The Eye That Floats, Silent and Unblinking, in Sunset Shimmer's Kitchen

Chapters

1. Eye Candy
2. Eyesolation
3. Me, Myself, and Eye
4. Eye of the Storm
5. Last Eyetem on the Agenda
Eyepilogue
(Original Story) The Eye That Floats, Unblinking, in Sunset Shimmer's Kitchen

1. Eye Candy

The chaotic, rainbow swirl of the tunnel receded from Twilight's vision as she stumbled through the statue. Her feet – her human feet that she'd never grown fully accustomed to – caught on the pavement. She yelped and stumbled backward, landing on her bottom with an "oof." Panting, gasping, and rubbing her now-achy butt, Twilight looked around at the familiar sights of Canterlot High – the statue behind her, and the brick building in front. She'd made it.

Twilight rose to her feet and tore off, trying and succeeding by necessity to readjust to a human body on the fly. Sunset Shimmer's plea had been vague, curt, and barely qualified as a complete thought, but it was enough to make Twilight drop everything and run through the portal in the cold grip of panic.

"Something wrong," the message in the journal had read. "Come quickly."

Lacking context, her mind tried desperately to interpret Sunset's message. Frightening and improbable scenarios arose in her mind, only to be discarded once something new came up that topped it. She passed the minutes thus, frightened and trying desperately to ignore her burning, cramping muscles, until she arrived at the cozy, if not particularly stylish, two-storey apartment that Sunset Shimmer called home.

Twilight collided with the door and leaned upon it, pounding rapidly with hands kept curled into fists out of habit. "Sunset! Sunset!"

Or so she meant to say. What actually came out between gasps was a breathless "Sahhsaaah... Sahhsaaaaaah!"

The wood of the door wasn't particularly dense, and Twilight could hear Sunset's muffled voice on the other end. "That's her outside now – we'll see you in a little while, okay?"

Was she on the phone? How could Sunset be holding a conversation on the phone if she were in dire, mortal peril? Twilight continued her furious pounding, until the door unlatched and opened, and she fell forward into Sunset's arms.

"Wagh!"

"Twilight!" Sunset sounded concerned, though she looked, sounded, and for that matter felt no worse for wear. If anything, her concern was for Twilight, and no one else.

"Sheesh, look at you," Sunset said with an airy chuckle. "You've sweated through your shirt like a hundred times over."

"Ran... legs hurt... so does butt..." Twilight panted, gulping down lungfuls of slightly stale, recirculated air.

Sunset Shimmer herded Twilight inside and led her to a couch with faded purple upholstery, where Twilight gratefully collapsed. Sunset excused herself to the bathroom, leaving Twilight to look around and marinate for a while in her own sweat. The apartment was spartan, but well-kept, with inexpensive furniture, a dated-looking TV, an old coffee table with a pair of wine glasses and a bottle of something that looked pricey, but was probably cheap...

Which was an odd detail to find in the home of a minor, Twilight thought. Whatever happened to bowls of fruit, or flower vases?

Sunset returned with a wet towel and a waxy-surfaced paper cup of tap water. Twilight accepted them, rubbing her face down before greedily swallowing her drink, all while Sunset watched bemusedly.

"Did you sprint all the way here from school, or something?"

Twilight gulped down the last of her water, sighed with relief, and cleared her throat. "Had to. Got your message. Is everything... everyone... okay?"

A faint blush dusted Sunset's cheeks, and she turned away from Twilight. "Yeah, um... why don't you relax for a moment, and we can talk about it when you've caught your breath a little bit more?"

"Can't. Need explanation." She folded the soiled towel neatly, and placed it on the coffee table. "Did Apple Bloom set herself on fire?"

Sunset's head snapped back to face Twilight, and her eyes flew open incredulously. "What? No! Why Apple—"

"Was Flurry Heart kidnapped by evil hoteliers?"

"No one has been kidnapped, no one is on fire, and I'm pretty sure we don't even have a Flurry Heart in our—"

Twilight grabbed fistfuls of Sunset's blouse and pulled their faces together. "Human Tirek broke free from Human Tartarus and is rampaging through the greater metropolitan—"

"Okay, you need to slow down. Another mouthful like that, and I'm pretty sure you're going to pass out." Sunset dislodged Twilight's hands from her blouse and scooted away from her. "Deep breaths. Steady."

Twilight wanted to argue, but acquiesced – her vision was darker and blurrier than it should have been. So she leaned back and sank into the squishy couch, until her heartbeat slowed and her breathing steadied and she could talk without the risk of losing consciousness.

"Okay." Twilight let out a breath, sat straighter, and cleared her throat. "I'm good. Now. What is the problem? You sounded so freaked out in your message. Uncharacteristically non-grammatical, too."

There was a moment's hesitation on Sunset's part before she answered. "It's... probably better if I show you."

Sunset's apartment had a kitchenette adjacent to the living room, separated by a swinging door. She led Twilight to it, placed her hand on the door, and looked back warily.

"Brace yourself for this," she muttered. She gave the door a shove, holding it open with the length of her arm.

"Oh, come on. I've seen your kitchen before, Sunset; it can't possibly beaaaAAAAAAAAAAGH!" Twilight recoiled, clutching her limbs against her chest.

"Sunset! Who and what and how and why?!"

"All pertinent questions," said Sunset. "And I hope you'll help me answer them."

A gargantuan, perfectly spherical eyeball floated in the middle of the kitchen, a foot off the ground, with a pristine white surface, a vivid blue iris, and a pupil that dilated and constricted at an even rhythm. It fixed its monocular gaze on Twilight's own, and stared her down, silent, unblinking, and unmoving.

Twilight dared to uncurl a single finger from one of her tightly clenched fists and pointed it at the Eyeball. "That's... that's new, right?"

Sunset nodded. The Eyeball's iris pulsed and spun counterclockwise.

"Right. I thought so." Twilight swallowed. "Because I don't remember that being here last time I was over. It seems like the sort of thing I'd remember."

"Yeah, well..." Sunset released the door and let it swing closed, blocking the Eyeball from sight. "Didn't exactly see it coming myself when I rolled out of bed, so imagine how I felt when I saw it."

Twilight stepped up to the door, pushed it open slightly, and peeked through. The Eyeball swiveled in the air to meet her gaze through the crack in the door, and Twilight "yiped" softly, scrambling backward.

"Yeah, pretty much like that," said Sunset. She folded her arms, with one forearm sticking up and a thumb pressed against her chin. "I'm sorry for freaking you out with my message. I went a little nuts and my first instinct was to pick up the journal and write to you. Probably should have taken a moment to calm down before I did, but in my defense..."

She put her thumb between her front teeth and bit down gently.

"Yeah, no, don't worry about it." Twilight looked curiously at Sunset. "It hasn't done anything... like... sinister, has it?"

"No. Nothing yet. Nothing... intentional..."

Twilight frowned. "What do you mean by that? What did it do?"

"It, um..." Another blush, darker this time, colored Sunset's face, and she turned away from Twilight. "Do they say 'cockblock' in Equestria? It's a thing around here, but it's been so long since I've been home that I can't remember if they say it over there, too."

Twilight's eyes narrowed. "What."

"Oh, I guess they don't. It means—"

"I know what it means, Sunset!" Twilight fumed and stomped closer to her friend. "That's why you couldn't even manage two whole sentences of description? I was worried sick about you – about everyone! You could've been hurt for all I knew! Or dead! Or hurt and dying! Or something else just as awful!"

Sunset whirled around. "Hey, something awful did happen, alright? Do you know how long it's been since I've had a shot at getting with a guy? I was evil the last time I got laid, Twilight. That's how long!"

"That's..." Twilight stepped back, blinking. "More than I think I really needed to know, first of all. And second, that's not the point I'm contending here."

Sunset scoffed and brushed past Twilight, moving toward the couch to lean against an armrest and wrapping her arms around her midsection. "Look, it's... difficult, alright? Living the kind of life I do. Even when you've got the best friends in the world, you can get lonely – longing for the kind of intimacy that mere friendship can't provide."

"Sunset, that's sad and all, but I think you might be ignoring what I'm trying to say—"

"Sometimes that means you make a call to someone you know should be off-limits, and you invite him over for movies and cheap wine that you bought with your fake I.D. But sometimes, instead of watching that movie, you wind up re-opening old wounds and crossing lines, lines you drew in the sand to protect the both of you from each other. And from yourselves! From making mistakes that would just make life more complicated for the both of you! "

"...Why do you have a fake I.D.?"

"And maybe, sometimes, you step so far beyond those lines that you just know... there's no going back." Sunset bowed her head and shut her eyes, and Twilight could see the tears pooling between her lids, beading on her eyelashes.

"The die is cast. The Rubiclop is crossed. Your panties are... somewhere... you're not sure where; you lost track of them at some point amid all the groaning and groping and gyrating. Maybe it's the half-glass of wine you got through before you pounced on one another, or the lingering attraction drawing you together like two magnets that really, really want to screw. But one way or another, you find yourselves stumbling into the kitchen, a tangle of wet lips and roaming hands, grunting and gasping, desperate to form the two-backed beast of forbidden teenage love – or the right angle of forbidden teenage love, which was kind of the direction things were going."

Nervous sweat prickled Twilight's forehead. "Uh, do you need a moment? 'Cuz I'm starting to think I don't really need to be here for this."

"Because maybe you maneuvered him into the kitchen on purpose; maybe you've always wanted to get bent over the kitchen sink, because maybe you get thirsty sometimes during the act, and maybe nothing kills the mood faster than getting up for a swig of Gatorade mid-coitus, and having a water faucet three inches away from your panting mouth can be incredibly convenient, you know?"

Sunset opened her teary eyes and looked at Twilight, frowning slightly. "Or... I guess you wouldn't know about that."

Twilight's face burned. "Hey!"

"But," Sunset continued, irritation now simmering in her voice. "Before you can even get your proverbial foot in the door and forever change the nature of your post-relationship relationship with your ex-boyfriend, he spots an obscenely large cosmic eyeball where there shouldn't be one. Then he freaks out and starts babbling in terror, yanks his clothes back on, and—"

"Ex-boyf – seriously?" The bottle and glasses and their purpose came into sharp, horrible focus. "You tried to have sex with Flash?!"

Sunset's arms dropped to her sides. "Oh. Yeah, um. I guess I should have led up to that a little more smoothly."

"Sunset!"

"Well, if it's any consolation, I doubt he's ever going to be able to look at me again without thinking of today, alright?"

"You – I – he – that – ohhhh...!" Twilight stormed over to the couch, past Sunset, grabbed a throw-pillow, buried her face in it, and screamed a long, throat-rattling scream of exasperation.

When she was finished, and turned around to look at the nonplussed Sunset again, her face was calm. Her outrage was left behind on the pillow as a vaguely circular stain, the size of her mouth.

"Alright," Twilight said serenely. "We're getting off track here. Whatever reasons you may have had for calling me over here, and however..."

She inhaled, sharply and deeply.

"Annoyed I might be that you had your impeccably manicured hands all over my not-boyfriend... you were right to call me over."

Sunset smirked and stretched out her hand to regard her fingernails. "They are pretty nice, aren't they?"

"Anyway," Twilight said sharply. "Let's put all our other concerns aside for now, and just work this problem. Alright?"

Sunset shrugged. "Sounds good to me."

Awkward silence settled on the pair, as they gazed anywhere but at one another. Or at the kitchen.

"Incidentally," said Twilight. "How can you afford a place like this?"

The twin sounds of glass shattering and a car alarm triggering outside made Twilight jump. Sunset didn't seem fazed.

"That answer your question?" she said dryly.

To Twilight, there was nothing quite like an educational environment to melt away negativity, which Sunset probably knew when she brought her to Canterlot High. The classroom they were in was mostly undecorated, with bare blue walls and identical rows of desks – none of the personalized trappings that many of the other classrooms had, traces of the teachers who worked in them. The air hung heavy with the sharp tang of disinfectant, sweeter than any perfume, and the sterile white glow and subtle hum of the fluorescent lights lent a clinical air to her surroundings.

At the front of the room was a computer console built into a podium, and beside it, a polished black table, where Sunset sat beside a stack of science textbooks. Twilight ran her fingertip along the top row of buttons on the console's keyboard, and "qwerty" appeared on the computer's screen beside a blinking cursor.

Sunset watched her with a wry smile. "I've seen actual kids in actual candy stores who get less excited than you whenever you see a computer."

Twilight grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. It's just..."

"Nah, yeah, I get it. No judgment here." Sunset draped one leg over the other and leaned back, folding her hands over her top knee. "Revel in the splendor of human technological sophistication, my friend."

"I had a computer back when I lived in the library, you know, but it was nowhere near as sophisticated as this one. Puts every piece of machinery I own to shame." Twilight propped her elbows on the console and rested her cheeks in her palms. "I wish I could show this stuff to Starlight..."

Sunset's smile flipped into a frown at the mention of Twilight's student. Her back straightened, and she picked up a textbook, flipping open to a random page.

"Ah, yes. Her. And how is she doing with her studies?"

"Oh. Uh." Twilight forced a shaky smile. "Progressing. Naturally. Learning a lot about the magic of friendship. Every lesson learned is another step on the road to redemption, y'know. Heh."

Sunset's eyes flicked up at Twilight briefly, narrowed, then returned to the pages of her book. "Hmm. How lovely."

Twilight's face fell, and she mentally slapped herself – Sunset always got weird whenever the subject of Starlight Glimmer came up. She always figured it was just insecurity. Without cause, to be sure, but it was something she could sympathize with.

"I'm not replacing you with Starlight, Sunset." Twilight left the console and sat beside Sunset, the stack of textbooks between the two of them. "You don't need to be worried."

"Who said anything about being worried? Or replaced? I sure didn't use those words." Sunset flipped to another page.

Twilight bit her lip. "Look, I'm sorry for bringing her up; I know you don't like talking about her. But I promise, there's enough room in my heart for the both of you, and you don't have anything to be jealous about."

"Also not a word I used," said Sunset sharply.

"You don't need to say it; it's plain as day how you feel. And you don't need to feel that way! Starlight and I came into each other's lives at a very unique time, when she needed guidance that only I could give her. I mean, she was evil, tried to brainwash people, then repented of her evil ways and needed guidance to—"

"Oh yes. Such unique circumstances."

Twilight tossed her hands up with a groan. "You two are nothing alike, okay? Your situations are completely different. Just because I redeemed her with friendship after she tried to perform acts of unspeakable villainy, that doesn't make her..."

Sunset glared at Twilight.

"I mean, she, um..." Twilight coughed. "Sh-She's wracked with inner guilt and turmoil over her past actions. She... uh..."

Sunset raised an eyebrow.

"She has trouble... making new friends... and, uh, she..." It came to her in a flash of inspiration, and Twilight grinned triumphantly, clapping her fists together, and pointing her knuckles at Sunset. "She's purple!"

Sunset's eyelid twitched. She slammed her book shut, took a breath, and opened her mouth to speak.

The classroom door opened, silencing her preemptively.

"Sorry I'm late," said Twilight Sparkle's glasses-wearing, hair-in-a-bun-having, parallel reality counterpart. "I wanted to check up on a few things before I headed over here. Any new developments I should know about?"

Sunset sucked her teeth and looked away from the Twilight sitting next to her. "Nothing that springs to mind."

"Phew. I'd really hate to have spent so much time crunching those numbers only for something new to come along and throw all my data completely out of whack. Not that I don't enjoy crunching numbers, but I understand that you're kinda looking for expediency here."

She stepped into the room, shut the door, and glanced at Twilight, looking her from head to toe quickly with a faint blush.

"H-Hi, Princess Me."

"Hey, Other Me." Twilight waggled her fingers by way of a greeting. "You're looking awfully bespectacled today."

"Right back at ya! Except, uh, without the, um... because obviously, you don't wear glasses, and I just, I mean, uh..." Bespectacled Twilight coughed to clear her throat and shuffled into the classroom. "Anyway."

Sunset shut the book and slid off the table, dusting off her bottom and sticking her hands in her back pockets. "What've you got for me?"

"A theory. Not a whole lot more than that." She glanced at Twilight again, flicked her gaze over her counterpart's bare legs, blushed brighter, and stepped up to the classroom's whiteboard.

"This actually dovetails nicely with a project I've been working on since the Friendship Games – a working theory of interdimensional dynamics. In a nutshell, I posit that different realities float around together in a void analogous to outer space – farther-out-there space, if you will. Some of them are in closer proximity to each other than others. Our two realities are one such example."

Bespectacled Twilight picked up a marker and drew an irregularly shaped blob on the whiteboard.

"This is us, right? This is our reality. And this one... this one here is Equestria."

She drew another blob beside the first, their edges pressing together.

"Now, based on what little concrete info I've been able to gather on the subject, our dimensions don't just float close to each other. They lean against one another, their borders touching together. Along that point of contact, you can find the occasional spot where the border's a little weaker, places that make interdimensional travel possible. The portal in the statue, that's one spot, and an anomalous one at that, being a relatively stable means of travel between Ponyland and Humanland."

Sunset nodded her comprehension. "But how does that relate to the situation at hand?"

She coughed again.

"If I'm right, then not all those portals opened into Equestria. A few popped up along an edge of our reality that didn't lean against another."

"So what did they open into?" asked Twilight. "Where'd Sunset's new roomie come from?"

Bespectacled Twilight drew a wide, asymmetrical oval around the two blobs.

"According to my figures, the only dimension leaning against ours is Equestria. We're surrounded, on all other sides, by literal nothing – the negative space between realities, in which all our universes float, the same way stellar bodies float around in space within a universe. Who's to say our friend didn't come from there?"

Sunset titled her head with a quizzical expression. "So you're saying, what, it came from outer space?"

"Farther-out-there space. But yes, that's my working hypothesis. As for why it's only manifesting now, after so much time has passed since the Friendship Games, I could not begin to speculate. If we could communicate with it, it'd make matters a lot easier, but for all we know, we're as incomprehensible to it as it is to us."

Bespectacled Twilight capped her marker and leaned against the whiteboard, partially erasing her drawing by mistake. She noticed, and scrambled away, smoothing out her skirt.

Sunset cupped her chin in her palms. "How do we make it go away?"

"That's another question that I don't actually have an answer for at the moment." Bespectacled Twilight's spectacles slid down her nose, and she pushed them back up with a fingertip. "B-But I'm sure that, between me and, uh, Princess Me, we can work out a solution."

"I concur," said Twilight with a nod. "I'll need access to your notes and research materials, though. And a place to stay, too. Do you think Pinkie Pie would mind another slumber party?"

"Uh... that's probably not an avenue we should pursue." Bespectacled Twilight chuckled sheepishly. "Pinkie's parents kindasorta think that you and I are the same person."

Twilight and Sunset stared quizzically at her.

Bespectacled Twilight flung her hands in the air. "I met them once and they thought I was you and they asked me stuff and I – I panicked, okay? Sue me!"

"So we say that you're twin sisters," Sunset suggested. "Easy peasy. Or, hell, just crash with me if you don't wanna go through the hassle."

"No offense, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing a roof with your, um... houseguest." Twilight smiled apologetically. "I'll swing by Pinkie's and see if we can arrange—"

"Or you could stay at my house!" Bespectacled Twilight interjected. A grin bubbled on her face. "I-I mean, if you want to, anyway. It'd be convenient, since, you know, you need access to my research stuff. And my parents are gonna be out of town for a few days, too, so there's no risk of anyone asking questions they're not prepared to have answered. Plus, having the place to ourselves means there's no chance of anyone walking in on the two of us sleeping together!"

Twilight's face flushed beet-red to compliment her nonplussed expression. Her counterpart's face was a perfect, albeit bespectacled, mirror for her own. She turned around and planted her forehead against the whiteboard, quietly cursing her stupidity.

Sunset's and Twilight's eyes met.

"She's..." Twilight tapped her knuckles together. "She's not wrong, come to think of it. If we're gonna collaborate on this, then it's probably best that we spend as much time together as possible. Staying with her would make a lot of things easier."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it." Sunset blew a lock of hair out of her face and turned away. "She's another member of the Purple Pony Girl club."

