Mirrors, Truths, And Tea-Parties

By Friday, my hoof had mostly healed—it still itched a bit, but at least it didn’t hurt anymore—and I had gotten over my cold, so I had to attend school again.

Good job, Snails; you’re almost done with your first week.

Fridays are weird for me. Unlike every other school day, all of my classes are packed into that one day, so my schedule ends up looking kind of like this:

Friday: thaumaturgy (9:00 A.M.—9:45 A.M.), physics (9:45 A.M.—10:30 A.M.), literature (10:30 A.M.—11:15 A.M.), lunch (11:15 A.M.—11:45 A.M.), math (11:45 A.M.—12:30 P.M.), history (12:30 P.M.—1:15 P.M.), learning strategies (1:15 P.M.—2:00 P.M.).

As if that didn’t make the day bad enough, each day is about five hours long, and lunch is about thirty minutes, which mean each class period, on a regular school day, is around an hour and thirty minutes, but because every class is packed into Friday, on that day, each class period is about forty-five minutes. Guess what that means? The teachers rush. Of course, this is a major problem for me: Since I already struggle following what they’re saying on regular school days, following them on Fridays is near impossible for me.

I guess that doesn’t really matter all that much, though, does it? I bet you’re just wondering what happened today. After all, yesterday was what Pinkie Pie would call “a doozy.”

The day started with me crawling out of bed with a stretch and a groan. My room was just as bland as it usually was, minus a couple notes and the unfinished math worksheet from yesterday on my desk. I levitated one of the notes up to my face. It was a reminder to help FIuttershy with the animals tomorrow. I put the sheet down and turned to look at the still-broken mirror.

I was still wearing the dress.

I stared at myself for a solid minute or so.

Do I really want to do this?

Yes.

Am I even ready to do this?

I don’t know.

Do I even know how I’m going to do this?

Absolutely not.

I sighed. I couldn’t go to school with it on—that would be suicide!—so I pulled the dress back over my head and stuffed it away underneath my bed where I had hidden it earlier, revealing the very colt I had become so well acquainted with over the years. I stared at him some more.

“What am I doing?” I asked. “What’s wrong with me?”

I shook my head again and made my way out of the bedroom, into the hallway, and down the stairs, the flooring creaking underneath my hooves as I went. After passing the bottom step, I walked into the kitchen and searched the cabinets for something to eat.

There were only oats. I don’t like oats.

In the corner of my eye, I spied the answer to all of my problems: the refrigerator. Inside of it was a bag of freshly picked carrots. I took a few of them and sat down at the dining room table to chow down.

I’m not sure if I’ve made this clear yet, but Mom is a carrot-farmer. She farms carrots and then sells the majority of them at the marketplace. She does keep a few for us both to eat, though, and the ones that she does…I have no words to describe then with—other than lip-smackingly amazing. They are so lip-smackingly amazing, in fact, that she basically holds a carrot monopoly over the entirety of Ponyville.

I lifted the next carrot to my mouth and chomped…air. Looking down at my hooves, I frowned; I was all out of carrots.

My ears drooped and I slumped in my chair, laying my chin on the table, my lips in a small pout. That’s what happens when you eat Mom’s carrots: post-carrot funk. I’m not even exaggerating at this point. They’re just that good.

I dragged myself out of my seat and planted my hooves back on the clean, white-and-black-tiled floor. I stood there for a moment, licking my lips, and then went back upstairs to finish getting myself ready for the day.

The bathroom was pretty trivial: It had a simple, white-tiled floor; a small sink and countertop with cupboards; a one-pony-sized bathtub with a shower nozzle and curtain; and a toilet. I grabbed my toothbrush—a simple, transparent, ruby-toned brush with white bristles—and a tube of toothpaste, and squeezed some of the paste onto the brush’s fibers. Then I raised the brush up to my face and got to work.

That was the second time that I looked at my reflection that morning.

My mane was a mess—a genuine rats’ nest—an unmanaged grass lawn in the middle of summer. While I usually would have left it alone, I decided against it this time. Instead, I reached into another cabinet with my magic and brought Mom’s hairbrush up to my head. Now I was brushing both my teeth and my mane! Who knew that I could double task?

