Gateway's at the base of the statue. Only opens every once in a while though, I think. You wouldn't believe the draft the school had while Superbitch had to rebuild the front of the school all winter."
Carl twisted his lips a bit. Sam himself raised an eyebrow. However, in the end they both turned and crossed their arms again.
"Nope."
"Not even close."
Dawn frowned as well. "What about the fact that no one ever mentions the 'other' Sunset Shimmer we have in this universe?"
She gestured, and the two young men looked up to see a much-less flashy fiery-headed girl run by the campus bawling at the top of her lungs and in absolute misery.
"WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE ME?! WHAT DID I EVER DO TO THEM?!"
Carl stared a moment, then snorted and shrugged. "Covered her last week."
"He did."
Dawn sighed. "Alright then...how about the other Twilight?"
She pointed to Carl's side. The green-colored boy looked up...seeing "Twilight Sparkle" in a lab coat and glasses waving a PKE meter in front of him.
"Uh-huh..." She remarked as she looked at the readings. "Something is definitely up at this school..."
Carl frowned. "No, really? What was your first clue? The giant rainbow DNA molecule last fall? The succubus that enslaved the student body? Her?"
The purple haired kid looked puzzled at that last comment, until a pink-haired girl bouncing up and down ran up excitedly.
"Twilight! Twilight! Twili-"
The girl in glasses looked to her, and the pink-haired one went rigid and grimaced.
"Ah!" Immediately, she slinked off. "Wrong Twilight..."
"She does that to you twice a day!" Carl shouted. He blinked soon after. "...Do you even go here?"
The girl frowned. "I tested out of high school when I was six, thank you very much!" She huffed before turning and storming off.
Sam looked up slightly. "...Carl, you ever think she might end up trying to take over the school one day?"
Carl snorted. "After everything we've been through? What's she going to do? Smack us over the head with her abacus?"
The two stared at each other a moment, and Dawn brightened, looking hopeful that this meant they were finally making up. However, they soon frowned and turned away from each other again, crossing their arms.
"I'm still mad at you."
"Me too."
Dawn frowned and sighed. "Oh, come on!" She turned her head. "Carl, you're usually all over things like this! Don't you think something is up with how those three just suddenly arrived at school and soon everyone started getting at each other's throats and they just seem to stand around and smirk evilly? Like maybe they're some sort of bizarre monstrous creatures from that other universe?"
"Oh, that's just silly, Dawn!" Sam interjected. "That's something out of a kid's fantasy! What would make you think that?"
The woman stared blankly a moment.
"...Because it happened at school six months ago, Sam! Why do people have such a hard time believing anything can happen now?!"
Carl rubbed his chin. "I am thinking a lot about how much I hate Superbitch along with everyone else lately...and loving the Dazzlings... I suppose this could be a cosmic situation where they were really displaced monsters banished from that other universe who were turned into human form but retain their evil potency."
Sam turned to him. "You think so?"
"It would certainly explain what's up with that one exchange student: Ted Balrog."
Suddenly, a blood-curdling roar went out from inside the lobby, followed by a flash of corrupted fire. Vice Principal Luna's voice shouted back.
"I'm warning you, Ted! If you eat just one more student's soul, you're banging erasers after class!"
The green-colored boy shook his head. "I tell you...he only gets away with it because he's such a teacher's pet." He frowned. "But I don't care! I hate Sam! I hate the other students! I really hate Twilight Sparkle and her group and I'm completely ignoring the fact she saved me once already and is likely here to stop another extra-dimensional monster! And I love the Dazzlings and I'm going to lay down to form a human carpet for them to walk down later!"
"And I'm going to do all of that, only better than you, Carl!"
"Bite me, Sam!"
The two resumed their angry huff. As for Dawn, she frowned a bit more at all of this, then finally grit her teeth and pushed herself off the ground.
"Alright...enough is enough. If Carl isn't pointing out inconsistencies, I'm just going to have to handle this one..."
She turned and stormed away from the two grumpy young men. Instead, she headed straight for the seven girls, who even now were still fretting and arguing amongst each other. The pink one had apparently rejoined them...although it had never been clear when she had left in the first place. As she neared, she began to overhear them.