"Sunset, that isn't what I—"

"So what about me?" said Sunset, her volume making Twilight recoil. "What am I gonna do 'til we get this sorted out? I mean, I'm the one who has to share an apartment with a thingy from outer space, if you'll recall."

"Father-out-there space," Bespectacled Twilight corrected, turning back around. "I don't know that there's any need to do anything, per se. The Eyeball hasn't done anything bad, right? Besides that thing with Flash Sentry."

A snorty giggle escaped her.

"Goodness, he's never going to be able to look at you as a sexual being again, is he?"

Twilight and Sunset shared a look of irritation that lasted until Bespectacled Twilight finished laughing.

"Anyway. If it's not acting maliciously, or giving any indication that it wants to hurt you, or even has the ability to hurt you, then why rush to judgment? Heck, maybe you could try communicating with it – if you can form some sort of rapport with it, learn something valuable, then it might help matters along a lot."

Sunset pointed at Bespectacled Twilight, frowned, and dropped her arm back to her side. "I can't actually find any fault in your logic. Much as it annoys me to admit it. Befriend a giant eyeball in my kitchen... not the weirdest thing I've done since coming here, I'm sure, but still. Pretty damn weird."

"Well, if you're uncomfortable with it, then you can always..." Bespectacled Twilight cupped her hands behind her back and looked at the ground. "Come and stay at my place? With Princess Me and I?"

Twilight looked at Sunset and gave her a frantic, anxious nod of encouragement. Chaperone, she mouthed.

Sunset glanced between the two Twilights. A smirk crossed her face for an instant. "Nah. I think I'm good. Let it never be said that a floaty Eyeball chased Sunset Shimmer out of her own apartment. And, wow, that sure was a sentence, wasn't it?"

She looked away, mumbling.

"Alleles, and measurements, and... whether or not the two of us look identical naked..."

Twilight slumped and groaned.

Author's Note

The original Writeoff version of this story was about 8k words in length. In revising and rewriting it, I accidentally tripled its size. Oops! :twilightblush:

So I'll be posting the rest of the story in increments to make up for that.

2. Eyesolation

Sunset's day began, as it always did, with the alarm clock's shriek wrenching her from sleep. Usually, the clock was a minor irritant at worst, and nothing a good thwack wouldn't fix, but yesterday, she'd been hoping – and, let's face it, fully expecting – to wake up beside a naked Flash Sentry. Reality had other plans, of course, and the clock seemed to revel in the unseating of her forbidden teenage love fantasy.

Or perhaps she was just projecting her frustration onto it. Regardless, Sunset wasn't currently entangled with a sexy guitarist, so her day was already starting on a lousy note.

Sunset drew the covers over her head and curled her body into a tight ball, creating a toasty cocoon from which she refused to emerge. She wanted to believe that the clock had no sense of object permanence – that if it couldn't see her, it'd assume she didn't exist, and would stop trying to wake her up. But the longer she hid, the more the clock blared, and the more she came to realize the futility of cowering in snuggly blankets when there was a whole day that needed facing.

So, reluctantly, Sunset tossed the covers off her head and blindly thwacked the clock into silence. However, she was unprepared for the assault of the outside world's frigid air, and she immediately plunged back under the covers with a sigh of relief. She lingered for as long as she dared, until the air beneath her blankets grew too hot and too thick to breathe comfortably, and she poked her head out of the covers to breathe and open her eyes.

What she saw, mere inches away from her nose, was the rounded tip of a black, rubbery surfaced object.

"Bwah!"

Sunset scrabbled backward as far as she could go – which wasn't very far, with the headboard to consider. She rubbed her eyes in disbelief, blinking rapidly to clear away the last traces of blurry, crusty, slightly drooly sleep. Her first cogent thought regarding her visitor, after dismissing the obvious, was "tentacle." It had a long, serpentine body, which snaked down the length of her mattress and curled past the footboard and through her door – through her closed, locked, and very much impermeable door.

Her second cogent thought was that it was far too early to deal with this sort of thing, and her third was "What the shit?!"

"Out," Sunset snapped, scowling and pointing at the door. "Out, out out!"

Concurrent with the final "out," the tentacle withdrew, slurping down her bed and through her door with an actual slurping sound.

Sunset flung the covers off her body and rushed to her door. She threw it open in time to witness the tentacle descend the stairs, its tip thumping loudly against each step. She traced the length of the tentacle back to her kitchen door, from which it protruded, until it wiggled and waggled and flailed back through it like a strand of wet spaghetti.

Sunset hopped down the stairs and rushed into the kitchen. The Eyeball floated, positioned and oriented exactly as it was when she'd peeked in on it before heading off to bed – with one notable difference. Its pupil had stretched out from the rest of its body, and now hung, limp and floppy, over the floor.

With one last wet, noisy schlorp, the pupil was sucked back into the Eyeball. It stared in silence at Sunset.

This is easily the third most awkward morning I've ever experienced, Sunset thought bitterly.

"Okay, we're gonna set some ground rules, right now." Sunset folded her arms and cocked her hip, shifting seamlessly from Beleaguered Roommate to Sassy Queen Bee. "You see this room? This room you're floating in, all unwelcome and taking-up-space-like? This is the only place in my apartment where I want you to be. And I don't even really want you to be in here – you're an intruder with whom I'm cohabiting under strict protest, after all – but as long as you're in here, I don't have to see or acknowledge you, unless I get really, really hungry.

"Which means that I don't want to catch head nor hide of you – so to speak – outside of the kitchen. This extends to certain prehensile parts of your anatomy, too. If I wake up with you all up in my face a second time, then you and I are gonna need to revisit this subject. And I am not gonna be anywhere near this patient about it."

The Eyeball observed Sunset in silence, giving no reply. Slowly, without even a whisper of displaced air to mark its motion, it floated to the side, and rotated until its pupil faced Sunset's broken coffee maker.

Sunset let her arms fall to her side, though she braced her knuckles against her still-cocked hip to maintain proper Queen Bee posture. "Are you listening to me? Hey—"

The empty coffee pot suddenly began to fill with some sort of clear fluid from the bottom up, rising in height and volume until it reached the brim.

Sunset's arm and jaw dropped with perfect synchronicity.

Giving the Eyeball as much of a berth as she reasonably could, Sunset stepped over to her coffee pot and pulled it free from the machine. She flipped open the lid and bent her neck to sniff, but paused – for all she knew, inhaling the fumes of this mystery fluid could kill her. She instead set the pot down on the counter and took a slow, deep breath, wafting the air into her nose with her hand.

From the trace of scent that she caught, it smelled the way morning breath tasted – and, presumably, the way it smelled. She wouldn't know; she hadn't been in a position to smell morning breath for quite some time. She had the Eyeball to thank for that as well. Satisfied that it wouldn't kill her with its fumes, yet annoyed at the reminder of what she'd missed out on, she pulled a fork from her silverware drawer, and poised it over the coffee pot. Before dipping it in, she gave the Eyeball a wary look

This isn't gonna corrode, or cause a chemical reaction that demolishes the entire building, is it?

She gulped – nothing ventured, nothing gained. In the name of science, Sunset dipped the fork into the pot, soaking it halfway up the prongs, before pulling it free and holding it up for inspection. Frowning thoughtfully, she rubbed her fingertip lightly against a prong, gathering a tiny sample and mushing it against her thumb.

"Faintly warm... viscosity is somewhere between water and maple syrup..." Sunset pulled her thumb and fingertip apart, squinting at the thin strands of fluid connecting her two digits. "Factoring in the odor, and in the absence of lab equipment, the closest comparison I could draw would be...."

She slowly turned her head to stare at the Eyeball.

"Why did you fill my coffee pot with human saliva?"

The Eyeball said and did nothing.

Sunset pursed her lips and quietly backed out of the kitchen, shuddering all the while. She paused in the doorway, finger raised, mouth open, ready to raise hell.

"...Oh, what would even be the point..."

The Eyeball swiveled away from the pot to watch her leave, the middle of its pupil twinkling faintly.

School came and went, the classes and hours passing in a blur. Sunset went through the motions, taking dutiful notes and paying attention, yet remaining silent and seldom bothering to contribute. Academia didn't get her all hot and bothered the same way that it did Twilight, but she was a diligent student, and always had been. Today, though, she was there without really being there. She drifted from class to class, tossed about the building by the tide of bells, until she washed up in the music room with Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash at the end of the day.

The two talked about this or that while Sunset sat on the piano with her legs dangling over the edge. She had a notebook in her lap, and a pen in her hand, and she scribbled away at a page full of eyeballs – round, bloodshot, disembodied eyeballs – in the waning light of the afternoon sun.

Until blue fingers snapped, twice, in front of her face. Sunset blinked and looked up from her notebook, thumbing the button at the end of her pen to retract it.

"You in there, Sunset?" Rainbow Dash's fists were planted on her hips, and she leaned down to peek over the top of Sunset's notebook.

Sunset pulled it against her chest. "No rehearsal this Friday because you're playing soccer with Scootaloo. Or you're buying Scootaloo socks. Something about Scootaloo."

Rainbow folded her arms in silence, her lips curling in a skeptical half-frown.

"What?" said Sunset. "I was listening."

"Uh-huh." Rainbow snorted. "That was only part of it, you know. I'm trying out this new training regimen with Scootaloo – we're seeing how she keeps up with pony magic. Wanted to know if you're in."

"Can't. Sorry. Prior commitment."

Sunset lowered her notebook and clicked her pen, but Rainbow planted a finger at the top of her page before she could return to drawing. She pulled it down to gaze at Sunset's sketches, arching an eyebrow.

"I think it'll keep for one afternoon, Sunset. Besides, maybe the three of you will have everything wrapped up by then. A lot can change by the day after tomorrow."

"You should listen to Rainbow," Fluttershy added. She hovered over Sunset's left shoulder, her hands planted on the piano's surface to support her weight. "It certainly couldn't hurt to make plans in advance, just in case things work out early, could it? You know... plan for the best, right?"

"I think you mean 'hope for the best.' You plan for the worst." Sunset tugged her notebook away from Rainbow Dash and scooted away, turning her back to her friends. "Which means that my answer's still no. But, hey, I'm not even sure I'm the right fit for this training regimen of yours. Mind-reading isn't really good for much in an athletic competition."

"You try and reach out, and this is what you get," Rainbow muttered, picking up her backpack. "Whatever; I gotta run. We're meeting up at Pinkie's to study and see how much whipped cream she can fit in her mouth at once. You coming? Guaranteed to be a good time."

Sunset made a non-committal noise.

"Yeah, I figured." Rainbow sighed and stepped out of the room. "Flutters?"

"In a moment."

Fluttershy waited until Rainbow Dash had shut the door behind her to speak up again. "You're a very talented artist, Sunset. I never actually knew that about you before."

Sunset smiled. "Yeah, well. I'd be even better if I still had magic. Hands are great, but they lack the precision of levitation."

"I suppose I'll have to take your word for it." Sunset felt Fluttershy's hair brush against her shoulder as she leaned in closer to inspect the page. "But, um... that one, right there. That's an interesting departure from your eye motif. Could you, perhaps, explain it to me?"

She pointed to a sketch of an alicorn, bound in ropes, being dangled over a vat of bubbling liquid.

"That," Sunset murmured, "is one Starlight Glimmer, moments before being subsumed by boiling, grape-flavored cough syrup. Grape for the purple coloring, you understand."

"Oh." Fluttershy shrank away. "How... imaginative."

"Mm-hm." Sunset tapped the pen idly against the page. "Of course, since I've never seen Starlight Glimmer, and I have no idea what she looks like, I based her appearance on that of the fallen Equestrian princess, Nightmare Moon. I took a few creative liberties, though – reinterpreted her design for a more modern context. See the helmet, and the mane? The starfield coming out the back of her head?"

Fluttershy frowned. "Why is the helmet is shaped like a—"

"Like a butt?"

"Like a— yeah, like a butt."

"Artistic license." Sunset idly colored in a blank spot on the page. "I like that it makes her mane look like a fart. That wasn't intentional; it just kind of worked out that way."

Fluttershy rounded the piano to kneel in front of Sunset, biting her lip in hesitation.

"Do you find that cathartic?"

Sunset's eyelid twitched. "Catharsis implies that I have emotions that need releasing in the first place. Which I do not."

"Are you sure about that?"

Sunset glanced up from the page to narrow her eyes at Fluttershy. "I get what you're doing here, Fluttershy, but there's nothing that I need to get off my chest."

"Isn't there?"

"Must you respond to everything I say with questions?" Sunset shut the notebook with an exasperated growl and tossed it to the floor. "Cripes, you even got me doing it. I hope you're happy."

"Sunset, I know that Princess Twilight's student bothers you. I'd know that without having to look at your... um... artwork." She glanced, quickly and furtively, at the notebook. "I know that recent events have brought that to the forefront, and with everything else that's going on – I'm just worried about the toll it's taking on you. We all are."

Sunset shut her eyes and exhaled slowly. When she opened them, she forced herself to grin. "Thanks. But I'm fine, Fluttershy. Really. There's nothing that I need to—"

"Please don't say there's nothing you need to talk about again," Fluttershy said gently.

The grin fell, and Sunset looked away. She gathered her legs onto the piano, and turned her body around to stare out the window at the fading light of the afternoon.

"...There's nothing I can talk about, then." Clouds gathered in the distance, creeping up on the sun – only a few hours of clear skies left, it seemed. "I appreciate your concern, but I can't get into it with you."

"You don't need to feel like you're alone in this, Sunset. We're here for you."

"That's exactly why I can't talk about it, Fluttershy. You're too close to it – to me, and to Twilight. I don't want to force our drama on the rest of you, and make you guys pick sides between the two of us, which is what will happen if I open up about it. Trust me on that."

Sunset pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin between them.

"I ruined your friendships with one another once already; I don't want to do it again by accident. It's just better for everybody if Twilight and I resolve things ourselves, so, please – just let this one go, for all our sakes."

"...If that's really how you feel, I won't press you," said Fluttershy at length. "But you know, if you ever need to talk about it – or about anything, really – I'm always here for you."

She patted Sunset on the shoulder, and Sunset looked down at Fluttershy's hand with a grateful smile.

"Thank you. And, you know what, when this is all over, and Twilight finally emerges from whatever tower she's sequestered herself in, then she and I can talk it out. But for now—"

The door to the music room opened suddenly, interrupting Sunset. She twisted her body to look behind herself at the newcomer, and her face blanked in undisguised shock.

"Flash." Sunset swallowed. "H-Hi."

Without saying a word, Flash shut the door and vanished, tearing off down the hall and out of sight.

Sunset gathered her things and went after him, leaving Fluttershy with a hurried apology. "Flash! Hey, wait up!"

Flash came to a stop beside a row of lockers, turning to face Sunset. He briefly met her gaze before looking away, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor.

"Hey... Sunset." Flash gripped his backpack's strap with knuckle-whitening force. "What's up?"

"I wanted to talk." Sunset noted the slight cringe in Flash's face at her use of the personal pronoun. "You know, about yesterday? Because we never really got a chance to, with all the, uh... all the..."

"Yeah, all the... the stuff. The crazy stuff." Flash's head bobbed as he inspected Sunset's shoes.

"Right. That. So..." Sunset toyed with the strap of her backpack. "Do you wanna... talk? Maybe?"

"I—" Flash's eyes shut, and he cringed. "That is, uh, Flash... me... me-Flash doesn't really want to talk about it. Everything is fi— okay. Everything's okay."

"Are you sure?" Sunset cocked her head. "Because you're sounding kind of—"

"Flash-me has no ide— no clue what you're talking about." Flash began to back away. "I— me have to go now. Go away. Far away."

He turned and bolted again.

Sunset pressed her palm against her forehead and sighed, listening to his footfalls as they grew fainter.

"Goodness. He certainly can run, can't he?"

Sunset straightened – she hadn't even heard Fluttershy steal up behind her. "Kid's got stamina to match, believe me."

Not that it'll do me any good ever again.

"You, um... you left this behind when you ran out the door." Sunset turned to see the notebook held between Fluttershy's hands, and she accepted it with a nod of thanks. Fluttershy cleared her throat. "Maybe there's no point in asking, but... will I see you at Pinkie's this evening?"

"...I think I'm just gonna go straight home." Sunset's voice was haggard; she leaned against the lockers tiredly. "Tell the others I'm sorry for skipping out on them."

"The door will be open if you change your mind."

"I know. Thanks."

Sunset killed the engine to her bike and looked up at the facade of her apartment building. As expected, the clouds had crept in as she made her way home; the overcast sky was a shade lighter than the slate-gray paint of the building.

As she nudged the kickstand down and dismounted, she noticed someone sitting on her bottom step – a girl in an oversized black hoodie and ripped black jeans. Vivid orange hair, striped with goldenrod, contrasted sharply with the ensemble and the pallor of her skin. Between two fingers she held a cigarette, the smoke curling up between her vacuous amber eyes, as she drank in the sight of Sunset on her motorcycle.

Sunset tugged off her helmet, and shook her head, tossing her thick hair about her shoulders. She glared at the girl on the front steps.

"No loitering."

In response, the girl leaned back against the stairs, and spread her arms across the step behind her, splaying her legs. She smirked at Sunset and waggled her eyebrows.

Sunset scowled and took a step toward her, fishing in her jacket pocket for her keys.

From behind came a snapping sound, followed by a crash as her motorcycle toppled to the asphalt. Heart seizing, Sunset dropped her helmet and ran back to the bike. She bent, hooked her fingers around the seat, and raised it high enough to see the broken kickstand, snapped off a few inches from its base. Leaning farther, she could see scuff marks on the bike's surface where it had scraped against the pavement.

"Son of a diamond dog..."

The girl on the stairs wolf-whistled. "Hey, I ain't complaining – the view from back here is excellent." She cackled at her own remark.

Sunset's fingers tightened.

She gently lowered the bike back to the ground before stomping toward the still-chuckling girl and smacking the cigarette from her hand. The girl started to protest, but Sunset grabbed her by the collar, and yanked her to her feet.

Her eyes widened. "The hell is your problem, you crazy—"

"I said. No. Loitering."

Sunset threw the girl down the stairs, and she fell to her hands and knees on the pavement below. She stared at Sunset, cowed but unharmed, before turning and fleeing up the street, her hood flapping behind her like the shrunken cape of a stunted superhero.

With a disdainful snort, Sunset ground out the still-burning cigarette, retrieved her helmet, and entered her apartment. She kicked off her shoes, tossed her things onto the couch, grabbed a throw pillow, and screamed into it until her throat scratched and her lungs burned for air. Vaguely, in the back of her mind, she wondered if it was the same one Twilight had used yesterday. Either way, the girl had the right idea. Screaming always helped.

Dizzy and oxygen-deprived, Sunset threw her scream receptacle back onto the couch and leaned against the armrest. She took slow, deep breaths to steady herself, and mentally ran through her options.

As far as the issues she had on her plate were concerned, the motorcycle was far from the biggest, or even the hardest to fix. A word in the right ear, and she could secure herself enough time in the school's auto shop to weld her kickstand back on. It wouldn't be an especially elegant solution, and it was far from a professional repair job, but she couldn't afford much more than that. The damage to her bike itself would need more attention, but it was a lesser priority – it was, after all, only cosmetic.

I mean, hey, she thought, looking around her apartment with a self-deprecating chuckle. What do I honestly care about appearances at this point?

Her eyes landed on the space underneath her kitchen door – through the gap, she could see a strange pattern of shifting lights and shadows. Sunset frowned at it.

"Now, what in the world...?"

She pushed off the couch and stepped into the kitchen, and almost went back to the pillow for a second round of frenzied screaming.

The door to her refrigerator was flung open. The Eyeball floated in front of it, and Sunset's food floated around the Eyeball, along with the contents of every other cabinet and drawer in the kitchen. Her perishables and kitchenware formed a three-tiered facsimile of planetary rings, with the Eyeball itself fulfilling the role of Saturn. Bottles of ketchup and mustard, jars of mayonnaise and relish, a carton of milk and two six-packs of peach yogurt, formed an inner ring of foodstuffs. Encircling that was an outer ring of bowls and plates, and spoons and forks, and two unwashed, long-stemmed wine glasses. Beyond that was another ring of moldy bread, peanut butter, napkins, and cutlery.