After another minute or so, I spit out the toothpaste and left the hairbrush on the counter for Ma to use later. I turned the sink on and used it to rinse my toothbrush, and then shut it off and stuffed the brush and toothpaste away, back to their original resting places.

A wide grin spread across my face. I looked so organized!—so clean!—almost as if I had my life together!

My smile dropped. If only.

I went back downstairs and grabbed my saddlebag. Today was going to be a long day.

⁂

As I said before, first period was Elementary Magic with Sparkler: a good forty-five minutes of stuff that I would never come to understand in the slightest. There were a couple of runic equations written on the massive forest-green chalkboards at the front of the classroom—I couldn’t read a single one—and accompanying these equations were diagrams that equally didn’t make any sense. As a result, for the majority of the period, I ended up staring at the seemingly inconspicuous bundle of thickly stemmed, yellow-toned flowers on my desk.

There was one moment in class that really got me to look away from the bushel, however.

Sparkler was standing at the front of the classroom, holding her own collection of flowers to her right with a sparkling, purple magical field. Her bottom eyelids were dark and sagging, her eyes were visibly red-tinted, and her mane, tail, and fur coat were all unusually frizzy.

She spoke with a kind of strained, almost-unexcitable voice, “Now, we’ve gone over chase-discord’s thaumic stabilizing properties, but who can tell me what else it can be used for?”

Tori’s hoof immediately shot up, almost forcing her to jump out of her seat. You could even hear a little bang from when her stomach hit the edge of her desk.

Miss Star sighed, pointed at her, and said, “Yes, Tornado Bolt?”

“It’s a fairy-bane.”

Sparkler nodded. “Indeed. So, remember, class, if you have any bones to pick with the Unseelie Court, having some chase-discord on you at all times would be a good idea; it’s poisonous to them. It also repels any glamour that may be directed towards you.” She turned her gaze back towards Tori and smirked. “Please consult your local changeling if you have any further questions; she’ll probably be able to give you a pretty realistic hooves-on demonstration. She might even spare your life—if you ask politely.”

At this point, I was almost drowning in my own confusion. I think the rest of the class was, too, because almost everypony had gone silent enough for me to easily hear Tori’s pencil fall from her desk right next to me and weakly bounce across the floor once or twice before rolling underneath my chair.

Sparkler cleared her throat and continued. “Now, chase-discord is not only a fae-bane, but it is also…”

Tori glared at the teacher, her teeth grinding, her face burning red. I swear I could see steam fuming from her ears and nose! She looked like a volcano that was about to erupt! “I swear…someday…I will crush your stupid fucking neck,” she growled under her breath.

I blinked. “Huh?”

“Oh; sorry, Snails; that wasn’t directed at you.”

“Oh…uh…okay.”

Well…that was new.

⁂

Physics class was incredibly weird today. By the way, that was an understatement; it was beyond weird; it was dreamlike.

Time Turner wasn’t there today, so we had a substitute teacher instead. She was a light-blue Unicorn mare with an azure-colored, silver-striped mane and tail, goldenrod eyes, and had a picture of a wooden hourglass on her flanks.

“Hello, class. Name’s Minuette. Turner’s a little sick today, so I’ll be subbing for him in the meantime.”

At first, I thought that she’d be just a regular substitute. Maybe she’d play us a movie or two and just sit down and read a book or something. Then I noticed that both Dinky Doo and Tornado were bouncing in their chairs like pogo sticks. Then I noticed that half of the classroom was grinning and pumping their hooves, whispering, “Yes!” The other half of the classroom was shivering with their eyes bulging wide open and their pupils the size of pinpricks. Then…Minuette continued.

“He told me to blow your minds this morning—said I should completely destroy your entire worldview.” She smiled, rubbing her hooves against each other like a maniac. “I guess I can try.”

I sighed and began reaching down towards my saddlebag for my notebook.

She looked at me—I stopped—she looked at me! Oh dear Celestia, am in trouble already?!

“No need to take notes, by the way. None of this’s gonna be on the finals,” she said. “After all, nothing particularly ‘classical’ will be happening while I’m here.”

I heard a continuous, loud, hammering hullabaloo. At this point, half of the classroom had joined Tori and Dinky in becoming humongous, equine bouncy balls. The other half was wheezing.