"Ok, if I get this straight, we've got to play awesome enough to win, but not so awesome that we reveal we have Equestrian magic, right?"
"Right, because we need to get to the finals so that everyone will hear the song at once to break the spell and we can stop the Dazzlings at the same time."
"And in that time, Twilight has to write the counter-spell!"
"Right!"
"...Can't we turn into those forms no matter what we sing? I mean...Rainbow Dash has it on her phone and everything. We don't even need Twilight, technically."
"Yes, and might we not simply sing multiple songs? After all, once the Dazzlings are defeated, we can go about singing to whoever we want as they can't hypnotize anyone else..."
"Plus, what exactly would they do if they did know about our Equestrian magic? We already know their power doesn't work on us..."
"Girls, girls! You got a minute?"
The seven paused and turned to watch Dawn running up to them. She halted and put her hands up.
"Stop all of this talking and planning for a second. Look...you think those girls are bad and casting a spell on the school, right?"
The seven looked to one another, and then back.
"Uh...right." Twilight stated.
"But their power doesn't work on you seven, right?"
"...Right." Sunset answered.
"And that's pretty much the only weapon they have right now, right? They have no magic of their own but their voices. They're as physically weak as anyone else normally...in fact, probably weaker than you and Rainbow Dash, Applejack...there's seven of you and only three of them, and they can't stop you with their singing, right?"
The girls looked to one another once again, thinking all of this over. Finally, Twilight Sparkle looked back to her.
"...Yes. What's your point?"
"I think you need to stop making this over-elaborate plan. I have a much simpler one in mind to stop them that would work a lot easier." Dawn answered, before reaching behind into her backpack and pulling out a shaft of wood. "It's called a baseball bat..."
"...And then they would have simply beaten them to death."
The blue-colored young man paused in the middle of eating his cookie and gave Carl a more critical stare than normal. The green-colored human, on the other hand, merely continued to lounge back and stare at Sam innocently, making sure to put his head underneath the shade cast by the stone horse statue in front of Canterlot High School.
At length, he shrugged. "Hey, it could happen! We're in just one alternate universe, Sam. For all we know, there's an infinite number out there. Heck! Maybe in one of them someone even wrote a comic about all the different alternate universes we have access to!"
Sam grimaced as he bit into his cookie. "I prefer the way Twilight, Sunset, and the girls got rid of the Dazzlings in this universe, Carl."
The green-colored boy shrugged. "Well, that goes without saying. In this universe we were at least smart enough to go with 'American Idiot' rather than anything by Blue Oyster Cult..."
His friend sighed and put the cookie down. "I meant I prefer it when things get resolved with as little violence as possible."
"You're telling us."
Sam idly looked behind him to see who had spoken, then turned back and took a bite out of his cookie...only to do a take, spitting the contents all over Carl's face, much to his displeasure, and snapping back around. The three Dazzlings, each looking rather dirty, haggard, and meager were all seated at the curb of the front lawn looking at them. Carl wiped his own face, muttering curses, until he spotted them as well and also looked shocked.
"What in the name of Principal Celestia's abnormal cowlick are you three doing here?"
"Shouldn't you have all been arrested or something?" Carl added.
"Like...since when has brainwashing high schoolers been illegal?" Aria dully answered.
"You didn't even give Sunset Shimmer an in-school suspension for what she did." Adiago snorted.
Carl rolled his eyes and groaned. "The city council has got to find a budget for a police force..."
"Well...why the hell are you hanging out at the school then?" Sam snapped.
"Now that we can't force humans to do our will anymore, we're doing the only thing we can do to make enough money to survive." Adiago answered grimly, gesturing to a bag of trash in front of them. "For one dollar per throw, you can pelt us garbage. For two dollars you can slap each of us in the face with this Nerf sword."
"You can hit us with as much food as you want for free, though!" Sonata cheerily threw in, before her look turned desperate. "Seriously...please pelt us with food. We haven't eaten in four days..."