The Eyeball slowly swiveled to face Sunset, and the two innermost rings changed their rotation, forming a gyroscope that flopped and spun around the Eyeball. The outermost ring maintained its orbit, slow and steady, in time with the other two. Sunset's eyes trailed after the bottle of wine as it floated past her face, followed closely by a coffee pot now mercifully devoid of human saliva.

Seeing the bottle, she realized that a screaming pillow would not be sufficient to deal with this new situation. There was only one logical and reasonable way to react.

Sunset pulled the wine from orbit. She uncorked it with her teeth, stuck it in her mouth, and tossed her head back. Sweet relief, rich and tangy, flooded into her mouth and down her throat in long, desperate gulps. She was no sommelier, but she knew that chugging wine – even cheap liquor store Merlot – like it was some watered-down piss-lager was the wrong way to drink wine. She just didn't care. She needed it, as she needed few other things in her life.

Sunset finished her pull with a gasp and wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist, leaving a dull red splotch against her skin.

"Alright," she said, swaying slightly on suddenly unsteady feet. She brought up a belch that brought with it a sweeping wave of nausea, which she battled down with some effort. "You see this? All of this, uh... whatever?"

Sunset pointed vaguely at the gyroscoping rings encircling the Eyeball.

"I need it to stop. I need it to stop, right now, and for you to cut me just a thin, slender little sliver of slack." She held her thumb and index finger apart a centimeter to illustrate. "Like, I know I deserve a lifetime's worth of ironic punishment, after all the bad I've done, but does it have to happen all at once? Can't it get portioned out a little more evenly?"

The rings began to slow their rotation as Sunset's diatribe continued.

"Silence, huh? Figures. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about," Sunset drawled, thrusting her bottle accusingly and spilling a few droplets of wine. "You showed up on the same day that I just happened to try and reconnect with my well-toned and as-yet-single ex-boyfriend. And not only did you scare him away, you big, cock-blocking lug, you broke his brain and made him terrified of a simple vowel sound. And of me. Besides being bad for his well-being, it sorta makes my prospects of ever hooking up with him again look not so great, so thanks a bunch for that!

"This ordeal, of course, led to me contacting my B.P.P.P.F.F. – that's 'Best Purple Pony Princess Friend Forever' – in a moment of blind, slightly tipsy panic, and all that did is force me to confront the reality that she has a close, personal friendship with Starlight the Synonymous Sunset Substitute. Which opens up a whole 'nother can of worms because, hey, getting replaced by someone you care about? Not good for the ol' self-esteem! All of which brings me back to my original point, which is this."

She took one last drink, re-corked the bottle, hammered it in with the palm of her hand, and tossed it back into orbit around the Eyeball.

"I get it. Okay? The message has been received. I have had my full measure. Whatever god of karmic punishment is watching me right now, cackling like an asshole, can rest easy, knowing that I have been sufficiently spanked for the time being."

The rings finally slowed to a complete stop. The room was still as the Eyeball stared at Sunset, its pupil visible between a jar of mayonnaise and Sunset's moldy loaf of bread.

Sunset snorted and turned around, folding her arms.

"You know what? Maybe I don't even have any right to complain." She laughed – an ugly sound, ill-humored and thick with wine. "Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong; maybe it's only fair that all of this is happening at once. So much good has happened to me these last few months – finding my friends, making things right with the rest of the school, helping Twilight almost get laid at Camp Everfree. Hell, the mere possibility of reconciling with Flash was unthinkable up until recently. Maybe things going to shit was inevitable. What goes up must come back down, and the higher up you go..."

She dipped her head, dropping her arms and letting them slap limply against her sides.

"The harder you hit the ground." Sunset sighed. "Maybe that's all this is. Just the universe balancing my account."

The sounds of squeaky hinges and clattering cutlery began to fill the kitchen. Sunset turned to see the Eyeball's gyroscope disassembling, its components returning to the drawers and cabinets from whence they came. Silverware, plates and bowls clanked against one another as they were re-stacked. Food and drink floated back into the fridge, the wine glasses settled again in the sink, and the coffee pot slid into place in the broken machine.

Finally, the Eyeball floated alone in an otherwise empty, mostly organized kitchen, staring down at Sunset.

Sunset's lips quirked up in a half-smile.

"That's... a start, I suppose."

The Eyeball's pupil vanished, leaving behind a blank white space inside its iris, which pulsed with a sudden glow. Sunset tried to say something, but a second pulse cut her off, and she fell silent to watch out of curiosity. Two more pulses, in rapid succession. A pause, and another three. In time with the pulses, a black line uncurled in the center of the blank space where the pupil had been, forming a spiral that grew longer, and wider, the farther from its origin that it went..

Those are Fillybonacci numbers. The spiral, too – that's part of it. But why...?

Sunset chewed the end of her thumb thoughtfully. She hadn't been able to assign any meaning or motivation to any of the weird, unquantifiable actions the Eyeball had thus far taken. Best guess, it was studying her, and the world she inhabited, analyzing everything in an attempt to understand her – perhaps even to communicate with her. It seemed to understand that Sunset didn't appreciate having her kitchen turned into a complex aerial ballet, and it reacted with empathy – that was surprising. But establishing actual dialogue with Sunset seemed as much beyond its capabilities as it was beyond Sunset's.

Yet it guessed, correctly, that Sunset knew her mathematics well enough to detect a basic pattern of numbers. Given time – given enormous amounts of time that she really didn't have – she might have been able to build a dialogue with the Eyeball based on that alone. If only there was another way, though. Something faster, something more... immediate...

...Wait. Duh.

Sunset stepped toward the Eyeball, swaying a little from the wine, and tentatively stretched her arm toward it. She stopped with her fingers inches away from its shiny surface.

"Listen... I'm gonna try something, alright? Something that I think'll help us to understand one another. Don't freak out, okay?"

The Eyeball's Fillybonacci spiral congealed back into a pupil. It hovered, silent and immobile.

Why am I bothering? It's not like it can understand what I'm saying.

Sunset's fingertips brushed against the Eyeball's skin – it was surprisingly warm and rubbery, and vibrated softly beneath her touch. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and concentrated.

What she saw in the Eyeball's mind made Pinkie Pie's sugar-infused, marshmallow wonderland look sensical and well-organized.

Her vision swam with swirls of colors she had no name for, images and polygons that stretched and warped inside her mind's eye, changing shape and shifting form a thousand times a millisecond. She tried to force them to hold still long enough for her to comprehend them, but the mere effort made her mind turn inside-out and implode. Sunset struggled to parse what she saw, to maintain some semblance of thought and self, desperate to grab on to anything familiar.

She caught something, and clung to it – a feeling, or the ghost thereof. Powerful, yet diluted, as though she were experiencing it through a filter. An overwhelming sensation of isolation. Of loneliness.

Sunset tried to call out to the Eyeball, and watched as her words swaggered from her mouth, becoming shapes which became colors which became songs. They unfurled formlessly in the vacuum, and Sunset laughed to behold them. In the distance, an unseen swarm of insects buzzed, the whine of their wings drawing closer, growing louder. Sunset flung open arms that did not exist in greeting.

Someone shoved – hard – against her chest.

Sunset stumbled backward, into a world of solid matter, and fell to the dirt-streaked linoleum floor, panting for breath. She sniffed – something wet was trickling from her nose, and she wiped it on her knuckle. Opening her eyes, she saw a smudge of red smeared against her skin, brighter than the wine-stain on her wrist.

...I probably shouldn't have tried that.

Then her insides clenched; she doubled over, and vomited.

I probably shouldn't have chugged half a bottle of wine, either.

Sunset lay for hours in companionable silence with her unwanted guest, as the sky darkened outside and shadows claimed the kitchen. She kept her head against the floor, the cool tiles soothing the pounding between her ears. Gradually, the pain ebbed away, and the memories of those alien geometries and unseeable blends of colors faded from her mind. She wanted them to stay – wanted to contemplate them, to understand on some small level what the Eyeball was and where it came from and what it wanted.

Maybe it was better that she didn't know. Maybe she wasn't meant to.

So many maybes. Only one thing I know for certain.

"...You didn't ask for this either."

Sunset's cheek had adhered to the tile as she lay there, and it stretched and smacked as it pulled free. Fighting against gravity, and the still-potent throbbing in her skull, she settled onto her haunches and looked up at the Eyeball. Its iris painted the room in cool blue tones.

"I hadn't really thought about how all this must seem from your perspective. How you'd feel about being here. Maybe I've been too self-involved to put much thought into it, I dunno. But you didn't ask for this either, and I get that now. You're all alone – the only one of your kind – in a world where you're unwanted."

She stood up, still unsteady, and stepped back to lean against the wall.

"Guess that's something we have in common."

The Eyeball's glow brightened, as the last traces of daylight vanished.

Sunset stuck her hands in her pockets.

"...You want me to run out and get us some burritos, or something?"

Author's Note

This chapter was inspired by, and brought to you in part by, the Sunset Shimmer Eats Burritos and Has Bipolar Disorder series, a series of stories by Soufriere in which Sunset Shimmer eats burritos and has bipolar disorder.

I suggest you go read them if you're like me and you enjoy depictions of Sunset Shimmer as emotionally isolated and wracked with self-doubt. And if you like burritos.

Also, Editor Man came up with "Fillybonacci," so please direct your outrage at that pony pun toward him.

3. Me, Myself, and Eye

Twilight spat the pencil out of her mouth and lifted her head from her notebook, wincing at the stiff, painful sensation that shot through her neck. Working without the benefit of magic meant mouthwriting everything – every note, every diagram, every marginal doodle – which further meant hunching over and craning her neck down to put pencil to paper. Terrible posture, really, and it put undue strain on her human spine and muscles.

Admittedly, she could ameliorate her problem by doing her work at her counterpart's desk, rather than on her bed. But that meant missing out on the many, many creature comforts that the bed offered – the plush pillows, the downy blankets, and, most of all, the mattress.

Sweet Celestia, the mattress. It was soft and spongy, yet somehow still springy, the product of some miraculous human invention called "memory foam." While there were probably some ethical and logistical issues with transplanting unique substances from one world to the other, part of Twilight wanted nothing more than to rush through the portal and invent this life-changing material in Equestria. Just thinking about it made her salivate.

I'm sure no one would mind me bringing back a tiny sample...

Thinking about it didn't help her neck any, though. Twilight leaned back against the headboard, rolling her shoulders and sighing with relief. Her legs, bent at the knee and drawn up close to her body, served as a makeshift table while she worked, and she stretched them out flat against the bed. The notebook was shaken off her lap by the motion, falling among the semicircle of identical notebooks surrounding her – Bespectacled Twilight's meticulously gathered research. Reading through it all had taken up half a day; reading it ten more times and revising it with her own analysis took another. All time well spent, of course, but it left her mentally and emotionally exhausted. Not to mention lonely.

She hadn't seen anyone besides Bespectacled Twilight and her Spike since that first day, and even then, only in mornings and evenings. The rest of the time, she was alone in the house, surrounded by books, munching away at processed snack foods, and kicking herself for leaving Spike behind. He'd volunteered to accompany her, of course, had been more than willing to run to Sunset's rescue, but Twilight declined his company. There was no telling how much of a shut-in Starlight Glimmer could become if she didn't have someone under the same roof as her.

...Then again, maybe it isn't Starlight I should be worried about.

Twilight folded her arms across her knees and rested her chin against them. She needed a break.

"Hey!" her own voice called from the bedroom's open door. Twilight glanced up to see Bespectacled Twilight poke her bespectacled face into the room. "Are you decent? I mean, if you aren't, then whatever; it's nothing I haven't seen before, but I figured it'd be polite to ask before I—"

"Stick your head in and gawk at her?" Spike interrupted as he pranced into the bedroom. "'Cuz, like, usually, you ask that question before you look."

Twilight stifled a chuckle and leaned over the bed to lift Spike onto her lap. Hearing the little dog speak for the first time had been a bit of a shock to her system, but she was grateful for his presence once she adjusted. He wasn't her number one assistant, but he was still Spike, and his sharp wit made her feel a little more at home than she might have without him.

Spike circled Twilight's lap, once, before curling up and yawning. "Y'know, it's funny – you and my Twilight are basically identical, but your lap feels kinda different from hers. It's a subtle, but notable, difference. Provided you know what to look for."

The busting of her chops, though, she could do without.

Please don't give her any more ammunition...

"How was school?" Twilight asked, hoping to preempt Bespectacled Twilight from pursuing Spike's line of thought.

"Noisy, and full of people." Bespectacled Twilight approached her desk, unslinging her backpack as she walked, and dropped it in her desk chair. She gave it an idle spin before wandering over to her closet. "There was an earthquake drill today, so we all had to hide under our desks, and whoever was running the show forgot to give the all-clear. We were stuck for, like, half an hour, with nothing to do besides count the chewed-up gum wads stuck under our desks. Nineteen, before you ask."

Twilight had not been planning to ask.

Then Bespectacled Twilight whirled around. "Oh! But while we were down there, Derpy made eye contact with Flash Sentry by accident, and he just completely freaked out – ran out of the classroom screaming. Ms. Cheerilee found him in a janitor's closet half an hour later, sobbing and hugging an old mop."

Twilight's fingers clenched. Perhaps she should have let Spike's comment stand – in trying to head off a lap-related line of conversation, she'd accidentally landed on a less comfortable topic.

"Anyway," said Bespectacled Twilight. "I'm only home long enough to shower and change. I'm meeting Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash for soccer practice at school."

"I didn't know you played soccer," said Twilight.

"I don't, not usually. But Rainbow has some new training regimen in mind for Scootaloo, and she thinks my powers will be a big help." Bespectacled Twilight turned back to her closet, rummaging through it for a fresh outfit to wear. "Fluttershy'll be riding the bench, though. You should come with – keep her company."

Well, she had just been pining for a break in routine. "Is Sunset gonna be there?"

Bespectacled Twilight tossed a maroon cardigan with C.P. embroidered in gold, cursive script over her shoulder. It landed at the foot of the bed and dangled off the edge.

"No... come to think of it, we haven't seen a whole lot of her this week. She's gone straight home after school every day since the Eyeball showed up. I don't think she likes leaving it unattended for too long."

Moments like this made Twilight grateful that her human ears couldn't visibly droop. It made it easier to hide disappointment. She and Sunset hadn't had a real conversation since that day in the classroom, and Twilight had the distinct feeling that she was being avoided. It hurt.

It annoyed the heck out of her, too.

If she would just sit down and talk to me, we could work this out, but she insists on acting like a jealous schoolfilly...!

Spike whined and pawed at Twilight's tummy. She sighed and scratched him behind the ear. Thoughts of Sunset and feelings of irritation melted away as his tail thump-thumped contentedly against her leg. What was it about dogs that made petting them so darn therapeutic?

I should ask Applejack to bring Winona by the castle sometime...

"Anyway, how are things on your end?" Bespectacled Twilight asked. She emerged from her closet with a T-shirt and shorts, both emblazoned with the logo of that camp she'd attended with the others. "Are you making any progress?"

"Actually? Yes." Twilight brightened – after educational environments and pancakes, science-talk was the most reliable method of elevating her mood. "I gotta say, I was a little skeptical about your plan the first time you told me about it. But I've run the numbers, and checked your figures, and I think you're on to something – I think the seven of us can generate enough power to stabilize a transdimensional rift long enough to send Sunset's new roommate back wherever it came from."

"Told you so." Bespectacled Twilight approached the bed, picking up and folding the discarded cardigan over her arm. "Honestly, stabilizing the rift won't be the tricky part. Creating the rift in the first place, on the other hand? Doable, don't get me wrong, but dangerous."

"Yeah, I vaguely recall someone trying to do something like that before, and nearly toppling the barriers separating Equestria and the human world by mistake." Twilight smirked.

Bespectacled Twilight's face burned, and she pulled the cardigan close to her chest like a security blanket. "Hey, that's— that's not fair. Those were unique circumstances. D-Difficult circumstances! Uniquely difficult—"

"Not disputing that."

"I mean, i-it was all very stressful." Bespectacled Twilight brushed some of the notebooks on the bed aside, creating enough space to sit next to Twilight. "There was singing, and chanting, and choreographed circling—"

"She was peer-pressured," Spike added, yawning.

"Exactly, see?" Bespectacled Twilight nodded. "I was peer pressured."

"I'll do my best to avoid leading any choral harmonies. No guarantees, though – sometimes they just kinda happen around me." Twilight snickered, then sighed. "That said, I ran into an unexpected problem while I was checking your research. It's nothing catastrophic, mind you – for our purposes, it's just an unexpected variable we should account for."

"Ooh." Bespectacled Twilight leaned closer to Twilight, the better to read over her shoulder. Twilight scooted away, feeling a spike of irritation when Bespectacled Twilight didn't take the hint and leaned in closer.

"I've checked and double-checked your work a grand total of eleven times now," said Twilight, her annoyance straining her voice. "And while I don't disagree with your theory of how realities coexist, I don't think your model is entirely accurate."

She reached for the notebook she'd been working on and flipped open to a page with a diagram of two circles, a duplicate of the one Bespectacled Twilight had drawn to first demonstrate her theory.

"So this is the model as you presented it. Equestria here, human world there, shared border... hereish." Twilight traced the space where the two circles brushed against one another. "Right?"

"Pretty much." Bespectacled Twilight put her hand on Twilight's shoulder, ignoring Twilight's attempts to shrug it off.

"Well, I've gone through a number of equations..." Twilight flipped to the next page, filled with complex formulas and figures, which Bespectacled Twilight quickly scanned, lips moving wordlessly. "The results don't support the model you're postulating."

Twilight ran her finger down the page, to a lopsided Venn diagram at the bottom that had been filled in with colored pencils. Pink for the left circle, black for the right, purple for the overlap between the two.

"Keeping in mind that this is a crude, two-dimensional sketch of a highly theoretical model of metaphysics that hasn't been mapped in either of our realities..." Twilight winced at the faint sensation of her counterpart's breath on her cheek. "If I'm right, then this is actually how Equestria and the human world play against one another."

Bespectacled Twilight studied the diagrams in silence for a moment before speaking up again. "So... wait, one of these is Equestria, right?"

"Correct. But this, right here?" Twilight pointed to the overlap. "This is you. Or, uh. Us, right now, I suppose.

Bespectacled Twilight nodded. "And the other is...?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe that's where the Eyeball really came from, or maybe it's some other dimension altogether." Twilight shut the notebook. "If you want to check my math on this, then feel free, but I'm telling you – there's some other universe-sized mass that's not accounted for in the model that you drew up. And, if I'm correct, this world exists somewhere between it and Equestria."

Bespectacled Twilight whistled, leaning closer. "What does that mean for us?"

"Well, it certainly restricts our margin for error. Assuming you're right, of course, and this thing actually came from the space between realities."

"Farther-out-there—"

"Anyway, assuming that still holds up, and that it didn't actually come from this other mystery mass, then the points of contact between our realities are far smaller than initially assumed. Before we can even think about opening another rift, we need to be absolutely certain, and nail down our calculations precisely. Otherwise, we run the risk of—"

She heard a sharp intake of air, and a puff of breath just above her head, and recoiled. Bespectacled Twilight wasn't hovering over her shoulder anymore. Her face was poised just above Twilight's hair, her nose nearly touching her scalp.

"...Did you just..." Twilight's nose wrinkled. "Sniff me?

Bespectacled Twilight's face was pale and expressionless. Pinpricks of sweat beaded on her brow.

"...Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes." She blinked. "Um. I-I was just trying to get a whiff of that shampoo you're using. Wh-What is that?"

She sniffed again. Twilight scooted to the very edge of the bed, dislodging Spike by accident.

"It was in your shower," said Twilight grumpily. "You tell me."