I sat back up in my seat and nodded cautiously.

She nodded back. “Alright. Are we ready to begin?”

The entire class squealed.

I just simply blinked. “I…guess?” I said.

She rubbed her hooves some more, then lit her horn.

Everything turned red for a moment. In less than a blink, the room’s size exploded beyond comprehension. I could see everypony’s—including Minuette’s—skin rippling, stretching, compressing, almost rhythmically. Floating underneath us were massive (also rhythmically stretching and compressing) globules of vibrating, point-like objects emitting packets of other point-like objects, some of which being received by other point-like objects in the group, causing them to change behavior in some manner. Sometimes, what looked like an impression of some kind would pass through these globules, causing groups of point-like objects to congregate even more than they already had. Around these globs of stuff were other point-like objects, all of which vibrating in seemingly random positions that changed whenever you blinked—which was right about now.

One of these point-like objects flew out from these globules and directly towards me. I flinched, anticipating an impact as my body was rapidly being stretched in its direction—like putty—but, instead, the object changed its path about five hooves away from my face, emitting an impression (which passed right through me, by the way) and shooting up towards the ceiling, pulling my head with it until, halfway to its destination, my face snapped back to its (relatively) normal position.

I blinked. I felt as if I was going to fall over. “U-uh…um…what was that?” The pitch of my voice was dramatically increasing and decreasing in a sinusoidal manner as I spoke.

“The W-boson just wanted to say hi,” Minuette giggled, her voice’s pitch also sinusoidal in nature. “Don’t worry about it too much. It can’t hurt you in here.”

Her face stretched some more as an impression passed right through it. She grinned “And that, Snails, was a neutrino.” She pointed down at the globules below us. “And those are atomic nuclei, consisting of quarks and held together by gluons. The particles orbiting them are called electrons.”

“When that W-boson decayed in your face, it emitted an electron and a neutrino. The particle that flew up there”—she pointed up towards the ceiling—“was the electron. The thing that passed through you was a neutrino.”

“Uh…”

She looked away, towards the rest of my classmates and made a motion in the air with her hoof. “Welcome to the quantum realm, class!”

Tori bounced on over to me with what possibly was one of the biggest grins I’ve ever seen on her—ever. “Isn’t this just awesome?!” she asked.

“Uh…”

It was. It was really…really cool.

For once in my life, I actually paid attention during class. It was glorious.

⁂

It was raining during lunchtime, today, so Tornado, Dinky, and I didn’t meet up underneath the maple tree this time. Instead, we met up in the school’s cafeteria.

Tori was acting really odd today. She was a lot more reserved than usual. Instead of trying to initiate any conversation between us three, she had her head buried in an enormous, yellowed, leather-bound tome, and was quickly scanning rows of text that were so small that they seemed almost unreadable to the equine eye.

Even Dinky noticed that there was something up with her. “Was it Star again?” she asked.

Tornado wilted ever so closer to her book.

Dinky laid her hooves on top of Tori’s. “Tori, please; you can’t hide yourself in your book whenever Amethyst decides to be a jerk like that. The Invasion is over; it’s all in the past. She’s just being stupid.”

Tori sighed. “Yeah; I guess. I just—I get so angry sometimes! I’m not sure why. I don’t even know her. I shouldn’t even care, but…I do. I mean, she can insult me all she wants, but pull Sweetie  into it and…ugh!”

Dinky opened her mouth. Then she closed it. Then she opened it again. Then she closed it again. She shook her head. “Tornado, do you think what Sparkler feels about her should matter to you?”

“I…no.”

“Then just do what Snails always does: don’t think about it—ever. Ignore her.”

Dinky, it should be noted that when I said that, I was more joking about my thoughtlessness if anything and hiding that joke behind a layer of partial-irony and ambiguity to make Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy think that I was talking about (performance?) anxiety, all the while being genuine about both possible interpretations of what I said.

It’s hard to explain. Sorry.

Anyways…I tried to hold a perfect poker face.  I think I did a pretty good job at it, actually. “It works”—it used to. “It’s what I always did when Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon tried to get on my nerves.”

“—Until they brought Snips into the equation. Then you screamed like a foal,” Dinky added. She shook her head. “I don’t get why you got so angry with them about that. Even in comparison to Tori, it seems hyperbolic.”