"And as a special, for this weekend only, for 20 dollars you can throw this rock at Sonata's head." Aria added glumly as she held up a stone. A moment later, however, she cried out in pain as a rock smacked her in the skull and sent her down like a ton of bricks. Both Adiago and Sonata were stunned, as was Sam, as he turned around and saw Carl's arm still extended in a cast.
"No thanks." He called out to them with a grin. "I have plenty of rocks I can throw at you for free."
Adiago merely "ughed" and rolled her eyes. "Terrific. Apparently we failed to learn to be good businesswomen over the past 1,000 years too..."
Suddenly, a sound of a cosmic ripping was heard from the statue. Sam and Carl both turned to look, and watched as the stone rippled for a moment...before, to their shock, a bloody, bruised, and beaten trio of Dazzlings half-lunged out of the portal, seized the ground as hard as they could, and desperately tried to drag themselves out as someone on the "other end" furiously tried to yank them back in. These ones looked far more agonized and desperate as they glared at Sam and Carl.
"We're from a PG-13-rated universe and they figured out how to use violence!"
"For the love of god, have mercy!"
The three desperately tried to crawl out a bit longer before multi-colored hands shot out and seized them, as well as hefted...somewhat bloodstained...baseball bats and yanked them back inside. Soon the rippling and ripping sound died out, but Sam and Carl were left a bit mortified. Both sat uneasily and looked to each other for a few moments, having forgotten about their cookies.
"So...apparently that connects to more than one universe." Sam muttered.
"Yeah. She...probably should have shut that thing behind her or something..." Carl answered, before suddenly looking up, as if getting an idea. He turned to Sam with a grin. "Want to take a look at what we're like as ponies?"
Sam snapped to him in alarm. "Huh?"
"Come on, Sam! It'd be fun! No one's looking! Besides, if Princess Twilight didn't want us to, she wouldn't have left the portal open!"
"I have no desire to become a technicolor horse, Carl!"
Carl grinned. "You're just afraid I'll end up being something like a pegasus or a unicorn and you'll be stuck being an earth pony."
"I am not!"
"Only one way to find out, isn't there?"
Sam paused, frowning and hesitating.
"Come on! What's the worst that could happen from a peek?"
The blue-colored young man continued to hesitate, thinking it over for a few moments more. Finally, however, he sighed.
"Oh, why not? It'd be a way to 'stand out from the background' of this school... Just make sure we go in from the right side. I don't want to end up in the universe where you're allowed one f-bomb..."
"And so I figure...why can't she just come back to Equestria? Did she burn so many bridges in this world she's stuck there? Or did she become so used to being human? I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of like 'Avatar'..."
Sam merely groaned from having to listen to Carl's latest rant on their outing to Sugarcube Corner, but as he took a sip of his milkshake he turned his head back toward the oddly-shaped and towering crystal castle they now had in town.
"...My condo's in the shadow of that thing, Carl. The sun doesn't even hit it until noon. It makes getting up a pain..."
Carl frowned at how his latest inconsistency was ignored, but he simply shrugged as he picked up a gingersnap. "All I know is I'm glad the gateway to the magicless, monkey-infested world is in there and not out here. I don't want to imagine what they have to deal with whenever someone just wanders out of that world into ours..."
As if on cue, a distant voice, just audible enough for the two stallions to hear, rang out from the upper levels of the castle.
"Wow! It worked! Check it out, Sam! You've got a snout and fur and teeth you don't grind down nearly enough and everything! Let's get you an apple! I want to see if it gives you colic..."
A female voice soon rang out along with it. "What the-... Oh no. No. No-no-no-no! I already have to deal with one set of you two in this world! After what happened in Manehattan I am not going to let you give me two of you!"
The sound of magic concentrating went out before a beam blasted. Screaming resulted.
"Son of a bitch! Horses can shoot death beams in this universe!"
"I thought we were cool, Princess! GAH!"
Both Sam and Carl gave a grimace in response as more sounds of agony and pain rang out, uneasily looking to each other.
"...I'm suddenly glad the Castle is off-limits to the general public, Carl."
"Me too, Sam."
The End