"Right! Yes, of course. Silly me. Heh." Bespectacled Twilight backed away. "Um, y'know, I think I'll just... maybe... go use some of that right now."

She dashed for the door, dropping the cardigan in her haste.

Twilight groaned and buried her face in her hands, massaging her eyelids gently. She felt the bed creak beneath Spike's weight as he moved about, and lowered his body over her bare feet. His fur was warm, and silky, against her toes, and she wiggled them in his loose belly fluff.

"Chin up, Princess Twi," said Spike. "You don't know weird until you catch her moaning her own name in her sleep. Now that's awkward."

"...It really, really is."

Spike's eyes widened, before narrowing slyly at Twilight. "What, you mean..."

"That she's crept into my bed every night since I've been here to spoon with me?"

"That much, I figured – her bed's always empty when I wake up. Didn't know about the other part. That just adds a whole extra layer of hilarity to it."

"For you, maybe," Twilight said glumly. "For me, it's just like you said, Spike. Awkward."

"Like a phoenix burning briiiight, in the skyyyyy..."

Sunset Shimmer entered her home, singing to herself with a smile on her face. Her backpack was stuffed with recently purchased supplies; the material bulged against a rectangular shape, and the head of a squeegee poked from its partially unzipped top. In her left hand was a paper bag that she gripped loosely around the middle.

"...I'll show there's another side to meeee, you can't denyyyyyy..."

She tossed her keys and phone onto the couch, pushed the door to her kitchen open with her shoulder, and greeted the Eyeball with a grin.

"Hey! How was your day?"

The air around the Eyeball shifted and shimmered, like an asphalt road on a summer's day; the room remained lukewarm, yet glowed with a subtle light from the thin red blood vessels spiderwebbing across its surface

"Don't know why I even bother," Sunset said good-naturedly, with a chuckle and a shake of her head. She dug into her paper bag and retrieved a burrito, piping hot and wrapped in yellow paper.

"I thought you might be sick of bean and cheese, so I decided to mix it up a bit – got you the same order as me. It's fried okra, rice, and onions, with chipotle mayo. It's the best vegetarian option on the menu."

Sunset tossed the burrito into the Eyeball's pupil. It made a faint plop sound before being swallowed by that sea of oily darkness.

The Eyeball's iris pulsed, once.

"Think nothing of it," Sunset replied warmly. "So, listen, something occurred to me today in chem class. I noticed your blood vessels keep getting redder, and more prominent, the longer you're here. I guess you don't have any way to moisturize in this reality, right?"

The Eyeball's pupil constricted to a pinprick before expanding outward rapidly again; the red light vanished, bathing the room in the cold blue tones from its iris instead.

"That's what I thought. So I was thinking, maybe I could help you out with that. On my way home from school, I made a couple of extra stops and I picked up some stuff to, uh... moisturize you."

Sunset shucked off her backpack and dropped it on the counter, beside a coffee pot filled with some white, creamy substance. That wasn't unusual; the Eyeball seemed to enjoy filling the coffee pot with random fluids for Sunset to discover. Yesterday afternoon, it was motor oil, and dish soap when she woke up that morning. This time, it seemed to be mayonnaise.

At least, I hope it's mayonnaise.

Sunset snorted with amusement as she emptied her backpack of the supplies she'd purchased – the squeegee, a bottle of eyedrops, and a tin paint tray. She poured a generous amount of the eyedrops into the tray, and dunked her squeegee into it.

"I'm not sure what'd work best on you, since, you know, you're an Eyeball from outer sp— or farther-out-there space, rather. But this stuff's supposed to be for extra-sensitive eyes, so I figured, when in doubt..."

For several seconds, the Eyeball vibrated rapidly, with thick lines like cables undulating across its pearly white surface.

"Uh. Cool." Sunset suppressed a shudder. While the Eyeball certainly seemed benign, even friendly at times, some of its actions and responses were nevertheless highly unnerving. "So... do me a favor and hold still, alright? Lemme know if I cross any lines."

She raised her squeegee, droplets sprinkling into the fluid-filled tray.

The Eyeball didn't move at all as she circled it, gently stroking her squeegee over its rubbery surface. Either it understood her request, or it intuited that it needed to remain still for the procedure. Now that Sunset thought about it, that would indicate that it was capable of intuiting that the procedure would be good for it, and that it didn't mind being subjected to gentle, yet thorough, moistening. Did it understand her explanation? Did it trust her enough to assume that whatever she did would be beneficial?

One thing was for sure; it understood her more than she understood it.

"Y'know, I'm learning quite a bit about you right now," Sunset muttered. "Which is great, because I feel like you get my world a lot better than my world gets you. Of course, I maintain that we'd have bonded faster if we could just chat over coffee like regular people. Too bad the machine's still on the blink. Meant to get it fixed, but then I spent my coffee maker funds on that wine."

For all the good that did me. The unwashed wine glasses still sat side-by-side in her otherwise empty sink, their bottoms stained a dark red from the dregs of Sunset's illicitly purchased Merlot.

Sunset sighed and tried not to think about it. She dipped the squeegee into the tray again, and squatted to rub the Eyeball's underside. "It's... whatever. There's no reason to assume you'd even like coffee. Burritos are one thing, but coffee – that's an acquired taste. For all I know, you'd just spit it right back out, or..."

Sunset trailed off and rose slightly, looking into the Eyeball's pupil.

"Personal question... where does your food go once you ingest it?"

The Eyeball's pupil dilated slightly.

Sunset shrugged and squatted again, returning to her work.

"Just asking. I could find out if I wanted to, I guess, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to take this little experiment quite that far. Although I guess it'd be a good way to get myself published. Make a name for myself in cryptozoology, or whatever. Which isn't a field I really saw myself going into as a filly, but... what else do I have to look forward to out here in humanland?"

Finished with its underside, she rose and dunked her squeegee in the tray again, and began working her way to the top of the Eyeball.

"It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that I have no idea what the hell I'm gonna do once high school is over." Sunset stood on tiptoe to reach the Eyeball's apex. "I mean, I didn't really have any long-term game-plan besides 'amass phenomenal power' when I came here from Equestria. Now that I'm not at risk of becoming a psycho she-demon anymore, I guess the sky's the limit, but what the heck would I even do?"

Sunset caught a glimpse of her warped reflection in the Eyeball's surface and paused, lingering over it. It suddenly winked and pointed a pair of finger-guns at her, and Sunset quickly drew the squeegee down over the image of herself, trying especially hard not to think about it.

"Sometimes I wonder if I should just go back to Equestria and try to pick up my old life again, but I have even less of an idea about what to do with myself there than I do here. I can't face Celestia, not after the way I left things. Maybe I could work something out with Twilight – live with her for a while – but with Starlight in the picture..."

The Eyeball's surface hissed and sizzled, trails of steam rising along random spots where Sunset's solution flash-boiled. A droplet splattered against the floor, fractaling into non-Euclidian patterns that dissolved into nothingness almost as soon as they appeared.

"Yeah, so maybe I am being petty about Starlight freakin' Glimmer. So what?" Sunset cocked her hip just so, adding a touch of Queen Bee in her posture to better reflect her defensiveness. "I know it. I own it. I don't need to have it pointed out to me."

The fridge door opened, and the bottle of wine floated out to dance in front of Sunset's face. She bit her lip, tempted, before turning her back on the Eyeball and dipping the squeegee in the tin again.

"...I shouldn't have snapped at you like that," she said, after a moment's silence. "I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with you, okay? Or even Starlight, when you get right down to it. It's..."

Sunset released the squeegee and wrapped her arms around herself with a sigh.

"It's about Twilight."

She felt a crawling sensation on the back of her neck – it usually meant that the Eyeball was staring at her. Sunset popped her jacket collar and pulled it closer against her skin.

"Don't get me wrong; I love all my friends to bits. But I feel a lot closer to Twilight than I do to the others. There's stuff about me that only she could understand, that only she could relate to. And I thought she felt the same way about me – that we were special to one another. Finding out that she had someone else... somepony else in Equestria, somepony that she has the same kind of relationship with that she has with me... As stupid as it is, I feel like I'm less important to her now. Or maybe that I was never as important to her as she is to me."

She turned to face the Eyeball, leaning against the countertop. In the corner of her eye, she saw the wine return to the fridge, and the door gently shutting.

"The other day, when I saw her, she insisted there was nothing to worry about, that I was just being paranoid and jealous for no reason. Which, like, yeah, I'm totally being a catty little shit, but I can't just switch my feelings on and off on command. And maybe there's something to it, too, y'know? Ever since Starlight came into the picture, I've felt like Twilight's slipping away from me. She doesn't visit, she doesn't write back as often as she did before... things just aren't the same between us anymore.

"And that's not even getting into the fallout from this thing with Flash, which I knew was a mistake on many different levels. Not the least of which being because he and Twilight habitually collide with and make goo-goo eyes at one another whenever they're in the same reality. But after what I pulled the other day, I'll be lucky if Twilight even still wants to have me in her life."

The wine in the fridge tempted her again. Sunset shook the urge off.

"In retrospect, that was one booty call that I should never have made. So stupid of me to do that. But I needed someone to be close to; I needed to feel..."

She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"I needed to feel. And he was there, and willing, and... and have you seen his ass?"

The Eyeball's pupil exploded into a six-pointed star, before normalizing back into a head-sized circle.

Sunset laughed again, with humor this time. She wiped away what tears she'd shed, picked up the squeegee, and playfully flung droplets of solution at the Eyeball.

"'Course you have. Silly me."

The droplets remained stuck to the Eyeball's surface without dissolving.

Sunset wiped down the front, the squeegee squeaking with every pass, until the entirety of the Eyeball shone and glinted in the dim, fluorescent light of her kitchen. The prominent blood vessels had faded, and the Eyeball was bright and perfectly pristine. Sunset leaned from left to right to examine both sides of the Eyeball, nodding with satisfaction at her work.

"You feeling as good as you're looking right now?"

The Eyeball's iris glowed vividly before flickering out.

"I'll take that as a yes." Sunset replaced the squeegee in the tray and grabbed her backpack. She moved to exit the kitchen, pausing in the doorway to look over her shoulder at the Eyeball.

"You know... I haven't opened up like that to anyone in the longest time. Especially not about this stuff, and for good reason. But with you, it all just came out so easily. Maybe it's 'cuz I know you won't tell anyone, or because you're an outsider to this whole situation... but whatever the reason, you're surprisingly good company. Thank you for listening, for letting me get all that off my chest."

The Eyeball's skin vibrated.

"Right back at you." Sunset shook her head bemusedly. "Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to send you back to where you came from. Talk therapy ain't cheap, but you? Stick around another few weeks, and we'll probably have all my emotional baggage sorted out."

As the door swung shut behind her, Sunset swore she felt a low rumble from the kitchen – a foreboding vibration in the floor. She peeked back inside, and saw the Eyeball, floating, a silent, ocular colossus.

Mildly unsettled, Sunset shrugged it off, and retreated to her room, and the mountain of homework that awaited.

The bleachers were made from decades-old wood, and slathered in multiple coats of chipping and peeling paint. They creaked and groaned every time Twilight moved, which, given how badly they chafed against her thighs, meant that they creaked and groaned like Granny Smith's hip at a square dance. Splinters poked through her skirt and stung her skin, itching her dreadfully. Human hide was so thin and easily damaged – come nightfall, she'd need someone to pick splinters out of her backside with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass.

And, lucky me, I have an able and willing volunteer. Provided she survives practice.

Bespectacled Twilight had traded her glasses for a pair of thick goggles, and stood in front of a plastic-framed practice goal on the soccer field. Rainbow Dash had drafted her with the belief that her telekinetic abilities would make an interesting training challenge for Scootaloo. Thus far, her assumption had not been borne out.

Scootaloo lined up another shot and thwacked the ball, sending it hurtling through the air toward the goal. Begoggled Twilight shrieked and ducked, and the ball sailed over her head and into the goal unimpeded. On the sidelines, Rainbow Dash smacked her forehead and groaned; the collision of her hand with her face was hard enough to be audible from the bleachers.

"Does she... not remember that she has telekinesis?" Twilight asked, idly patting the little dog on her lap.

Beside her, Fluttershy shrugged, swallowing a mouthful of her tomato-and-watercress sandwich. "In her defense, soccer is a very stressful and intimidating sport. I don't blame her for forgetting, under the circumstances."

"Historically speaking, Twilight hasn't handled balls flying rapidly toward her face very well," Spike added, raising his hind paw to scratch inside his ear. "She'd make a terrible dog, if you ask me."

Twilight looked down at him. "Are you trying to give yourself an ear infection?"

Spike paused and looked up at Twilight plaintively. "It itches," he whined.

"You know what'd really itch? An ear infection. Now stop it."

Spike frowned and rose, hopping the narrow chasm between Twilight and Fluttershy to settle on the other girl's lap.

Fluttershy scratched Spike on the bridge of his nose. "It's very kind of you to come out and keep me company, Twilight. But I know you're here on business, not pleasure, so if you'd rather be working right now—"

"I've been staring at charts and notes and diagrams for so long that I'm starting to dream in bullet points. Which is a lot less fun than it sounds." Twilight huffed. "I need a break. And some conversation with someone who isn't a sarcastic dog."

Or with someone who isn't one miscue away from jumping my bones.

"If you're certain, then I won't push you," said Fluttershy. "And I'm not going to complain. We've all missed spending time with you since you've been here."

"Yeah, sorry." Twilight chuckled self-consciously. "I've been a bit of a hermit, I know."

"At least you're being a hermit for a good cause. You'd never neglect any of your friends – anyone who knows you knows that for a fact."

Twilight looked warily at her friend. Was this some sort of passive-aggressive guilt-trip, or was Fluttershy just being Fluttershy?

"Are you implying something, Fluttershy?"

"Like what, Twilight?"

Fluttershy took a small bite of her sandwich and brushed off the breadcrumbs that peppered Spike's coat.

Who am I kidding? She's just being Fluttershy.

"...I'm sorry," said Twilight. "I guess I've just come to expect guff from people over my friendship with Starlight Glimmer. It's made me a little defensive."

"Well, I'd never dream of giving you something as awful as guff, Twilight."

"I know. Or I should have known. So." Twilight looked down at the field in time to catch a glimpse of Begoggled Twilight extricating herself from the goal's net, which she had somehow entangled her ankle in.

"I'd totally give you guff though," said Spike, breaking the silence between the three.

Twilight glared at him. "Of course you would. You're Spike. Guff-giving is integral to your nature, no matter what reality you're from."

"Spike," Fluttershy admonished gently. "Please, we needn't be so—"

"I don't see how the direct approach is any worse than being all passive-aggressive about it."

"I was not being passive aggressive," Fluttershy insisted, holding a hand to her chest.

"Aw, c'mon," Spike said with a conspiratorial smirk. "I know you wanna talk about this as badly as I do. You can't convince me otherwise."

"Well... yes, granted, I would like to have a frank and open conversation with Princess Twilight..." Fluttershy blushed and averted her eyes. "But I'd never be passive-aggressive about it. I mean, passive aggression is just so... aggressive."

"Easier for you to do than active aggression, though, right?"

"How about," Twilight snapped. "How about we, you know, avoid aggression altogether. Just a thought? I swear, if Other Me invited me along just so that my friends could ambush me, I'm going to be very nettled."

"Well, I can't speak for what Twilight – um, Other Twilight – or, no that sounds awfully exclusionary, if she's Other Twilight and you're just Twilight..."

Spike snickered.

"...I can't speak for her intentions," said Fluttershy. "But I was hoping we could talk. This seems as good a chance as any."

"If we're talking about what I think we're talking about, then I'll tell you what I told Sunset. There's nothing to talk about. There's nothing to be jealous about. She's making a fuss over nothing. End of discussion."

"But Twi—"

"End. Of. Discussion!" Twilight flung her hands onto her lap with an air of finality.

On the field, Begoggled Twilight gave her ankle a final tug, only to overexert herself and fall on her back, dragging the goal down with her. Trapped in the netting, she flopped like a fish as Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash rushed to her side.

Fluttershy swallowed another bite of sandwich and cleared her throat daintily. "She talks about you, Twilight. You and that Starlight pony? Not very frequently, and usually in veiled terms. But she does it often enough to make it clear that she's envious of the position that Starlight holds in your life."

Twilight sagged in her seat. "And we're still doing this."

"I'm afraid so." Fluttershy patted Twilight on the knee before continuing. "We spoke about it a little bit the other day – it was the most open she'd ever been with any of us about her feelings on the matter. Now, maybe you're right, and maybe she shouldn't feel the way that she does—"

"Yes, exactly!" Twilight cried, bolting upright suddenly enough to startle Fluttershy. "She's being absolutely ridiculous!"

Fluttershy blinked, nonplussed. "Twilight, I wasn't exactly endorsing your position—"

"I mean, between her and I, I'm not the only one who's gone out and gotten a shiny new purple friend, am I? And hers is literally me, butwith glasses! Plus this whole schoolgirl plaid look that I really don't see myself pulling off, either as a human or a pony—"

"Eyes on the prize, Twilight," Spike muttered.

"The point is..." Twilight shot Spike another glare. "I could get all jealous about it if I wanted to. But I don't. Because I am a grown-up. And grown-ups do not get jealous over silly little things like that."

"Isn't she, like, older than you?" Spike leaned up to nab a drooping leaf of watercress from the back of Fluttershy's sandwich, chewing it greedily while she booped his nose in playful admonishment.

"Irrelevant, Spike," said Twilight acidly.

Spike shrugged, an awkward gesture when performed by a dog's body. "Okay. So. You do the friendship mentor thing with Sunset, and she does that with Twilight – with my Twilight, that is. That really doesn't bother you?"

"No. Why would it?" Twilight snapped. "She's paying forward the kindness I showed her, helping someone else the way that I helped her. That's, like, my thing. That's what I'm all about! Why in the hay would that ever bother me?"

"...And if it were Starlight Glimmer in that position?" Fluttershy looked pointedly at Twilight. "It wouldn't bother you then?"

Twilight hesitated for a moment, watching in silence as Rainbow and Scootaloo set up the practice goal again, Begoggled Twilight standing awkwardly to the side.

"Twi? Got an answer for my girl here?" Spike nudged her knee with a paw. "Because your silence is kinda sayin' volumes right now."

Twilight sighed. "You're gonna make a big deal over this, but... Starlight and Trixie, they have a whole thing. They're 'best friends.'"

"Like, in the Lyra and Bon Bon sense, or...?"

"No, the literal kind." Twilight frowned. "I think. There's no mentorship involved, though. Not like me and Starlight, or Sunset."

"Ah." Spike nodded. "And... that bothers you?"

"No!" Twilight said quickly. "Not... inherently."

Spike raised an eyebrow. "You sure about that?"

"Why do you keep—"

"Twi, I can hear the air quotes in your voice."

"It's true," Fluttershy added, dabbing her mouth with a paper napkin. "They're very nasal and aspirated."

"Yeah, thanks for the linguistics lesson, Roan Chomsky." Twilight rolled her eyes. "Okay, so, yeah, I'm a little uncomfortable with it. With Sunset and Other Me, I've been where both of them are. I've been the mentor and the student. Their dynamic makes sense to me. But Starlight and Trixie bonded because they both used to be evil. Or, well, I guess Trixie was never evil, per se; she was always just kind of..."

"A bitch?" Spike offered.

"Language!" Twilight snapped. "But... yeah, pretty much."

Spike scoffed, giving his head a shake. "Like I said anything wrong. That's our word; I'll use it if I want."

Fluttershy finished the last of her sandwich, wiped her mouth and hands with her napkin, and stuffed the detritus from her meal into her lunch bag. "So. You're not jealous of Sunset's and Other You's friendship, because you understand the kind of friendship that they have."

"Uh..." Twilight looked uncertainly at Fluttershy. "I suppose? I made no mention of jealousy."

"But with Starlight and Trixie, you don't approve, because their friendship is based on something that you don't have personal experience with."

"That's... not exactly how I characterized it—"

"Which is somehow completely distinct from jealousy."