Tori raised an eyebrow. “Snips?”

“His coltfriend—a little olive-colored pony—orange mane—scissors for a cutie-mark.”

“I—wha?” My face warmed. “He’s…he’s not my coltfriend!” I looked away. Rubbing my cannon, I muttered, “We’re just friends.”

Dinky snickered, “Sure—and that kiss underneath the mistletoe was completely and utterly platonic in nature, right? No homo?”

What had just been faint warmth in my cheeks grew to a sweltering inferno across my entire face. “Sh-shut up.”

⁂

In case you’re wondering why I ask “Why am I so stupid?” so much, the weather forecast had said that a rainstorm had been organized for later today and yet I hadn’t once thought of packing a raincoat or some boots this morning.

Tornado had been smarter; she had packed a three-pony umbrella which she offered to share with Dinky and me after school got out. Unlike Dinky (who had packed her own umbrella and coat just like everypony else with at least half an I.Q. point), I eagerly accepted. It would make the trip home a great deal more tolerable. After all, having a few shivers was a great deal better than having a bunch of them alongside a soaking-wet fur coat; one situation was a recipe for needing a warm bath and the other was a recipe for needing a hot bath and a couple more mind-numbing days in bed.

Shortly following a flash of light in my peripheral view, I heard an ear-splitting boom. I jumped and quickly turned my head to the left, towards the direction of the sound, and a blast of air hit my face like a cannonball. Lifting a hoof to block some of the wind from obscuring my vision, I noticed a plume of black smoke slowly rising into the sky. A mare with a thick country accent yelled in the distance, “Goddess, damn it!”

“Think we should drop by my place for the time being? As cool as this is, I don’t want either of you to get fried out here,” Tornado said.

Dinky shook her head. “Mine’s closer; we should hang out there instead.”

“Snails? Any objections?”

I shook my head. “We already passed my house.”

Tori blinked.

Squinting at me, Dinky asked, “Then why are you still here?”

I shrugged.

Tori nodded. “Alright. Sounds like a plan.”

⁂

Soon, we arrived at Dinky’s place. It was a modest, single-story house with a typical straw roof and the normal Ponyville brown, yellow, and pink color scheme. Extruding from the rooftop was a short chimney that was currently exhaling clouds of charcoal-colored smoke into the atmosphere. At the front of the building, a little dirt path led through a wall of shrubs to a white door. We dragged our muddied hooves across a rug situated at the base of the front door and stepped inside, leaving our umbrellas at the entrance.

The first things that I noticed when I entered were the equation-littered black walls of the hallway. Beside the walls sat buckets of chalk and an equally sized bucket of water with a wet rag hanging over its edge. Dinky’s earlier mention of “chalkboard walls” made a lot more sense now; they were literally made of chalkboard—or at least painted with the stuff.

“Mom, I’m home!” Dinky shouted. I flinched. I still wasn’t used to her yelling yet. Well…really, I wasn’t used to her at all.

A middle-aged Pegasus mare stepped into the corridor through an archway to my left. The mare, Derpy, had a messy, blonde mane and tail, a grey coat, and golden eyes that had somehow managed to direct themselves in completely different directions. “Hey, Dinks! Hey, Tori! How was school?” she asked. Upon noticing me, her head tilted slightly leftward. “Who’s this?”

“Hi; I’m Snails.”

Tori added, “He’s a friend.”

Derpy smiled. “Oh. Well…welcome, Snails! My name’s Derpy. It's nice to meet you!”

“Y-you, too,” I replied.

She stared at us for a moment before nodding and saying, “Well...why don’t you three get yourselves acclimated while I get you guy and gals some tea and muffins? I’ll be right back.” With that, Derpy disappeared back through the aforementioned archway, apparently into the kitchen.

Tori followed behind her and said, “I’ll help with the water!”

“Oh; thank you, Hon. The fireplace is rather inefficient at boiling things, I’ve found.”

That just left Dinky and me behind in the hallway…alone…with each other. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t mildly afraid that she might hit me in the face or something, however irrational that fear may have been—which it was; it was very irrational.

At least it was somewhat justified, I guess; Dinky was looking at me weirdly again—frowning, specifically. I still didn’t know why that was. Was she angry at me?

