Octavia was a pony of high standards.

Likewise, her home was subject to such standards as well. Countless hours of her time, if not spent on repeating the notes from her books to her cello, was diverted to keeping her home as pristine as possible, in the company of her roommate.

She was a mare of perfection. One that did not believe there was an easy way out of a situation.

Well, she did once… with a robotic vacuum cleaner. It didn’t end well for her, even when it was 70% percent off at the local electronics store. To her credit, it worked, but it worked a bit too well- it managed to suck up the winning lottery ticket lodged on her hoof, to where it proceeded to turn against itself and try and vacuum up the flames of the burning fireplace.

Twice.

Needless to say, she didn’t trust automated technology, and the robotic vacuum proved to her point. Likewise, she didn’t hate her roommate, nor did she even hate her music for that matter, but when she suggested on buying another robot, even with the assurances that it won’t kill anything in their house, the gray mare didn’t take it; Not even with her promise of her covering the cost of all the lottery tickets she would purchase over the next year.

Unsurprisingly, Octavia was quick to get back to the fundamental base of cleaning the utensils. It wasn’t long before the regular vacuum cleaner and brush turned out to be her best friends. Sure, she killed her back on more than a few occasions in trying to handle the vacuum in some awkward position or having a strange taste residue in her mouth from the handle of the brush, it was worth it. There would be no more explosions of dust or cases of her winning lottery tickets being burned at stake with the vacuum following suit.

Well, the lotto was less of a concern, considering how she still didn’t get any winning numbers yet. A frustrating, but yet calming symptom bunched into one pot.

The office table was her last obstacle to overcome, the area around it being populated largely by chip crumbs, cheeto dust and the assorted pieces of sweets. She couldn’t help it- even a proper, classy pony as her was not spared the mean streak of snacking habits. It definitely tasted better to snack on the fats and excess sugars rather than pick up something healthier from the organics section, even at the cost of some extra fat accumulating in her belly and arteries. Her roommate had a similar looking table being polluted by the same pollutants, but her side of the house was her property, but to her credit, she still kept her area reasonably clean, at least to not draw any attention from the ants.

It was finally finished; her whole house was clean, or at least her area of responsibility. It was only early evening at the moment, which pleased her; she would have some lone time to practice her cello, as her roommate won’t be back until nightfall. She personally didn’t mind her practicing her own genre, but it was infuriating when she blasted her speakers over her cello’s faint melody, to say the least. Her room was soundproofed, but it still wasn’t enough to stop the incessant blasting of the unicorns ‘wubs’, as she calls it.

Flipping to the correct page on her book and placing it on the stand, she set up her posture to keep her stamina and her focus at optimal for the piece. Slowly but surely, the notes came naturally, as if she became one with the piece being played out from her instrument. This was going to be-

Ring! Ring! Ring!

Her train of focus derailed spontaneously with the abrupt chiming of the telephone on her desk across the room, causing her to fall forwards into the stand with her cello. Luckily, neither the stand nor her instrument broke, but her book was left with a few crumpled pages under her weight.

She groaned, picking herself up and crawling over to the desk. Though she considered herself a focused pony, she didn’t deny that her focus can be broken by abrupt distractions.

The caller ID revealed that the caller in question was from Rarity. It was possible that the pony in question was done with her other bow ties- her signature etiquette, regardless where she was. She didn’t hesitate, picking up the handset.

“Your dress is ready, de-“ That was all she managed to pick up as she felt a tickling sensation crawl into hear ear, breaking her train of thought.

It wasn’t like a feather’s tickle; no, this one felt as if it was crawling down her ear canal. Instinctively, she picked at her affected ear with a hoof, keeping the handset to the side, but it did little than to scratch the outside area of her ear.

She forced back a grumble. It was one of the few occasions where she wished she was a unicorn, so she would be able to manipulate a small object to prod at her ear canal. Speaking of unicorns, she remembered her roommate telling her a story of how it felt like when a bug crawled into her ear-

No, she couldn’t have. Not after endless rounds of daily house cleaning, would they have an insect infestation.

Her fears were confirmed, however, as the tickling sensation came back out of her ear canal and settled down on her snout. A cross eyed look determined in fact, that it was a cockroach.