Spike snickered. "Careful, Fluttershy. Now you're leading the witness."

"I am not jealous of Starlight's friendship with Trixie," Twilight fumed. "That isn't what it's about at all. Sure, I've never been bad before; I don't know what it's like to eat crow in front of everypony, and spend all my time trying to make up for the terrible things I've done. I've never felt that particular variety of social isolation, so it's not something I can immediately relate to. And sure, they hang out together and giggle about me behind my back – probably – and sure, Starlight keeps spending her holidays with Trixie, instead of with me, but that has no bearing on the matter. I am not jealous of the two of them; I'm uncomfortable with it because... because, um..."

Twilight paused mid-rant to look closely at her friends' faces. Spike and Fluttershy exchanged a skeptical look, which they then turned onto her.

"Twi..." Spike leaned across the chasm between Twilight and Fluttershy to rest his chin on the Princess's knee. "Did that sound even a little bit convincing to you?"

"I..." Twilight stammered. "I'm not jealous..."

But Spike had the right of it. It didn't sound convincing to her own ear, not in the slightest. She made no secret of her dislike for Trixie, or her disapproval of her growing bond with Starlight. It was personal, on her part, and entirely based on their history together. She tried to keep that in mind, of course – to catch herself when she took personal offense at Starlight choosing Trixie's company over hers – and to take the high road whenever Trixie made some swipe at her.

But when she invited Trixie to her village's Sunset Festival, instead of her, Twilight hadn't been able to stifle her feelings quite so easily. Granted, Starlight hadn't meant to hurt her in the first place, and the changeling crisis ended up taking priority anyway, but the sense of rejection was still there. Even if the rejection was implicit. No matter how many times she berated herself for it, told herself she was being silly, and stupid, and that it didn't make her friendship with Starlight any less meaningful... the hurt was still there.

Irrational, yet utterly equine. And utterly human, too.

Twilight pressed her hand to her forehead, lacing her fingers through her hair.

"I've made a mess of things, haven't I?"

Fluttershy wrapped an arm around Twilight's shoulders and squeezed. "Assigning blame helps nothing, and no one, Twilight. What matters is where you go from here. What do you think you're gonna do?"

Twilight leaned into Fluttershy's hug and closed her eyes.

From the field came a crack – the sound of leather slapping hard against flesh – and a sharp yelp of surprise. Twilight looked down to see Begoggled Twilight on the grass, her arms curled around her stomach. Beside her, a soccer ball rolled to a gradual stop.

"Goddammit, Twilight, you can catch stuff with your brain!" Rainbow Dash shouted in exasperation as she raced toward her friend again, Scootaloo in tow.

"Better put a pin in that," said Spike, cringing. "You were saying something about messes, Twilight?"

He hopped off of Fluttershy's lap and bounded down the bleachers toward the field.

Shattering glass and a hissed curse wrenched Sunset out of her dreamless sleep, bringing her back to a darkened bedroom, lit only by the LED numbers on her alarm clock. It was 3 AM, and someone was in her home.

"Shut the hell up," a man's voice hissed, carrying up past Sunset's open bedroom door. "You wanna wake bacon-hair?"

Correction. Two someones. A pair of loud, incompetent robbers.

Sunset reached for her nightstand, for her phone, and groped for it in vain until she remembered that she'd left the thing downstairs, on her couch. If anything, the intruders'd probably pocketed it.

"Screw it," Sunset muttered to herself. "I'm not helpless."

She slid out of the covers and reached under her bed for the field hockey stick that served as her primary home defense implement. She'd never played; it was something she'd lifted during her phase as Canterlot High's resident bad girl. It had no place in the life of the new Sunset Shimmer, of course, and she fully intended to return it... eventually...

...Once I'm old enough to legally purchase a revolver...

Sunset crept silently to her door, gripping the stick tightly and leaning it on her right shoulder.

"Ooh! Lacy. Check it out – think these'd look good on me?"

Sunset scowled. Even hushed, whispered, she recognized the voice of the girl who loitered on her steps the other day.

She must've really liked that cigarette.

"What the hell, sis?!" the first voice growled. "I don't wanna think about that! Put 'em back where you found 'em; you might've just given yourself herpes, for all you know. And wash your hands before you pick up anything else."

Sunset flushed – now she wanted to brain them on general principle. She crouched and carefully stepped through the doorway, creeping on tiptoe to the stairs.

She heard the kitchen door swing open, and a loud, shocked gasp from the woman. "Dude, get over here right the hell now. Right the hell now! Get a look at this!"

"Get a look at— Whoa! Sweet mother of—"

"I know, right? Frickin' sweet, isn't it?"

"It's frickin' something, alright. A stupid, pointless, worthless-ass kitchen island. Damn hipsters these days with their damn hipster decorations. C'mon, let's keep looking around."

Sunset edged to the stairs and knelt, keeping her body low to avoid being seen, heart thumping in her chest.

"...Nah. Nuh-uh. We're taking this," said the girl.

"What? Shut up; get serious."

"I am being serious. I want this and I'm taking it home. Help me get a hold of it."

"Are you out of your – what could this possibly be worth? The TV might get us a couple hundred; the cell phone definitely will, and the chop shop'll pay hard cash for the bike outside. But you really wanna waste time jackin' this... this... whatever the hell it is?"

"It's an eyeball, dude. Duh."

"Duh yourself. I wash my hands of it. Speaking of, don't forget to— uh, what's it doing?"

"I dunno. It wasn't doing it when I came in, though. I'm not sure if—"

From the kitchen came a red glow. The air thickened – Sunset had no other way to describe it; the air itself felt solid and tangible, like wading through molasses. Then a cry of terror came from the woman, shrill and blood-curdling.

"Get it off of me! Get it off!"

"Oh my god, oh my god, uh – I'll get a knife. I'll get a—"

"A knife?! What good's that gonna do?!"

"Well if someone hadn't sold our guns to buy these stupid masks and turtlenecks—"

"They're designer, you ingrate! Shit costs money! Now shut up and – no, no, no no no no!"

A slurp and a plop echoed from the kitchen – familiar sounds that made Sunset's stomach turn.

"Killjoy! You miserable freak; that's my sister! You killed my— Ah, shit, no, lemme go! Lemme go! I don't wanna die! I don't wanna—"

Another slurp, another plop, and silence fell, the air thinning to normal. The light from the kitchen faded, and vanished.

Sunset gulped and crept downstairs, the stick clutched tightly in her hands. She tiptoed to the kitchen, shutting her front door as she went – the robbers had left it ajar, and the lock was probably picked or broken.

Sunset shouldered the kitchen door open.

The eye floated serenely in the center of the room, its iris glowing with a pale blue light. Of the robbers, there was no sign.

Sunset fainted.

Author's Note

I had a different eye pun title for this chapter, but mastermenthe suggested the current one, and I was like "damn, that's good; I should use that instead." Everyone buy him milk and tendies.

As long as I have your attention (who am I kidding, of course I don't), I should clarify something for readers of Equestria Gear Solid who might recognize the character of Killjoy in here. Also, the fact that SciTwi (or "BiTwi," as someone in the Writeoff dubbed her. CoffeeMinion, I think) has nearly identical characterization as she does in EGS..

My intent when writing both that story and this'un was that they would be in continuity with one another, and that this would be a (partial) sequel to EGS. I changed my mind eventually on the grounds that its portrayal of Crystal Prep is probably too outlandish in its terribleness to function in the same universe as this story. Which is, at least nominally, supposed to follow the movies' canon, where crippling your classmates would probably get you expelled, and where Cadance is demonstrably not a boob.

(although Cinch probably does force her to buy her tacos in reality)

Editor Man disagrees, because he is a dark and terrible man, and you're welcome to headcanon a connection between them. But I don't think I like the idea of this version of BiTwi being a rapist who impregnated herself with Solid Snake's baby because magic bacteria overclocked her sex drive. As hilarious as that is, it kinda makes it hard for me to write even a semi-serious story with her in it.

Anyway, that's all for now. More Eye-related content coming your way forthwith!

4. Eye of the Storm

Twilight yawned and stretched her legs languorously, smiling into her memory foam mattress. She tried to extend her arms as well, only to find them pinned at her sides. Her brief panic abated when she realized she wasn't being held hostage, or restrained on purpose – she was simply being hugged. From behind. In bed. Again.

I swear I locked that door...

Vexed, Twilight slowly and gently extracted herself from her doppelganger's sinewy embrace, and slid out of bed, tiptoeing out of her guest bedroom. She padded downstairs and toward the kitchen, groggy and tugging her thin pajama shirt. The morning was a cold one, even indoors, but it was nothing that a pot of coffee couldn't fix. It would certainly sweeten the sour note her day had started on.

She passed the front door just as someone knocked on it, and paused to peek out the window. Her heart skipped when she saw Sunset Shimmer on the stoop, fully dressed and fidgeting nervously. She looked about as stressed as Twilight had ever seen her, even moreso than on the first day of the Eyeball crisis.

Twilight quickly unlatched and opened the door, squinting at the orange light of dawn shining in her face. "Hey," she said, her voice still thick with sleep.

"Hi." Sunset looked shyly at Twilight. "You mind if I...?"

"Oh, um... I mean, it's not my house, but I doubt Other Me would mind." Twilight peered closer at Sunset – her eyes were red, with dark circles underneath, and her face and hair were conspicuously unmade.

"Did you not sleep last night?"

Sunset shook her head and stepped inside, Twilight shutting the door behind her.

"Please tell me you have coffee. Or anything with caffeine." Sunset crushed her hands together and wrung them tightly. "A can of heart attack-inducing energy drink would be acceptable at this stage. Hell, you can fish an old tea bag out of the garbage, and I'll chew that like gum if I have to."

Twilight rolled her eyes, smiling. "I doubt it'll come to that, since Other Me taught me how to use the coffee maker. Of course, I already know how to use a coffee maker, but she insisted on showing me, holding my hand through the whole process... and I do mean that literally..."

She looked at Sunset with an expectant smile, waiting and hoping for a knowing smirk or a teasing chuckle. Sunset's face, however, remained blank and harried, as though the comment hadn't registered at all.

Sunset Shimmer, passing up the opportunity for an incisive quip? Things must be more serious than I thought.

"C'mon then," said Twilight, beckoning for Sunset to follow. "Let's get you coffee'd up."

Sunset clenched her hands tighter against one another to stop them from trembling. She sat on a wooden stool, leaning against the granite countertop of the kitchen island, and watched in silence as Twilight prepared their coffee. The process took longer than it should have; Twilight insisted on scrubbing the pot until it sparkled, and her awkwardness with human hands and digits made an already painstaking task more time-consuming. Then she needed to carefully, and precisely, measure every scoop of grounds and every drop of water poured into the reservoir, with measuring cups and spoons.

As endearing as Twilight's meticulousness could be, Sunset wished to every god in every human pantheon that she'd just wrap things up already. The episode with the burglars left her unable and unwilling to fall back asleep, her short loss of consciousness notwithstanding. Her eyelids kept growing too heavy for her to keep open, and every time she shut them, she couldn't avoid likening the nothingness before her to the inky black of the Eyeball's pupil...

Sunset felt a brief sensation of weightlessness and jerked awake, taking a sharp breath. Twilight sat on another kitchen stool, across the island from her; she didn't seem to notice Sunset falling asleep, but her concern was nevertheless plain on her face. Behind her, the coffee machine burbled and percolated away, and steam was already beginning to rise from the vent on its lid.

How long did I nod off for?

"So..." Twilight looked down at her hands. "I take it you got my... um, what's the term... voicemail?"

"Voicemail?" Sunset said vacantly.

Twilight cocked her head. "I called late last night on Other Me's phone, saying I needed to talk to you. You seriously didn't..?"

"I left my phone downstairs last night; I haven't checked it since yesterday afternoon. Kinda... can't anymore. Tehcnical difficulties." Sunset idly, and nervously, ran a hand through her hair.

"I see." Twilight took a deep breath. "When I saw you outside, I naturally assumed... but I suppose there's only one other explanation for why you'd drop by so early."

Sunset blinked. "That being?"

"You're here because you want to apologize for seducing Flash Sentry."

"What?!" Sunset snapped up, her grogginess shocked away by Twilight's assumption. "That's the furthest thing from my mind right now!"

Twilight held up her hand. "You don't need to hide your feelings from me, Sunset. And I want you to know that there isn't any need for you to apologize."

The shock wore off, and Sunset slitted her eyes, fighting like hell to keep them from shutting on their own.

"That's fantastic to hear," Sunset said testily. "But I didn't actually come to grovel at your feet like one of your subjects, Twi. Believe it or not—"

"I owe you an apology, Sunset."

The words cut easily through Sunset's irritation, and she fell silent, at a loss.

"Come again?"

"I owe you an apology," Twilight repeated. "Over the way I've treated you – taking our friendship for granted, and failing to take your feelings seriously. Without really meaning to, I've made you feel like you're a less important part of my life than you truly are. I've only ever considered our friendship from my own perspective; I've never tried to put myself in your position. Never really thought about what it might mean to you. Or how it might have felt for you when someone else came into my life whose situation was similar to yours."

Sunset clenched her jaw. "Twilight, we don't... we don't need to have this talk right now," she said through her teeth.

"I think we do. I think it's long overdue, Sunset." Twilight's voice was wistful, and rang with regret. "I know you're not comfortable with the friendship I have with Starlight Glimmer. Maybe it is similar to the one I have with you, and maybe she is important to me. So are you, though, Sunset. Every bit as important."

Twilight reached across the island to grip Sunset's hand.

"She's not a carbon copy of you, and you're not one of her. You're you. You're unique – your own person, your own mare – and that makes my friendship with you unique. Whatever parallels exist between you and Starlight, or the friendships I have with the both of you, they're just skin-deep. What matters is the substance of our friendship, Sunset. And the substance of our friendship is different from the one I have with Starlight. Because you are not Starlight Glimmer. And I would never ask for you to be."

"Twilight... I'm..." Sunset wanted to squeeze Twilight's hand, but her fingers felt suddenly numb.

"That's... that's what I wish I'd said that from the start, instead of making lame excuses." Twilight chuckled softly, a sad smile on her face. "But actions speak louder than words. So... if you'll forgive me... I'd like the chance to prove it to you."

Thin tears streaked down Sunset's face, and a sound came from the back of her throat as she struggled to formulate a proper response, staring into Twilight's eyes all the while.

Then she blinked, recalling what had driven her here in the first place.

"The Eyeball ate two people last night."

Twilight's smile slowly melted, until her lips were a thin line, pursed tightly. Her pupils shrank, her fingers slowly unclenched from around Sunset's hand, and she leaned forward, gazing intently into Sunset's face.

"When you say 'ate'..."

Half an hour and two cups of coffee each later, Sunset had recounted the events of the last three days to Twilight – her burgeoning rapport with the Eyeball, and the burglary from the night before. Twilight sat in silent, rapt attention as Sunset spoke, nodding along, yet pointedly not asking for detail or elaboration.

"No wonder you couldn't get back to sleep," Twilight said, when Sunset finally finished. She took a thoughtful sip of coffee.

"Yeah, unless you count passing out on the kitchen floor for the second time this week. And I certainly don't." Sunset dropped her chin into her palm. "Once I regained consciousness, I picked myself up, grabbed my field hockey stick, and waited on the couch for the sun to come up."

"I didn't know you played field hockey. Come to think of it, what the heck is field hockey? I know what hockey is, but—"

"Twilight? Eyes on the prize?"

"Why do people keep saying that to me?" Twilight shook her head and drank deeply from her cup. "If it's any consolation, I'm sure you're perfectly safe. If the Eyeball could do that to the robbers, it's plausible that it could have done it to you at any time. The fact that it did it to them, and not you, suggests that it may have been acting in your defense. Maybe it was protecting you from what it perceived as a threat. You did say you've bonded a little over the course of this week."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because I'll tell you right now, it does not." Sunset slurped noisily from her mug, glaring bloodshot daggers at Twilight all the while.

"Need I remind you that you decided to stay put. Coulda come and stayed here, with me and Other Me." Twilight shrugged. "Although I don't think that would have been much of an upgrade. In some ways, it's nice to have someone you can work with on the exact same wavelength, and we have made a lot of progress while sharing the same space, but hanging out with yourself isn't all it's cracked up to be."

She lifted her mug to her lips and spoke into it. "Plus, she keeps trying to peek at me in the shower. I mean, we don't have a nudity taboo, but you all do, for some reason, and the implications are more than a little awkward."

Sunset's jaw dropped. "Please tell me you're not comparing your sitcom relationship with your pervy purple doppelganger to me living with a time-bomb that will eat me if I get on its bad side."

Twilight's eyes widened and she set her coffee down, lifting her hands defensively. "No no, I didn't meant to – I thought we were doing the girl-talk bonding thing. Y'know, venting about our living situations and the—"

Sunset leaned across the kitchen island and pressed her face against Twilight's. "I need that thing gone, Twilight, and I need it gone yesterday. I have never, never lived in fear under my own roof until last night, and I cannot keep living like that. So, please, tell me that the two of you worked something out between pillow fights and games of spin-the-bottle."

Twilight flushed. "We haven't been—"

"Or whatever!"

"I mean, I don't think you can even play spin-the-bottle with two people. That's not a game; that's inefficiently making out." She unlaced Sunset's hands from her blouse, but kept their fingers clutched together.

"Look, you weren't the only one who lost sleep last night. Other Me and I... we were working pretty late, and we do have something to go on. I was hoping we could wait, maybe run a few tests, but if you honestly feel that unsafe..."

Sunset nodded. "Uh?"

"...Then I guess we can skip the rigorous troubleshooting under safe, controlled circumstances." Twilight sighed and squeezed Sunset's fingers, smiling tiredly. "There's still a lot of work to do, either way, but with you around, I think we can get it done by this evening."

A sense of relief and gratitude flooded through Sunset, as a weight she'd been carrying since long before the Eyeball appeared was lifted from her shoulders. She stared at Twilight, her vision blurring, as hope crept into her heart.

From the kitchen doorway came a stifled, girlish sneeze. Twilight's face all but glowed; she released Sunset's hands and folded her arms tightly.

"Good morning, Other Me," she said, her words sharp and clipped.

"...G'morning," came a timid, sheepish voice in reply.

"How long have you been hiding there?"

"...A while."

"I take it you're up to speed?"

"...Mm-hm."

"Wonderful." Twilight's eyes flicked over to Sunset's. "Why don't you come in here and join us, then? I made coffee."

"...Kay."

Bespectacled Twilight tiptoed into the room, her face flushed. She quickly waved at Sunset, but otherwise made a beeline for the coffee machine.

"Was she spying on us?" Sunset whispered, leaning in close to Twilight. "Why?"

Twilight flexed her fingers and took a long, deep sip from her mug.

"Why do you think, Sunset?" she muttered.

Author's Note

SciTwi likes to watch.

Just a short chapter for you all. We're in the back half of the story now, and we'll be wrapping it up pretty soon. :twilightsmile:

Why is there a Twist emoji, but not a Luna?

5. Last Eyetem on the Agenda

Rarity leaned from side to side, staring into the Eyeball as it stared back at her.

"Is it just me," she murmured, "or do the two of us have the same eye color? And... should that disturb me? Because, oddly enough, it doesn't."

"Well, who knows?" Pinkie chirped. "You know how there's an entire world out there where all of us are ponies? Maybe this thing's from a world where we're all silent, floaty eyeballs! Maybe this is your alternate universe eyeball doppelganger! Wouldn't that be something?"

Rarity blinked. "Well, that would qualify as 'something.'"

"Right?!" Pinkie fixed the Eyeball with a grin, and it swiveled to bore into her with its piercing, unyielding gaze. "What do I call you, big guy?"

The Eyeball's pupil swirled and took new shape: a thin, black spiral, rotating counter-clockwise, one which flattened and extended into a horizontal line. A ripple ran up and down its length, starting from one end, reaching the other, and then bouncing backward in an endless rhythm that precisely matched Pinkie Pie's heartbeat.

