Silent Cacophony

Silence is crushing.

The sun rose in a muted, suffocated fashion, the overcast weather of the deafening city blocking out any hopeful vestiges of sunlight, anything that may elicit conversation was banished completely from this realm.

Pinkie was already at attention, attempting to squeeze into grey elastane, the perfect camouflage against the colourless cityscape, the dimness of the city adding to the effect. Her unusual speed and improbable methods of movement allowed for her to precisely leap from rooftop to rooftop, which is made even easier by the fact that nobody bothers to look up, there’s nothing to look at anyway. If only they knew.

The jovial mare, now adequately suited for the day, began her usual routine, two pieces of toast and jam for herself, 4 eggs, scrambled, for her alligator. The egg shells are tossed to the floor, the pan used for the eggs is cleaned before suffering the same fate, creating sweet noise as it crashed to the ground. Humming a stray tune, she chomps down on her toast, watching as Gummy slurps up pieces of eggs fervently. She giggles.

“Silly Alligator, you’ll get heartburn!” She jests. “Wait. Can alligators get heartburn?”

Blink.

“Oh... Neat!”

Pinkie grabs the TV remote from the makeshift couch-bed, and crashes onto it next to her scaly friend, pressing the power button as she does.

Static.

Pinkie smiles contentedly and cuddles the croc.

~~~

Being quite early, it was still dim, nobody was out on the streets yet either, as was expected from a seemingly controlled population. Two hooded equines silently hover to the ground, carefully touching down before breaking into a sprint, ducking into an apartment near the outskirts of the circular city. Silence pursues closely.

Underneath that apartment, oblivious to the sound, sits a grey suited mare kissing an alligator on the top of the head, who blinks in return.

“See-ya tonight Gummy!” She promises, picking up a satchel of supplies from her mattress.

She approaches the dumpster obscured exit of her temporary abode, before becoming an almost noiseless blur and scuttling up the adjacent wall. Two experienced sets of ears pick up the tiny, offending noise that the mare carelessly allows to be created.

Both hooded equines dash from their cover for a tiny peek upwards, only to just get a glimpse of a pink tail zipping over the ledge of a building. They glance at each other and nod in seemingly psychic agreement, then scurry back inside their generic grey apartment block.

~~~

As if on cue, the streets begin filling with freshly awoken ponies, all with the usual, emotionless faces of a population content on an uninteresting, generic life.

Peeking over the ledge of one apartment block, the pink mare studies the mass of ponies, trying to grasp how not one of them is smiling, or even showing interest in another. Not one simple word, spoken in passing, will escape their mouths, if they can even speak. She had observed this for at least a fortnight, and she still could not get over the depressing reality of the urban landscape, for at least Manehatten had ponies who talked, even if in passing.

She turns her head towards a subtly marked building, launching herself over the decent gaps between apartments, jumping from building to building like a parkour expert, somehow only a minimal hoofstep or two is made.

~~~

On the ground, two inconspicuous ponies walked at a similar pace, distanced by about 10 metres from each other, with no obvious ties to one another. If it could be seen, the only things even slightly similar about the two is what can be determined as being uniform with everyone else, but more minimal, however, was fact that they each glances upwards when nobody was looking.

The forward most pony shakes his left fetlock ever so slightly, the second takes the signal, and both round the nearest left corner. They both disappear into the crowd, following the distinct pink tail which hopped from building to building. Their purpose, unknown.

It’s crushing, silence.