She screamed, tumbling backwards from the chair behind her desk, dropping her handset in the process. The roach fell off her, but was quick at its feet to get back into a stance to make the musician retreat from it. However, she tripped backwards on the inconveniently placed vacuum next to her desk, sending her tumbling into the nearby VCR and slamming into the wall. Luckily the TV missed her, but the wall clock managed to get her instead, falling from its original position and knocking her out cold.

Octavia managed to regain her consciousness rather quickly with the familiar sensation returning to her snout, and upon triangulation with her eyes again, she located the insect in where she despised it the most. She shrieked and batted it off with a hoof, scrambling onto all fours to leap onto the nearby coffee table in order to place some distance between her and the cockroach, in time to help her decide on her own course of actions to take.

The roach was now making its way up one of the table’s legs, inciting Octavia to tremble in uneasiness. Then, she managed to spot the first object of opportunity in the far corner of the kitchen: a broomstick. However, her trembling managed to buckle one of the legs of the table out of place, rapidly causing it to collapse, sending the nervous wreck of a pony tumbling towards her roommate’s mixing board.

Fortunately, the mixing board’s stand managed to stop her from knocking it clean over, but instead rendered it dangerously unstable, ready to collapse onto her face at any moment. She didn’t consider evading it twice, and when she did, she was only greeted by the ‘clang’ of a pot rebounding off her head, being knocked over from the kitchen counter when it broke her evasive roll.

Luckily, the broomstick fell within her view among the fallen pot and other displaced items from the counter. Not a moment too late, either, as the roach had already managed to find her again, threatening to crawl up the broom to deny it of her use. She hurriedly picked up the stick with a shaky pair of hooves, but being too over the edge at the moment over the presence of the roach in such close proximity, she swatted at the roach with the stick end of the broom, causing a rebound off the hard surfaced floor to smack her between the eyes with a similar returning force, stunning her for a moment again, while completely missing the blasted insect itself.

She shook her head. How could she be so daft, using the wrong side of the broom to try and hit something that small? She managed to stand upright on her hind legs, if not a bit wobbly at the unnatural stance, swinging away with the broom side this time. Like last time, she missed wide of her intended target, managing to pick up the picture frame on the wall containing an anvil sketch onto the broomstick.
To her surprise, the picture sketch felt as heavy as the typical 100 pounder anvil, from where the inertia of her motion and her unnatural stance on two legs caused her to tumble off course again, unintentionally directing her towards the basement stairway, with her stance only helping her to tumble down the said location. Hitting the bottom of the stairwell with such force, the door slammed shut as she rolled into the basement, with the bar lock sliding into position from the outside.

Once again, the gray mare slowly returned to her consciousness, trying to pick apart her surroundings once more. A quick look around scan confirmed that she was in the basement; the picture frame from the broom was still on the floor just in front of her with some overturned boxes, to where a miniature crater laid just beneath where the now cracked frame was. The thought of it alone surprised her, ‘who would possibly want to make a picture weigh as much as the real thing?’

Groaning, she made her way to the door behind her, eager to get out of the basement. The knob managed to turn without effort, but the door just won’t open when she pulled upon it. Her eyes proceeded to widen in realisation, recalling the last time when she was locked down here; she had to wait the whole day for her roommate to come back, followed by another few hours for the unicorn to finally hear her screams of help over her wubs.

Shuddering at the thought, the tickling sensation returned to her, except this time all over her body. Daring herself to look down, her sight was filled with those cursed brown insects, slowly trickling up her body as she worked to bat them off her coat spontaneously, causing her to lose balance as she jumped and threw her forehooves around.

A metal pail soon found its place on her head when she stumbled from her bipedal pose again. With all her willpower she ignored crawling sensation over her body again as she lifted the pail off her head, finding herself head on with a terribly oversized variant of the common pest she just encountered.

It was too much for her to bear at the moment. She screamed at the top of her voice, pulling the metallic pail over her head again as the roach lunged at her. It was probably the size of her torso, and it made quite the impact when it lodged itself onto the pail the gray pony used as cover, throwing and pinning her against the wall from the inertia.

Sliding her head out of the metallic shell with haste and desperation, her first thing that came to her immediate attention was the window in the far corner of the basement, where a house was clearly visible outside. She broke out into a gallop and leaped at it, being too over the edge to think properly of her location and surroundings-

Thud!