"Think I'll call him 'Ferb,'" said Pinkie.

Apprising Sunset of the Twilights' findings and plans took the better part of the morning. The rest of the day was spent working and gathering the girls to set things into motion. By the late afternoon, most of them had already arrived at Sunset's apartment; Bespectacled Twilight was still en route, having stayed behind to finish alone while Twilight went on ahead. The others waited for her in the kitchen, killing time by commiserating and inspecting the Eyeball. Twilight, for her part, busied herself cleaning Sunset's days-old wine glasses.

The arrangement left Sunset less than thrilled. She didn't mind the company; after living in a state of self-imposed exile for most of the week, it was refreshing to have the others close at hand. Nor did she mind Twilight's insistence on thoroughly cleaning the wine glasses – Twilight seemed to draw some sort of personal catharsis from that. It wasn't even that she had misgivings about the plan.

To her, it was more a question of location than anything.

"Must we really do this in my kitchen?"

"I'm afraid so." Twilight, standing on the opposite side of the Eyeball from Sunset, spoke over the sound of running water. "Other Me and I both agree that the rift should be opened in the same location that the Eyeball emerged into. That provides the best chance of creating a stable passage, as well as sending it back to its original—"

Glass suddenly shattered, startling all present. Twilight, red-faced, peeked out from behind the Eyeball, grinning sheepishly.

"Hey, you... don't actually need more than one wine glass, do you?"

Sunset folded her arms and narrowed her eyes at Twilight, who "eep'd" and retreated behind the Eyeball again.

"Hey Sunset, can I wash your wine glasses?" "Sure thing, Twilight; it's not like you're the kind of girl who hold pencils in her mouth because she doesn't know how to use her flippin' hands." Sunset mentally harrumphed. I am such a genius.

She rubbed her forehead, sighing. "Let's table the issue of Princess Slippyfingers's struggles with fine motor skills for the time being. I get where the two of you are coming from, Twi, but I read the lease agreement, and shredding the space/time continuum isn't covered at all."

"Well, what else'd we do with it? It ain't as if we got a lotta options," said Applejack, putting her hand on Sunset's shoulder. "I mean, maybe we could squeeze it outta th'apartment, but then, takin' it somewhere else'd just draw attention we prob'ly don't want. I mean, a big ol' thing like this is gonna draw some stares, am I right?"

The others all turned to gaze at her.

Applejack sighed. "That wasn't supposed to be a pun, but I guess it kinda worked out like one, now, didn't it?"

"Plus," Rainbow Dash added. "Doin' it here means that we can throw a kickass movie night immediately afterward. With wine! I saw that bottle in the cupboard – you've been holdin' out on us!"

Fluttershy nudged Rainbow Dash's shoulder. "Um, not to reopen old wounds, Rainbow, but remember your little misadventure in ninth grade? I think that's more than enough exposure to alcohol for you until you come of age."

Rainbow Dash flushed, irritated, and folded her arms. "You pass out from drinking watered-down cider at one party, and you never live it down..."

Fluttershy smiled and patted her friend on the back.

There was a knock at the front door. Sunset quietly excused herself and went to answer it. The field hockey stick was braced against the knob, acting as a makeshift lock; she pulled it aside and opened the door. A slightly disheveled and thoroughly bespectacled Bespectacled Twilight shuffled into the apartment.

"You didn't need to knock, y'know," said Sunset, shutting the door and replacing the stick against it. "The lock's busted, and it's not like this thing'd stop someone who can move stuff with her brain."

"Common courtesy?" Bespectacled Twilight replied. "I'd offer to fix your lock for you, but that's outside my area of expertise. Now, you want me to chart the cosmos, map the unknowable, and peer beyond the curtain into the fifth dimension beyond sight and sound?"

A purple disk dangled around Bespectacled Twilight's neck, and she raised it to eye level for Sunset to inspect. The plastic case was dented and blackened, but it thrummed with some unseen power.

"I'm your gal." Bespectacled Twilight grinned.

Sunset pointed at the disk. "No offense meant, Twilight – I trust you – but I do not have fond memories of you using that thing in the past."

"Neither do I, but repairing and modifying this girl here was faster and easier than building a new one from scratch. She's a little beat up, granted, but she should still be able to open a dimensional rift." Bespectacled Twilight rapped her knuckles upon the case. "Without ending all life in the multiverse. Or making me go all crazy and sexy again."

"Everybody wins. But mostly me." Sunset pulled Bespectacled Twilight in for a hug, sandwiching the disk between their chests. "You have any idea how much I appreciate this?"

Bespectacled Twilight squeezed back. "It's the least I could do. I mean, you did me a solid once. The 'crazy and sexy' fiasco?"

They parted, and Sunset guided her into the kitchen with the others. Twilight had emerged from behind the Eyeball, and was pulling a pair of rubber gloves off her hands. She averted her eyes from her counterpart as soon as the pair entered the room, instead focusing very intently on one of Rainbow Dash's aglets.

Bespectacled Twilight clapped her hands. "Okay! So. We all ready to do this?"

"There are no acceptable answers besides 'yes, yes, for the love of all that is good and holy,'" Sunset quickly interjected.

Murmurs to that effect resounded throughout the room.

Bespectacled Twilight nodded. "Great. Everybody knows their role?"

"Hold hands with Applejack and shoot a light show out of my boobs," Rainbow Dash muttered. "Just like at Rumble's Bar Mitzvah."

The girls linked hands and formed a semicircle in front of the Eyeball, with Sunset in the center. Bespectacled Twilight stood off to the side, looking uncertainly at the Eyeball.

"You know, I've been thinking," Bespectacled Twilight said hesitantly. "Are you absolutely sure you want to get rid of it? I mean, this isn't the best part of town, and it does make a handy home defense system."

Sunset's jaw dropped. "It ate my robbers! I mean, it was trying to help, I guess, but still, you can't just eat criminals – it's illegal, and stuff. And immoral! Imagine if you all had eaten me when I was bad. Or if I'd eaten you, Twilight!"

Bespectacled Twilight blushed, turned her head, and coughed. "Yeah, can't have that, can we?"

"And it could have eaten me! It still could!" She stepped away from the others and glared at the Eyeball. "Sorry, big guy, but I don't feel comfortable having you in my home if you're capable of that kind of... of..."

Sunset trailed off as the Eyeball spun to stare at her; she stared back with rising anxiety. Then its pupil elongated obscenely, stretching out of its body. The others, aghast, watched in horrified fascination as a shape emerged – a human body, coated in black slime, yet with visibly female curves. It plopped to the ground with a wet smack, before another body, a man's, slithered from the pupil and fell on top of it.

Sunset's legs buckled.

Applejack and Bespectacled Twilight hurried forward, on either side of her, and caught her under her arms before she could collapse. Fluttershy broke ranks and rushed to the pair of bodies as the Eyeball's pupil receded and returned to normal. She knelt and cradled the man's head in her hands, tugging off his mask and leaning her ear close to his pallid face, before doing the same to the body beneath him.

"They're alive," she declared. "But I'm not sure either of them is conscious—"

The man rolled off of his sister and trembled on the ground, startling Fluttershy into backing away on her hands and knees.

"A wrench in the gears," he whispered. His eyes were wide, his pupils pinpricks. "Blood-soaked boots stain sacred ground unmeant for human feet."

"The lord is the third is the lord is the third is the lord," said his sister, Killjoy in the same tiny voice. She curled, fetal, choking back sobs. "Wrong. It's all wrong."

Sunset looked from one, to the next, to the Eye.

"Yeah, I think we're done here." Her throat was dry, and her voice raspy, and she cleared her throat to summon some strength back into it. "Someone, uh, get them out of the kitchen, please and thank you."

Fluttershy took hold of her companion, while Bespectacled Twilight pulled the girl to her feet. She peered closely at her face, frowning in concentration.

"I swear, I've seen her before. Pretty sure she used to go to Crystal Prep..."

"Her name's Killjoy," Sunset offered. "I think."

Bespectacled Twilight shook her head. "Deja vu, I guess."

The pair ushered the burglars away from the Eyeball, into the living room, and returned to the semicircle. Fluttershy linked hands with Pinkie, while Bespectacled Twilight took a position off to the side.

"Ready when you are," she said.

Energy crackled and rippled around the seven. They sprouted ears and wings and ponytails, and their bodies lifted slowly, hovering inches off the ground. Hair and clothing whipped around them; cabinets and cupboards flapped and slapped noisily as gusts of energy swirled through the room.

Sunset's eyes met the Eyeball one last time. Its pupil shifted into a new shape – a U, it looked like, crude and lopsided. Its iris flashed once.

Sunset cocked her head quizzically. She tried to say something.

Then the auras rippling around the girls coalesced into spheres in front of their chests. Seven beams of seven different lights lanced out and collided in the same spot, in front of the Eyeball, blocking it from Sunset's view. Then an eighth light joined it, a white light, shining from the opened mouth of Bespectacled Twilight's device.

The Eyeball drifted inside, and was gone. Bespectacled Twilight slammed the device shut, and the magic maintaining the portal ceased. Gradually, the seven drifted back to the ground, their auras and extraneous pony parts vanishing.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. Sunset broke the silence.

"So. Universe still seems to be here. Gonna go out on a limb, say the spell worked."

"As an expert in virtually every scientific field known to human and ponykind," Twilight added, glancing around the room. "I'm forced to corroborate your findings. Spell worked. Everyone's alive. And there's no sign of any floaty Eyeballs."

Pinkie Pie clicked her tongue. "Darn shame."

Sunset blinked at Pinkie, but didn't pursue that line of inquiry.

"Thank you," she said, warmly and sincerely, looking from one face to the next. "I got my apartment back, and we didn't break the universe. All in all, a net win."

"You know what'd be a good way to thank us?" Rainbow Dash said, grinning and rubbing her hands together. "Movies. And/or wine. Possibly pizza; the night's still—"

"Darling," said Rarity with a smile. "I think perhaps what Sunset needs right now is her privacy. That was rather the point of this whole exercise, was it not? Plus, I think those two in the other room have a long-overdue date at a police precinct. And/or a psychiatric ward."

Sunset bid each of the girls farewell with a hug and a personal word of thanks. "Just gimme a day or two to rest and tidy up, and we'll have that movie night," she promised.

"With wine?" Rainbow Dash asked, a mischievous grin on her face.

"Probably not. Pizza, though."

Rainbow Dash's hopeful expression vanished, and she sighed. "That's... fine. I guess."

She plopped down the stairs and joined Rarity, who strained against the weight of the male robber leaning limply against her. Rainbow helped by slinging his other arm over her shoulders, and the two hefted him together.

The girls were personally accompanying the traumatized robbers to the nearby police precinct, mostly at Fluttershy's insistence. She passed by Sunset on the stoop, supporting Killjoy with both arms, and the friends exchanged a knowing smile before she descended the stairs.

Twilight lingered with Sunset after the others left, her body stiffening as Bespectacled Twilight paused on the steps to speak with her.

"S-So!" Bespectacled Twilight blushed and linked her hands behind her back. "Now that we've got that business out of the way, I was thinking we could, I dunno... pick up some ice cream and catch a movie at home? What do you say?"

Twilight grinned shakily. "Uh, heh... that sounds—"

"Actually!" Sunset interrupted, stepping forward. "I was gonna ask Twilight to crash with me tonight. Now that the Eyeball's gone and all, she and I have some catching up to do. If that's alright with you, Twi."

Twilight stifled whatever look of profound relief threatened to break onto her face, and wore a placid, neutral smile. "I think I would like that very much, Sunset. Sorry, Other Me."

"...Oh." Bespectacled Twilight's face fell. "Alright. I'll... I'll see you around, then..."

She trudged away after her friends, leaving Sunset and Twilight alone in front of the apartment.

Twilight sighed, slumping against the doorway. "Thank you."

"You seemed like you needed some space. And you don't have an excuse not to crash here anymore, right?" Sunset watched them leave with a smile, her eyes lingering on Bespectacled Twilight. "Besides, easy money says she would have made a pass at you before the night was out."

"Yeah, if anything, that would come as a relief after three days of non-verbal cues and actions." Twilight sighed. "You know, the other night, I'm pretty sure she measured my bust in my sleep. She asked me if she could while I was getting ready for bed, and I said no, of course, but when I woke up, I had these marks – like, from a tape measurer – running across my—"

Sunset's laughter killed the rest of that sentence, and through Twilight tried to be indignant, she was soon laughing along with her.

The girls stepped back into the apartment, and Sunset shut the door behind them, bracing it with the field hockey stick. She stepped over to her couch, flopped down onto it, and sank deep into the cushions. Sunset sighed and propped her feet up on her table, her eyes fluttering shut.

She felt the cushion sink beneath Twilight's weight as she joined Sunset on the couch. Sunset's eyes opened halfway, and she looked sidelong at the Princess.

"Hey, so, Twilight." Sunset paused, hesitating. "This morning, when you thought I came over to apologize for Flash... you were kinda right. I am sorry about that. I know you two... well, y'know."

"Yes, I do know. You're not incorrect." Twilight shook her head with a melancholy smile. "It's alright. I mean, given your history together, it kinda makes sense that the two of you would hook up at least once, if not just get back together. And something tells me the H.M.S. Flash Sentry, Prince Consort to the Princess of Friendship isn't a ship that's gonna leave drydock anytime soon, no matter how many notebooks I fill with that exact phrase. So I can't exactly hold it against you, now, can I?"

Sunset blinked. "Er... notebooks? Plural?"

"A girl's gotta have a hobby." Twilight smirked. "I know I already apologized for... you know, everything... but I wanna say again, I'm sorry for being so self-involved. I shouldn't have assumed that you showed up this morning to talk about Flash when you were so obviously distraught about—"

"The Eyeball eating two people? Probably not."

"I was sleepy," Twilight whined.

"Yeah, so was I. Somehow, I didn't lose my ability to read facial cues and body language, you big goof." Sunset shoved Twilight playfully and shook her head. "But we're good. I don't hold it against you. On the contrary, it's actually kind of encouraging if even the Princess of Friendship screws up from time to time."

"It's all a constant process of trial and error, yeah. Rest assured, I'll be writing a report to Princess Celestia detailing my findings. 'Dear Princess Celestia, today I learned that, sometimes, your best friend wants your crush to bend her over a sink, and you just gotta be okay with that.'"

Sunset blanched, until Twilight burst out laughing.

"Did you seriously think that I—?"

"Yes! You sold it very, very well," said Sunset grouchily. "Devious little..."

Twilight's laughter died down, and she scooted closer to Sunset on the couch. "Y'know, all kidding aside... we really don't get to spend a lot of time together, for obvious reasons. But I'm here, now, and I wasn't planning on going back to Equestria for another day or two. Maybe we could do something? Just the two of us?"

"You sure you can afford to dilly-dally here for much longer?" Sunset said, smirking. "I hear being a Princess is a lot of work. To say nothing of 'teaching.'"

"Spike's ruling as regent until such time as I return. He's very efficient. Brutal and tyrannical, but efficient. Equestria's well taken care of, I assure you. Although it might be in dire need of a steam-cleaning when I get home."

Sunset stared blankly at Twilight. "Was that an auditory hallucination from sleep deprivation, or did you just say what I think you just said?"

"Depends on what you heard, doesn't it? As for 'teaching...' it's an important part of my life, true."

Twilight reached over to take Sunset's hand in her own.

"But it's just like I said. You're every bit as important to me, Sunset."

Sunset, exhausted and tongue-tied, squeezed Twilight's hand back before separating herself. She reached for the remote control and switched on her TV, to some black-and-white period piece, and leaned onto her side, resting her head on Twilight's lap.

"Y'mind if I take a nap here, Twilight?" Sunset yawned and shut her eyes again, pulling her knees onto the couch with her.

Twilight chuckled, running her hand through Sunset's hair and weaving a lock around her fingertip. "Not at all."

"...I'm probably gonna drool on your skirt, you know."

Twilight swatted Sunset's forehead. "Too far."

"Hey, my broken-ass apartment, my rules. That means I drool where I want. Leave if you don't like it."

"...Never," said Twilight softly.

I know.

Sunset smiled against Twilight's lap as she drifted off.

Author's Note

"Super gay." -DannyJ, 2017

Eyepilogue

Sunset woke with her head still cradled in Twilight's lap, and a sticky spot of drool connecting her cheek to Twilight's skirt. The living room was dark, and the TV's screen snowy; its pale glow threw long shadows across the cramped space.

She yawned, and slid to the floor.

"Twi," said Sunset groggily, rubbing her eyes. "You up?"

Twi was not up – her head was lolled onto one side, her cheek snuggled against the couch's armrest. A thin trail of saliva leaked from the corner of her mouth, pooling on the couch's upholstery.

"Oh, so you're allowed to drool, huh?" Sunset snorted. "Better not give me any grief about your skirt, then."

She pulled off her jacket and draped it over Twilight, who smacked her lips and stirred slightly before nuzzling deeper into the armrest.

Sunset smiled to herself and headed for the kitchen, flicking the light switch on and reveling in the emptiness that greeted her. The microwave clock read 5:38 – she'd been out for nearly twelve hours. And Twilight had just let her sleep. On her own lap.

Guess she really feels guilty about the Starlight Glimmer thing.

She shrugged it off and headed for her broken coffee maker, more out of habit than anything else. It wasn't until she reached it that she recalled the thrice-damned thing was—

"...Huh," she said with genuine shock. "Hello there, big ol' pot of coffee."

The pot was filled to the brim with steaming brown liquid. Sunset pulled it free, flipped open the lid, and sniffed. The heady aroma of hazelnut filled her senses, and she compulsively released a slow, shuddering sigh. Not convinced that she wasn't dreaming – or hallucinating – Sunset poured a cup for herself, and took a tentative sip.

Her eyes widened. She swirled the coffee around with her tongue and moaned, relishing in its rich, bold flavor.

This is the greatest thing I have ever had in my mouth, she thought, gulping it down with a smile.

But a glance at the pot sent needles of paranoia up her spine – the amount of coffee inside hadn't decreased in the slightest. It was still filled to the brim.

Sunset bit her thumb and mulled this sudden turn of events, trying to string together some kind of logical explanation. Once, she'd had a coffee maker. It had stopped working. Then, one day, a floating eye from another dimension occupied her kitchen, and when it left, her coffee pot was literally bottomless.

Sunset glanced quickly at the pot's underside.

Figuratively bottomless, she corrected.

The Eyeball had done something before it left, Sunset remembered. It looked at her, deliberately; it formed a shape with its pupil. A U. Or so she'd assumed. In hindsight, it was more likely...

"A smile."

Sunset downed a swig of coffee and poured a refill – yet again, the volume of coffee did not decrease. She set her mug down and stared pensively at it, gnawing harder at her thumb. Could this have been a show of gratitude from the Eyeball? A token of farewell after she'd spoken to it and shown it kindness? A parting gift, because they developed a weird, mostly burrito-based friendship, against all odds and in defiance of communication barriers?

She had no way to be sure, really. But, she mused as she picked up her mug again, it would probably be a good thing to discuss with Twilight when she woke up.

Whenever that'll be.

Sunset took a long sip, smiling all the while.

Then she slammed her mug on the counter as a sudden realization took hold of her.

"Son of a bitch. I never got my phone back."

The Eyeball bobbed freely in the tides of a world without friction, awash in the nothing-that-was-everything, as she made her journey home. A nightmarish symphony played everywhere and nowhere – screams and laughter and childish weeping, crashing thunder and shrieking metal, underscored by the distant beating of insect wings. Swarming flies, phantasmal subjects to a degenerate Lord, raged impotently against the walls of a world forever beyond their grasp.

She had no sympathy to spare – for the Lord, for his subjects, or his plight. His world, all worlds, were better off without him.

A current of rainbows caught her, and swept her away. Home was yet beyond.

Borne by the tide, the Eyeball spun about, and stared into the infinite. Translucent orbs, like glass baubles, rippled and burst as realities formed and died by the thousands, the fleeting realms of mortals who existed within the constraints of dimensional space. In one, she glimpsed a house, built upon a rock in a sea of black and purple – the dwelling of her friend, the Old Chaos. His home, a quaint and paradoxically mortal construction, was a constant in all but the dreariest of realities, a fact which would no doubt vex him if he knew. Constancy is anathema to chaos, after all.