“I know that Tori told me not to ask earlier, but why did you lie to us about the drawings?”

My ears perked up. “H-huh?” Was that what all of the strange looks were about? Lying? “Oh…uh…it’s”—I looked away from her and mumbled, my ears now drooping back down towards the ground—“it’s kind of personal. Sorry.”

“You could have just said that to begin with; you never had to lie.”

“I—uh…why—why does it matter?”

“That…that’s irrelevant.”

I sighed. “I…I was worried that if I said it was personal, it’d only make you gals more curious.”

Her face relaxed. A tiny, barely noticeable smile had replaced her previous, supposedly negative expression. “Admittedly, it does pique my interest—I think it piques Tori’s, too, though I feel that she knows a fair bit more about it than she lets on—”—how did she know about that? Was she a psychic?—“but did you really think that we wouldn’t respect your wishes not to talk about it?”

I awkwardly rubbed and scratched at my crest. “I—uh—well…y-yeah.”

Dinky blinked. “Don’t worry about it; we won’t bite, regardless of whether you tell us about it or not. Trust me; I would be lying if I said that we didn’t each have our own fair share of secrets, too.” Her smile grew to a size that, while still modest, was a lot more visible to the naked eye. “I think we got off on the wrong hoof. How about we try this again?” She reached her hoof out towards me and said, “My name is Dinky Diamond Doo. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Snails.”

I wasn’t really sure how to take that then. It seemed like her mood had turned a complete one-eighty at the drop of a hat. Was simply explaining myself enough for her to change her perspective completely? “I—uh…what?” It seemed odd, at the least; very rarely are ponies quick to change their minds. I shook her hoof anyways, though. “It—it’s nice to meet you, too.”

We stood there for a few minutes, an awkward silence permeating through the air (neither of us really having anything to say, I guess). It was only broken by a loud bang and Tori’s panicked yelp as something metallic clattered against what was presumably the kitchen floor. “Ah!! …I’m so—so—so—so sorry! I didn’t mean it!”

“Oh; it’s quite alright, Hon. There are plenty more where that came from.” Derpy Hooves giggled. “Accidents are more than a little commonplace here so, naturally, I have more than just a few spares lying around.” There was some more clanging, this time sounding of metal against metal instead of metal against tile. “Ah; here you go! Just make sure not to break this one, alright? It’s a present from my niece.”

“Okay; I’ll try.”

Dinky drew my attention back towards her by tapping my wither. “We should probably get ourselves situated. They’ll probably have the tea ready soon. Well, unless they blow it up again.”

I nodded. My legs were starting to ache from all of this standing.

There wasn’t much to be seen in the living room—okay, that’s wrong; there were some things. While there wasn’t a lot of furniture, there were a couple of wooden tables, a wooden cabinet or two, and a cotton sofa to sit on. The real spectacle was to be seen in the various pictures littering the room. There were dozens of them covering the pink-multitoned wallpapered walls, the tables, and one or two were even on top of the overhang of the cobblestone fireplace. The majority of them were poorly shot but served their purpose regardless, all depicting moments shared between Dinky and Derpy Hooves Doo. One of the pictures, showing Derpy holding baby Dinky at a hospital, had a huge segment of it ripped out, which I couldn’t help but mull. I didn’t ask about it, though.

As I settled down on the sofa, Dinky galloped back out into the hallway. I heard some rustling and clanking, then a series of quiet clacking noises. A minute later, she stepped back into the room and said, “Sorry; I had something I needed to write down before I forgot about it.” She sat down next to me and shuffled positions for a while. I think she was trying to find a comfy manner to sit, I guess. Then she exhaled. “I’m sorry for teasing you about Snips earlier.”

“I-it’s alright.”

She shook her head. “Still, it wasn’t cool of me. It has to be pretty personal to you, right?”

“Other than the whole…”—I slid my hoof forwards and backwards against the cushion—“…uh…m-mistletoe thing? Not—not too much. Everypony already knows I don’t like it when Snipsy’s mistreated.”

“He didn’t go crazy when you were on the receiving end, though.”

“No; he—he’s always been the more…emotionally stable…of the two of us. He…had his own ways of reacting to that sort of thing. ”

“Oh? How so?”