Alas, it wasn't a window, for her head was greeted by the concrete wall stopping her whole right at the point of inception. She fell unceremoniously backwards, knocking over a few boxes near the picture frame.

‘Of course, we just had to put it there’, she exasperated mentally as she spotted the damaged object right in front of her eyes, ‘This day just gets better and better…’

Her headache quickly faded when she sighted the roach hordes emerge from their boxes towards her, with the huge one unfurling its wings, ready for another lunge at the musician. Through the adrenaline already in her system, she managed to make out the basement window in the opposite corner of the room, probably large enough to fit her through, though at this rate, she was probably unlikely to make it in time.

Flapping its wings, it lunged at Octavia again, aiming towards her head once more. The pony was quicker this time, hitting the floor to let the six legged beast fly over her and into another box pile.

This was her chance. She made a run for it, only to stumble over the same pail that saved her just moments earlier.

Realising that the delay just costed her the slim chance of escape, she replaced the pail back onto her head with haste as she caught sight of the roach was ready to lunge once more.

The expected exertion of force threw her into another box pile at a different angle, but there was a different feeling cushioning her toss this time. Tossing the bucket off once more, she saw the source of the cushioning, filling her with a mixed sense of relief, curiosity, disgust and anger at the same time.

It was her old robotic vacuum cleaner.

Her roommate was supposed to throw that thing out months ago! Instead, she pieced the abomination back together again and stored it in the basement. It had the shape and size of a pony, but yet strangely, it was coloured black and red out of all the possible colour schemes in the world! Assuming that the feather dusters at the sides were shaped like the wings, she figured out the retractable antenna at the head was supposed to represent a horn of some sort… It still made her wonder, why would someone design a defective piece of junk into a form similar to a deity?

She didn’t ponder over it for long. If the thing still worked, it should be able to buy her some time by simply running in circles or something to confuse the grotesquely oversized roach.

There were only three buttons up front, all of them being unlabelled. She can’t recall what the manual asked for exactly, but the swing of a hoof managed to mash down the left and center button.

Octavia watched in awe as the machine just powered itself up without the need for an external power source, but quickly shrugged it off when she remembered how it just worked when they accidentally pushed its buttons inside the box. It was short lived, however, as the robot simply went out of its way with an extended pipe from the ‘groin’ area, sucking up the crumpled boxes in the immediate vincity before turning onto the cockroaches upon the immediate surroundings.

The mare let out an exasperated sigh upon seeing what she hated the most kick into action. The large roach was too stunned at the initial sight of the vacuum simply managing to suck up its minions with impunity to turn its attention to the mare at first. By the time it picked up its act and tried to take action upon the pony again, the vacuum cleaner and its tailpipe had already targeted the unfortunate insect’s rear end, repeatedly ramming into the sensitive parts.

The oversized insect let out a high pitched chitter, almost similar to a scream, trying to evade the vacuum’s fury. Surprisingly, the robotic device sensed this, extending its feather dusters and repeatedly batting down its antennae and eyes. It was a game of tug of war that the machine was winning by the second over the insect, forcing it in all directions around the basement, eventually pinning it against the locked basement door.

‘Those Canterlot engineers… unbelievable on what they come up with…’ she thought, making her way to the window. It was a bit tricky to get it open with just hooves, as it was probably designed for a unicorn instead of for all ponies. That would’ve been more ergonomical, but it would probably cost more.

Besides, who opens the basement windows on a regular basis, anyways?

With some difficulty, the musician hauled herself through the window, giving herself a good squeeze trying to maneuver through the window well. When she was finally through, she heard a loud crash emit through the same basement she had worked so hard to escape from.

She didn’t look back down the window, as she already knew; the thing broke through the basement door and was heading upstairs now. Her hypothesis was confirmed upon scouting through the living room windows across from her exit, where the robot, now releasing the unfortunate roach, began to vibrate, stutter and grind to a halt, with time seeming to slow down in suit.

Sputtering up a horrible note, the machine exploded right on the tune, dispersing everything that it just vacuumed up into the living room, the roaches included. Octavia’s heart sank at the scene, her eye twitching in a mix of emotions over the recent misadventure, mostly over how her efforts went to waste once more.

It was all summed up into one word for her.

“Shit.”

Author's Note

A quick thing written to try and get back into the writing mood once again. Once again, feel free to leave a constructive comment, or a flame. Either one works.