Through its window, the Eyeball glimpsed him – Discord, yet not Discord, alike and dissimilar from the one she knew. Standing apart from him was Sunset Shimmer, who saw the Eyeball, and waved.

The Eyeball had no sentiment to spare for this girl, for though she was Sunset Shimmer, she was not Sunset Shimmer as well – merely a different iteration from a different reality. Curious, then, that Sunset-Shimmer-Yet-Not recognized and greeted the Eyeball. The Eyeball sensed another's hand in this, and wanted no part at all.

She allowed the current to carry her away. Home was yet beyond.

The world shattered like ice, falling away into a stark land of white space – a backdrop, upon which mortal dwellings were drawn in two dimensions, colored in a spectrum visible even to the humdrum denizens of dimensional space. A being wandered about this backdrop, a hollow thing of neck and head and toothless mouth. Wide, glassy, lidless eyes glimpsed the Eyeball; he opened his mouth, and sang a song of shining darkness and four-sided triangles.

The Eyeball forsook the current. She toppled heedlessly into the mouth of her Spouse, for she knew she had come home.

The Spouse closed his mouth lovingly around the Eyeball. In their union, their thoughts swirled and bled together – the Spouse's fear at the Eyeball's disappearance, his certainty that he would never again cradle her in the warm embrace of his soft, felt mouth. And the Eyeball shared with her Spouse the memory of her time in the human purgatory, when her luminous existence was constrained by the chains of corporeality. A miserable, anxious, time – yet time well spent.

The Eyeball was not always a luminous being. She was born a meager thing of flesh and blood, of a kind with Sunset Shimmer. But that was ages past; she had outgrown such mortal conventions as ages, and forgotten the profundity of mortal life. Sunset reminded her that there is beauty, and meaning, to the fleeting lives of the lesser beings. They think, and they feel; they rejoice and despair. They love, and they lose; they grieve for what slips away. And though they are small-minded and short-lived, though they are as children to ones such as the Eyeball and her Spouse, they are not so dissimilar.

For in the moment where Sunset's thoughts were as one with the Eyeball's, they saw in one another the same want: To be loved and understood by another, utterly and wholly. If nothing else, they were alike in that.

The Eyeball sank into her Spouse's embrace, and hoped that Sunset would someday find the same.

Author's Note

Special thanks to:

-The Writeoff Association, for all their help in workshopping the original version, and for bestowing upon it the coveted "an attempt was made" silver medal

-Danny "Editor Man" Jidya, for his invaluable assistance over the course of revision

-Oroboro, for referencing this story in his own work, thus inspiring me to get my ass in gear and finish it up for FiMfic

-Soufriere, for helping to inspire the more character-centric tone and direction that the story took in its final draft (and for writing a damn fine series of Sadset Shimmer stories)

And to everybody who read and/or commented, for helping to make this story a (relative) success. I'll probably post a retrospective on my blog, going over my writing process for this story, as is my wont. Stay tuned for that if you're interested. Otherwise, thank you again for reading. :pinkiehappy:

The Eyeball will return in The Eye That Floats, Silent and Unblinking, in Petunia Paleo's Sandbox

(Original Story) The Eye That Floats, Unblinking, in Sunset Shimmer's Kitchen

Author's Note

This is the original version of the story, written in a rush and submitted to the Writeoff Association moments before I crashed for, like, twelve hours. If you didn't read it before the revision, and you're interested in what it was like before I added all the burrito subplots and emotional angst, and turned SciTwi into a full-blown creep, then go ahead and take a look. It's more or less the same as what I posted for the contest.

(Original Story) The Eye That Floats, Unblinking, in Sunset Shimmer's Kitchen

The chaotic, rainbow swirl of the tunnel receded from Twilight's vision. She burst through the white light at the end of the tunnel, momentum carrying her forward. Her feet, her human feet that she'd never fully grown accustomed to, caught on the pavement, and she stumbled backward, landing on her beskirted bottom with an oof. Panting, gasping, and rubbing her butt, Twilight looked around at the familiar sights of Canterlot High – the statue behind her, the brick building in front. She'd made it.

"Something wrong," the message had simply read. "Come quickly."

Lacking context, her mind tried desperately to interpret Sunset's message. Frightening and improbable scenarios arose in her mind, only to be discarded once something new came up that topped it. She passed the minutes thus, scared for her friend and trying desperately to ignore her burning, cramping muscles, until she arrived at the cozy, if not particularly stylish, two-storey apartment that Sunset Shimmer called home.

Twilight collided with the door and leaned upon it, pounding rapidly with hands kept curled into fists out of habit. "Sunset! Sunset!"

Or so she meant to say. What actually came out between gasps was an airy "Sahhsaaah... Sahhsaaaaaah!"

The wood of the door wasn't particularly dense – Twilight could hear Sunset's muffled voice on the other end. "That's her at the door now – we'll see you in a little while, okay?"

Was she on the phone? Twilight's lips tugged downward – how could Sunset be holding a conversation on the phone if she were in dire, mortal peril? Twilight continued her furious pounding, until the door unlatched and opened, and Twilight fell forward into Sunset's arms with a "wagh!"

"Twilight!" Concern rang in Sunset's voice – concern for Twilight, oddly enough. Twilight peeked at her face and saw that same concern etched onto her stunning features, but the girl looked, sounded, and for that matter felt no worse for wear. "Sheesh, look at you. You've sweated through your shirt like a hundred times."

"Ran... legs... body... feet... butt hurts..." Twilight panted, gulping down lungfuls of slightly stale, recirculated air.

Sunset Shimmer herded her houseguest inside and led her to a couch with faded purple upholstry, where Twilight gratefully collapsed. Sunset excused herself to the bathroom and stepped away, leaving Twilight to marinate for a while in her own sweat. The apartment was spartan, but well-kept, with inexpensive furniture, a dated-looking TV, a well-varnished coffee table with a pair of wine glasses and a bottle of something cheap... an odd detail, Twilight thought, but a trivial one.

Sunset returned in a moment with a wet towel and a paper cup of tap water. Twilight rubbed down her face with the former, and greedily swallowed the latter, while Sunset watched bemusedly. "Did you sprint all the way here from school, or something?"

Twilight polished off her cup, sighed with relief, and cleared her throat. "Had to. Got your message. Everyone... everything... okay?"

A faint blush dusted Sunset's cheeks, and she turned away from Twilight. "Yeah, um... look, why don't you relax for a moment and we can talk about it when you've caught your breath a little bit more?"

"Can't. Need explanation. Problem. What is." She folded the soiled towel neatly and placed it on the coffee table. "Self-immolation? Apple Bloom, perhaps?"

Sunset's head snapped back to face Twilight, and her eyes flew open incredulously. "What? No! Wait, why Apple––"

"Flurry Heart kidnapped by evil hoteliers?"

"No! It's... who's Flurry Heart? Isn't that your––"

Twilight grabbed fistfulls of Sunset's blouse and pulled their faces together. "Human Tirek broke free from Human Tartarus and is rampaging through the greater metropolitan––"

Twilight wanted to argue, but acquiesced – her vision was darker and blurrier than it normally should have been. So she leaned back and sank into the squishy couch, until her heartbeat slowed and her breathing steadied and she could talk without risking a loss of consciousness.

There was a moment's hesitation on Sunset's part before she answered. "It's... probably better if I show you."

Sunset's apartment had a kitchenette adjacent to the living room, separated by a swinging door. She placed her hand on the door, and looked back at Twilight. "Brace yourself for this," she muttered, and gave the door a shove, holding it open with the length of her arm.

"Oh, come on," said Twilight dismissively. "I've seen your kitchen before, Sunset; it can't possibly beaaaAAAAAAAAAAGH!" She recoiled, clutching her limbs against her chest. "Sunset! Who and what and how and why?!"

"All pertinent questions," said Sunset. "And I hope you'll help me answer them."

An eyeball floated in the middle of the kitchen, a foot off the ground. It was gargantuan, and perfectly spherical, with jagged red blood vessels running along its sclera, a vivid blue iris, and a pupil that dilated and constricted at an even rhythm. It fixed its monocular gaze on Twilight's own, and stared her down, silent, unblinking, and unmoving.

Twilight dared to uncurl a single finger from one of her tightly clenched fists and pointed it at the Eyeball. "That's... that's new, right?"

Sunset nodded her confirmation. The Eyeball's pulsing pupil spun counterclockwise.

"Right. I thought so. Because I don't remember that being here last time I was over. It seems like the sort of thing I'd remember."

"Yeah, well..." Sunset released the door and let it swing closed, blocking the Eyeball from sight. "Didn't exactly see it coming myself when I rolled out of bed, so. Imagine how I felt when I saw it."

Twilight stepped up to the door, pushed it open slightly, and peeked through. The Eyeball swiveled in the air to meet her gaze through the crack in the door, and Twilight yiped softly, scrambling backward.

"Yeah, pretty much like that," said Sunset. She folded her arms, with one forearm sticking up and a thumb pressed against her chin. "I'm sorry for freaking you out with my message. I saw it and I freaked out, and my first instinct was to pick up the journal and write to you. Probably should have taken a moment to calm down before I did, but in my defense..."

She put her thumb between her front teeth and bit down gently.

"Yeah, no, don't worry about it." Twilight looked curiously at Sunset. "It hasn't done anything... like... sinister, has it?"

"No. Nothing yet. Nothing... intentional..."

Twilight frowned. "What do you mean by that?"

Another blush, darker this time, colored Sunset's face, and she turned her head to avoid Twilight's gaze. "Do, um... do ponies in Equestria say 'cockblock?' It's been so long that I can't remember if that's a thing over there, or just over here."

Twilight's eyes narrowed to half-slits. "What."

"Oh, I guess they don't. It means––"

"I know what it means, Sunset!" Twilight fumed, stamping closer to her friend. "That's what it did that freaked you out so badly that you could couldn't even manage two whole sentences of description? I was worried sick about you – about everyone! You were hurt for all I knew, or dead, or... or hurt and dying! Or something else awful!"

"That's..." Twilight stepped back, blinking. "More than I think I really needed to know, first of all, and second, that's not the point I'm contending here."

Sunset scoffed and brushed past Twilight, moving toward the couch. She leaned against an armrest and wrapped her arms around her midsection. "Look, it's... difficult, alright? Living the kind of life I do. Even when you've got the best friends in the world, you can get lonely – longing for the kind of intimacy that mere friendship can't provide."

"Sunset, that's sad and all, but I think you might be ignoring what I'm trying to say––"

"Sometimes that means you make a call to someone you know should be off-limits, and you invite him over for movies and cheap wine that you bought with your fake I.D. Sometimes you wind up re-opening old wounds and crossing lines, lines you drew in the sand to protect the both of you from each other. And from yourselves! From making mistakes that would just make life more complicated for the both of you!"

"Why do you have a fake I.D.?"

"And maybe, sometimes, you step so far beyond those lines that you just know there's no going back." Sunset bowed her head and shut her eyes, and Twilight could see the tears pooling between her lids, beading on her eyelashes. "The die is cast, the Rubiclop is crossed, your panties are... somewhere... you're not sure where; you lost track of them at some point amid all the groaning and groping and gyrating. Maybe it's the half-glass of wine you got through before you pounced on one another, or the lingering attraction drawing you irrevocably together, but one way or another, you find yourselves stumbling into the kitchen, a tangle of wet lips and roaming hands, grunting and gasping, desperate to form the two-backed beast of forbidden teenage love – or the right angle of forbidden teenage love, which was kind of the direction things were going."

Nervous sweat prickled Twilight's forehead. "Uh, do you need a moment? 'Cuz I'm starting to think I don't really need to be here for this."

"Because maybe you maneuvered him into the kitchen on purpose; maybe you've always wanted to get bent over the kitchen sink, specifically, because maybe you get thirsty sometimes during the act, and maybe nothing kills the mood faster than getting up for a swig of Gatorade mid-coitus, and having a water faucet three inches away from your panting mouth can be incredibly convenient, you know?"

Sunset opened her teary eyes and looked at Twilight, frowning slightly. "Then again, maybe you... wouldn't know about that...?"

Twilight's face burned. "Hey!"

"But," Sunset continued, irritation now simmering in her voice. "Before you can even get your proverbial foot in the door and forever change the nature of your post-relationship relationship with your ex, he spots an obscenely large, cosmic Eyeball where there shouldn't be one. Then he freaks out and starts babbling in terror, yanks his clothes back on, and––"

"Ex-boyf – seriously?" The bottle and glasses and their purpose came into sharp, horrible focus. "You tried to have sex withFlash?!"

Sunset's arms dropped to her sides. "Oh. Yeah, um. I guess I should have led up to that a little more smoothly."

"Sunset!"

"Well, if it's any consolation, I doubt he's ever going to be able to look at me again without thinking of today, alright?"

"You – I – he – that – ohhhh...!" Twilight stormed over to the couch, past Sunset, grabbed a throw-pillow, buried her face in it, and screamed a long, throat-rattling scream of exasperation.

When she was finished, and turned around to look at the nonplussed Sunset again, her face was calm – her outrage was left behind on the pillow as a vaguely circular stain, the size of her mouth. "Alright," she said serenely. "We're getting off track here. Whatever reasons you may have had for calling me over here, and however..." She inhaled. "Annoyed I might be that you had your impeccably manicured hands all over my not-boyfriend... you were right to call me over."

Sunset smirked and stretched out her hand to regard her fingernails. "They are pretty nice, aren't they?"

"Mm." Twilight rolled her eyes. "Look, let's just... put all our other concerns aside for now, and just work this problem. Alright?"

Sunset shrugged. "Sounds good to me."

Awkward silence settled on the pair, as they gazed anywhere but at one another. Or at the kitchen.

"Incidentally," said Twilight. "How can you afford a place like this?"

"Low-rent housing at a rock-bottom price." Sunset shrugged. "I live in a crummy neighborhood."

To Twilight, there was nothing quite like an educational environment to melt away negativity. The air hung heavy with the sharp tang of disinfectant, sweeter than any perfume, and the sterile white glow and subtle hum of the fluorescent lights overhead lent a clinical air to her surroundings.

At the front of the room was a computer console and a polished black table, where Sunset sat beside a stack of science textbooks. Twilight ran her fingertip along the top row of buttons on the keyboard, and "qwerty" appeared on the computer's screen beside a blinking cursor.

Sunset watched her with a wry smile. "I've seen actual kids in actual candy stores who were less excited than you are whenever you see a computer."

Twilight grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. It's just..."

"Nah, yeah, I get it. No judgment here. Revel in the splendor of human technological sophistication, my friend."

Sunset's smile flipped into a frown at the mention of Twilight's student. She picked up a textbook and flipped open to a random page. "Ah yes. Her. And how is she doing with her studies?"

"Oh. Uh, y'know." Twilight forced a shaky smile. "Progressing. Naturally. Learning a lot about the magic of friendship. Every friend made and every lesson learned is another step on the road to redemption, y'know. Heh."

Sunset's eyes flicked up at Twilight briefly, narrowed, then returned to the pages of her book. "Hmm. How lovely."

Twilight's face fell, and she mentally slapped herself – Sunset always got weird whenever the subject of Starlight Glimmer came up. Insecurity, Twilight always figured – unfounded, to be sure, but it was something she could sympathize with.

She rounded the console and sat beside Sunset, the stack of textbooks between the two of them. "I'm not replacing you with Starlight, Sunset. You don't need to be worried."

"Who said anything about being worried? Or replaced? I sure didn't use those words." Sunset flipped to another page.

"Also not a word I used," said Sunset sharply.

"You don't need to say it; it's plain as day how you feel. And you don't need to feel that way! Look, Starlight and I came into each other's lives at a very unique time, when she needed guidance that only I could give her. I mean, she was evil, and tried to brainwash people, repented––"

"Oh yes. Such unique circumstances."

Twilight tossed her hands up with a groan."You two are nothing alike, okay? Your situations are completely different. Just because I redeemed her with friendship after she tried to perform acts of unspeakable villainy, that doesn't make her..."

Sunset glared at Twilight.

"I mean, she, um..." Twilight coughed. "Sh-she's wracked with inner guilt and turmoil over her past actions. She, uh..."

Sunset raised an eyebrow.

"She has trouble making... making new friends... and, uh, she's..." It came to her in a flash of inspiration, and Twilight grinned triumphantly, clapping her fists together, and pointing her knuckles at Sunset. "She's purple!"

Sunset's eyelid twitched. She slammed her book shut, sucked in a breath, and opened her mouth to speak.

The classroom door opened, silencing her preemptively. A bespectacled, purple face peeked timidly through. "Sorry I'm late. I wanted to check up on a few things before I headed over here. Uh, any new developments I should know about?"

Sunset sucked her teeth and looked away from the Twilight sitting next to her. "Nothing that springs to mind."

"Hey, Other Me." Twilight waggled her fingers. "You're looking awfully bespectacled today."

"Right back at ya! Except, uh, without the, um... because obviously, you don't wear glasses, and I just... I mean, uh..." Bespectacled Twilight coughed to clear her throat and shuffled into the classroom. "Anyway."

Sunset shut the book and slid off the table, dusting off her bottom and sticking her hands in her back pockets. "What've you got for me?"

"A theory. Not a whole lot more than that." She shrugged, glanced at Twilight again, flicked her gaze over her counterpart's bare legs, blushed brighter, and turned to the classroom's whiteboard. "This actually dovetails nicely with a project I've been working on since the Friendship Games – a working theory of interdimensional dynamics."

Bespectacled Twilight picked up a marker and drew an irregularly shaped blob on the whiteboard. "So this is us, right? This is our reality." She drew another blob beside the first, its edge pressing against the first. "This one here is Equestria. Now, as far as I can tell, based on what little info I've gathered on the subject, our dimensions sort of 'lean' up against one another. Along that point of contact, you can find the occasional spot where the border's a little weaker, places that make interdimensional travel possible. The portal in the statue, that's one spot: a stable, two-way portal that connects this world and Equestria."

"Makes sense," Sunset said, nodding her comprehension. "But how does that relate to the situation at hand?"

Bespectacled Twilight shuffled her feet and looked down. "Well, uh, recall if you will that a certain... someone... sorta opened a bunch of additional portals into Equestria and almost destroyed the fabric of reality." She coughed again. "If I'm right, then not all those portals opened into Equestria. A few popped up along an edge of our reality that didn't lean against another."

"So what did they open into?" asked Twilight. "Where'd Sunset's new roomie come from?"

Bespectacled Twilight drew a wide, asymmetrical oval around the two blobs. "According to my figures, the only dimension leaning against ours is Equestria. We're surrounded, on all other sides, by literal nothing – the negative space between realities, in which all our universes float, the same way stellar bodies float around in space withina universe. Who's to say our friend didn't come from there?"

Sunset titled her head with a quizzical expression. "So you're saying it came from... what, outer space?"

"Farther-out-there space, if you will. But yes, that's my working hypothesis. Of course, if we could communicate with it, it'd make matters a lot easier. But for all we know, we're as incomprehensible to it as it is to us." Bespectacled Twilight capped her marker and leaned against the whiteboard, partially erasing her drawing by mistake. She noticed, eep'd, and scrambled away, smoothing out her skirt.

"Huh. Neat." Sunset cupped her chin in her palms. "So. How do we make it go away?"

Bespectacled Twilight's spectacles slid down her nose, and she pushed them back up with a fingertip. "That's a complicated question that I don't actually have an answer to at the moment. B-but I'm sure that, between me and, uh, Princess Me, we can work out a solution."

Twilight nodded. "I'll need access to your notes and research materials, though. And a place to stay, too. Do you think Pinkie Pie would mind another slumber party?"

"Might draw some questions from her parents. Questions that they're probably not prepared to have answered." Sunset snapped her fingers. "You wanna crash with me?"

"No offense, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing a roof with your, um... other houseguest. Maybe I'll just––"

"Stay at my place!" Bespectacled Twilight interjected. A grin bubbled on her face. "I-I mean, if you want to, anyway. It'd be convenient, since, you know, you need access to my research stuff. Plus, we'd probably have the place to ourselves – my parents are gonna be out of town for a few days, so, you know, there's no chance of anyone walking in on the two of us sleeping together!"

Twilight's eyes flew open; her mind blanked, and her face blanched. Her counterpart's face was a perfect, albeit bespectacled, mirror for her own. She turned around and planted her forehead against the whiteboard.

Sunset's and Twilight's eyes met.

"I mean..." Twilight tapped her knuckles together. "She's not wrong. If we're gonna collaborate on this, then it's probably best that we spend as much time together as possible. Staying with her would make a lot of things easier."

"Yeah, yeah." Sunset blew a lock of hair out of her face and turned away. "So what about me? What am I gonna do 'til we get this sorted out? I mean, it's great that you two are shacking up, but I'm the one who has to share a living space with a thingy from outer space, recall."

"Father-out-there space," Bespectacled Twilight corrected. "I don't know that there's any need to do anything, per se. The Eyeball hasn't done anything bad, right? Besides that thing with Flash Sentry." A snorty giggle escaped her. "Goodness, he's never going to be able to look at you as a sexual being again, is he?"

Twilight and Sunset shared a look of irritation that lasted until Bespectacled Twilight finished laughing. "Anyway. If it's not acting maliciously, or giving any indication that it wants to hurt you, or even has the ability to hurt you, then why rush to judgment? Heck, maybe you could try communicating with it – if you can form some sort of rapport with it, learn something valuable, then it might help matters along a lot."

Sunset pointed at Bespectacled Twilight, frowned, and dropped her arm back to her side. "I can't actually find any fault in your logic. Much as it annoys me to admit it. Befriend a giant Eyeball in my kitchen... not the weirdest thing I've done since coming here, I'm sure."

"Well, if you're that uncomfortable with it, then you can always..." Bespectacled Twilight cupped her hands behind her back and looked at the ground. "Come and spend the night at my place? With Princess Me and I?"

Twilight looked at Sunset and gave her a frantic, anxious nod of encouragement. Chaperone, she mouthed.

"Off topic," said Bespectacled Twilight, looking up at the Princess. "But, uh, I have an experiment or two I'd like to run with you, as long as the two of us are together. Just, you know, stuff like, uh..." She looked away, mumbling. "Genetics, and chromosomes, and... whether or not the two of us look identical naked..."

Twilight slumped.

Sunset Shimmer entered her kitchen, with a tin paint tray and a squeegee under one arm, and a gallon of eyedrops in the other. "Hey," she said. "How was your day?"

The Eyeball regarded her in silence.

Sunset sighed. "Don't know why I even bother."

In three days of living with her new roommate, she'd failed to establish a dialogue with it. She spoke, and it responded in its own fashion, but neither she nor the Eyeball seemed to understand the other.

"So, I was thinking," she said, setting her things down on the kitchen counter. "I noticed that you don't have any way to moisturize, right? No eyelid?"

The Eyeball's pupil constricted to a pinprick before expanding outward rapidly again.

"Uh-huh. So I was thinking, maybe I could help you out with that. I picked up some stuff to, um... moisturize you." Sunset uncapped the eyedrops and poured a generous amount into the tray, then dunked her squeegee into it. "I'm not sure what'd work best on you, since, you know, you're an Eyeball from outer sp – or farther-out-therespace, rather. But this stuff's supposed to be for extra-sensitive eyes, so I figured, when in doubt..."

For several seconds, the Eyeball vibrated rapidly, with thick lines like cables undulating across its pearly white surface.

"Yeah, uh. Me too, buddy." Sunset raised her squeegee, droplets sprinkling into the fluid-filled tray.

To her surprise, the Eyeball didn't move at all as she circled it, gently stroking her squeegee over its rubbery surface. Either it understood her request, or it intuited that it needed to remain still for the procedure – which, now that Sunset thought about it, would indicate that it was capable of intuiting that the procedure would be good for it, and that it didn't mind being subjected to gentle, yet thorough, moistening.

"I can't speak for the both of us," Sunset muttered, "but I for one am learning quite a bit about you right now. Of course, I maintain this would have gone faster if we could just chat over coffee. Too bad the machine's fried. Meant to get it fixed, but then I spent my coffee maker funds on that wine." She sighed. "For all the good that did me."

Sunset dipped the squeegee into the tray again and squatted to rub the Eyeball's underside. "Not that you'd even be able to drink it. Not sure where on your body you have room for a urinary system, and finding out is a bridge farther than I think I really wanna take this little experiment. Although I guess it'd be a good way to get myself published, make a name for myself in cryptozoology, or whatever. Not a field I really saw myself going into as a filly, but... what else do I have to look forward to out here in humanland?"

Finished with its underside, she rose and dunked her squeegee in the tray again, and began working her way to the top of the Eyeball. "Y'know, what's funny? Speaking of? I have no idea what the hell I'm gonna do once high school is over. I mean, I didn't really have any long-term game-plan besides 'amass phenomenal power' when I came here from Equestria. I guess the sky's the limit, but..."

Sunset caught a glimpse of her warped reflection in the Eyeball's surface and sighed. "Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't just go back to Equestria and try to pick things up over there. But what would I even do? I can't face Celestia again, not after the way I left things. Maybe I could work something out with Twilight – live with her for a while – but with Starlight in the picture..."

The Eyeball's surface hissed and sizzled. A droplet ran down its surface and splattered against the floor.

"Yeah, I'm being petty about Starlight freakin' Glimmer. I know it; I own it. It's just..." Sunset turned away from the Eyeball and dropped the squeegee in the tin, and wrapped her arms around herself with a sigh.

"Don't get me wrong; I love my friends. But Twilight... I feel a lot closer to her than I do to the others. Like there's stuff about me that only she could understand. I thought we had the kind of friendship that was, I dunno, special, or something. Now that she has Starlight Glimmer in her life, where do I fit in? Important as she is to me, I feel like I'm less important to her now. Not to mention this thing with Flash, which I knew was a mistake on many different levels. Not the least of which being because the two of them habitually collide with and make goo-goo eyes at one another whenever they're in the same reality."

She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and chuckled wetly. "I guess I was just lonely. And he was... convenient. And willing. And have you seen his pecs?"

The Eyeball whirled around, its pupil exploding into a six-pointed star, before normalizing back into a head-sized circle.

"Silly me." Starlight chuckled again. "'Course you have."

Shattering glass and a hissed curse from downstairs wrenched Sunset out of her dreamless sleep.

"Shut the hell up," someone hissed. "You're gonna get us arrested."

Robbers. Loud, incompetent robbers.

Sunset reached for her nightstand and groped vainly for her phone, until she remembered that she'd left it downstairs. The intruders had probably pocketed it.

"Screw it," she muttered to herself. "I'm not helpless."

Sunset rolled out of the covers, took hold of the cord to her bedside lamp, and freed it from the wall. Lifting the lamp, she crept silently to her door.

"Ooh! Lacy." One of the voices, distinctly female, carried up to her room. "Check it out, bro. Think these'd look good on me?"

"What the hell, sis?! I don't wanna think about that! Put 'em down and go wash your hands before you touch anything else."

Sunset flushed. She'd liked those panties...

She heard a door swing open from downstairs and a loud, shocked gasp from the woman. "Dude, you gotta get a look at this!"

"Get a look at – whoa! Sweet mother of––"

"I know, right? Frickin' sweet, isn't it?"

"It's a stupid, pointless, worthless-ass kitchen island. Damn hipsters these days with their damn hipster decorations."

"Nuh-uh. We're taking this."

"Get serious."

"I am. I want this and I'm taking it home."

"What could this possibly be worth? The TV might get us a couple hundred; the cell phone definitely will; we haven't even been upstairs yet, and who knows what's up there. You really wanna waste time jackin' this... this... whatever the hell it is?"

"It's an Eyeball, Tryhard. Duh."

"Duh yourself. I wash my hands of it. Speaking of, don't forget to – uh, what's it doing?"

"I dunno. It wasn't doing it when I came in, though. I'm not sure if––"

There was an otherworldy shriek that curdled Sunset's blood, and then a cry of terror from the woman. "Get it off of me! Get it off!"

"Hang on! I'll – I'll get a knife!"

"A knife?! What's that gonna do?!"

"Well if someone hadn't sold our guns to buy these stupid masks and turtlenecks––"

"They're designer, you ingrate! Good shit costs money! Now shut up and – urk!"

"You miserable bastard; that was my sister! I'm gonna – ah, shit, no, lemme go! Lemme go! I don't wanna die! I don't wanna––"

Silence reigned.

Sunset crept downstairs, the lamp clutched tightly in her hands. She tiptoed to the kitchen, shutting her front door as she went – the robbers had left it ajar, the lock probably picked or broken.

Gulping, Sunset shouldered the kitchen door open.

The Eyeball floated serenely in the center of the room, its iris glowing with a pale blue light. Its pupil looked wider, fuller, darker. Of the robbers, there was no sign.

Sunset fainted.

"I need that thing gone, Twilight." Sunset clutched a mug of the Cakes' overpriced brew between trembling fingers.

Princess Twilight sipped from a steaming mug of the Cakes' surprisingly affordable green tea. "Did you sleep at all last night?"

"Of course not!" Sunset snapped, sipping. "Spent the whole night on the couch with the heaviest thing in the house that I could find."

"To defend against home invasion, or the Eyeball?"

"Duh." Another shaky sip.

Twilight drank deeply from her cup. "If it's any consolation, I'm sure you're perfectly safe. If the Eyeball could do that to the robbers, it's plausible that it could have done it to you at any time. The fact that it did it to them, and not you, suggests that it may have been acting in your defense – maybe it was protecting you from what it perceived as a threat. Maybe it likes you."

Sunset glared bloodshot daggers at Twilight. "That. Does not. Make me. Feel better." A long slurp followed, during which she never broke eye contact with the Princess.

"Need I remind you that you decided to stay put. Coulda come and stayed with me and Other Me." Twilight shrugged. "Although I don't think that would have been much of an upgrade. We have made a lot of progress working together while sharing the same space, granted, but it's also kinda... awkward. Hanging out with yourself isn't all it's cracked up to be." She lifted her mug to her lips and muttered into it. "Plus, she keeps trying to peek at me in the shower."

Sunset's jaw dropped. "Twilight. Please tell me you're not comparing your sitcom relationship with your pervy purple doppelganger to me living with a time-bomb that will do unspeakable things to me if I get on its bad side."

Twilight's eyes widened and she set her tea down, lifting her hands defensively. "No no, I didn't meant to – I just thought we were, y'know, venting about our––"

Sunset leaned across the table and pressed her face against Twilight's. "I need that thing gone. Right now. I can't keep living like this. Please, please, please tell me that the two of you worked out something good between pillow fights and spin-the-bottle sessions."

"Not sure how you even play spin-the-bottle with only two people." She unlaced Sunset's hands from her blouse, but kept their fingers clutched together. Their eyes met. "Look, we... we do have a theory, alright? We were gonna wait for a while, run a few tests, but if you're really this worked up, then..."

Sunset nodded furiously.

Twilight squeezed Sunset's fingers. "We're gonna need some back-up."

Rarity leaned from side to side, meeting and never losing the Eyeball's gaze. "Is it just me," she murmured, "or do the two of us have the same eye color?"

"Who knows?" Pinkie chirped. "You know how there's an entire world out there where all of us are ponies? Maybe this thing's from a world where we're all floaty Eyeballs! Maybe this is your alternate universe Eyeball doppelganger!" Pinkie fixed the Eyeball with a grin, and it swiveled to bore into her with its piercing, unyielding gaze. "What do I call you, big guy?"

The Eyeball's pupil swirled and took new shape: a thin, black spiral, rotating counter-clockwise, one which flattened and extended into an undulating line. A ripple ran up and down its length, starting from one end, reaching the other, and then bouncing backward in an endless rhythm that precisely matched Pinkie Pie's heartbeat.

"Think I'll call him 'Ferb,'" said Pinkie.

Seven girls gathered in Sunset's kitchen. They waited for their eighth, commiserating, inspecting Sunset's unwanted houseguest, and – in Rainbow Dash's case – raiding the cupboards and cabinets.

Sunset was less than thrilled with the arrangement. Not that she minded the company, or that she thought the plan wasn't going to work. Weakening the dimensional barriers separating the human world from Equestria nearly had disastrous consequences the last time it happened, but the plan had approval from both Twilights, and Sunset trusted their judgment. If they said that their combined powers would be enough to stabilize an artificially created rift, then Sunset would take them at their word.

It was, to her, more a question of location than anything. "Must we really do this in my apartment?" she groused. "Because I'm not sure ripping apart the space/time continuum is covered in the lease agreement."

Applejack put her hand on Sunset's shoulder. "It ain't like we got a lotta options. Takin' it somewhere else'd just draw lots'a attention that we prob'ly really don't want. I mean, a big ol' thing like this is bound to draw some stares outside."

"Plus," Rainbow Dash added. "Doin' it here means that we can throw a kickass movie night immediately afterward. With wine! I saw that bottle in the cupboard – you've been holdin' out on us!"

Fluttershy nudged Rainbow Dash's shoulder. "Um, not to reopen old wounds, Rainbow," she said. "But remember your little misadventure in ninth grade? I think that's more than enough exposure to alcohol for you. At least until you come of age."

Rainbow Dash flushed, irritated, and folded her arms. Fluttershy smiled and patted her friend on the back.

There was a knock at the front door. Sunset quietly excused herself and went to answer it, letting a slightly disheveled, sleepy-eyed, and thoroughly bespectacled Twilight into the apartment.

"You coulda just opened the door, you know," Sunset said with a yawn. "The lock's kinda busted."

"Wish I could help with that, but my thing is cosmological and thaumaturgical research, development, and analysis. Not locksmithing." A purple disk dangled around Bespectacled Twilight's neck. Its plastic case was dented and blackened, but nevertheless, it thrummed with power.

"Took me the better part of the night to modify and repair this old girl," said Bespectacled Twilight. "She should do the trick. Without ending all life in the multiverse, or making me go all crazy and fiery again."

Sunset pulled Bespectacled Twilight in for a one-armed hug. "Thanks for this. Really."

She returned the grin, and let Sunset lead her into the kitchen with the others. Twilight averted her eyes from her counterpart as soon as the pair entered the room, instead focusing very intently on one of Rainbow Dash's aglets.

Bespectacled Twilight clapped her hands and grinned sleepily. "Okay! So. We all ready to do this?"

Sunset spoke before anyone else could: "There are no acceptable answers besides 'yes, yes, for the love of all that is good and holy.'"

Murmurs to that effect resounded throughout the room.

Bespectacled Twilight nodded. "Alright then. So. Everybody knows their role?"

"Hold hands with Applejack and shoot a rainbow out of my boobs," Rainbow Dash muttered. "Just like at Thunderlane's Bar Mitzvah."

The girls linked hands and formed a semicircle in front of the Eye, with Sunset in the center. Bespectacled Twilight stood off to the side, looking uncertainly at the Eye.

"You're absolutely sure you want to get rid of it?" Bespectacled Twilight said hesitantly. "I mean, this isn't the best part of town, and it does make a handy home defense system."

"It ate my robbers," Sunset groused. "It's not that I'm ungrateful for the gesture, but... I mean, you can't just eat criminals. You know? There's something wrong with it. Imagine if you all had eaten me when I was bad."

Bespectacled Twilight blushed, turned her head, and coughed.

The Eye gazed at Sunset, and Sunset gazed back. Then its pupil elongated obscenely, stretching out of its body. The others, aghast, watched in horrified fascination as a shape emerged – a human body, coated in black slime, yet with visibly female curves. Another body, a man's, slithered from the Eye's pupil, and plopped on top of the first.

Sunset's legs buckled. Twilight and Rarity, on either side of her, held her up. Fluttershy broke ranks and rushed to the pair of bodies as the Eye's pupil receded and returned to normal. She knelt and cradled the man's head in her hands, leaning her ear close to its face.

"Alive," she declared. "Both of them. I think."

The man rolled off of the body beneath him and huddled on the ground, fetal. "Eyes," he whispered. "Eyes in the dark. Vision in the inky black. Bottomless, topless, inside and all around, yet nowhere. Make it stop."

"It never stops," said the woman in the same tiny, scared voice. "Endless black. Everywhere, the eyes, piercing my flesh..."

Sunset looked from one, to the next, to the Eyeball. "Neato. Fluttershy?"

Fluttershy guided the pair away from the Eyeball, away from the radius of the spell, and returned to the semicircle, linking hands with Pinkie Pie. "Ready when you are."

Energy crackled and rippled around the seven as auras shimmered around their bodies. They sprouted ears and wings and ponytails, and their bodies lifted slowly, hovering mere inches off the ground. Hair and clothing whipped around them; cabinets and cupboards flapped and slapped noisily as gusts of energy swirled through the room.

Sunset's eyes met the Eyeball one last time. Its pupil shifted into a new shape – a U, it looked like, crude and lopsided. Then its iris flashed once.

Sunset frowned. She tried to say something.

Then their auras coalesced into spheres in front of their chests. Seven beams of seven different lights lanced out and collided in the same spot, in front of the Eye, blocking it from Sunset's view. Then an eighth light joined it, a white light, shining from the opened mouth of Bespectacled Twilight's device.

The fabric of reality gave way, and a vortex of light and darkness appeared. Inside, swirls and whorls and patterns churned and frothed, in every color conceivable, in grays and whites and blacks, in tones and hues unfathomable. Shrieks and screams and bellows of fury, of triumph, of agony and defeat, resounded from inside the vortex. The Eyeball drifted forward, into the vortex, and was gone. Bespectacled Twilight slammed the device shut, and the magic maintaining the portal ceased. Gradually, the seven drifted back to the ground; their auras and extraneous pony parts vanishing.

For a long, pregnant moment, none of them spoke. Sunset broke the silence. "So," she panted. "Universe still seems to be here. Gonna go out on a limb, say the spell worked."

Pinkie Pie clicked her tongue. "Darn shame."

Sunset bid each of her friends farewell with a hug and a personal word of thanks. "Just gimme a day or two to rest and tidy up, and we'll have that movie night." she promised.

"With wine?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"Probably not. Pizza, though."

Rainbow Dash's hopeful expression vanished, and she sighed. "That's... fine. I guess."

Fluttershy insisted on personally accompanying the traumatized robbers to the nearby police precinct, with the others traveling as escort. Twilight lingered with Sunset after they left, giving her bespectacled counterpart a shaky smile and a noncommittal response when asked whether she'd see her at home.

Sunset watched them leave with a smile, her eyes lingering on Bespectacled Twilight. "Easy money says she makes a pass at you before the night's over."

"Not a bet I particularly want to take," Twilight sighed. "I swear, if I wake up with her spooning me from behind one more time––"

Sunset's laughter killed the rest of that sentence, and through Twilight tried to be indignant, she was soon laughing along with her.

"Hey, so, Twilight," said Sunset, when their mirth had finally run dry. "I want to apologize for that thing with Flash. I know the two of you... well, y'know."

"Yes, I do know. You're not incorrect." Twilight sighed and shook her head, a melancholy smile on her face. "It's alright. I mean... kinda makes sense that the two of you would hook up at least once. And something tells me the H.M.S. Flash Sentry, Prince Consort to the Princess of Friendship isn't a ship that's gonna leave drydock anytime soon, no matter how many notebooks I fill with that exact phrase. So I can't exactly hold it against you, now, can I?"

Sunset blinked. "Er... notebooks? Plural?"

"A girl's gotta have a hobby." Twilight shrugged and stepped closer to Sunset. "Y'know, I wasn't planning on going back for another day or two. Maybe we could do something, just the two of us? We haven't really had time to stop and catch up since I've been here. I mean, except for Sugarcube Corner. Which was mostly business."

Sunset bit her lip. "You sure you can afford to dilly-dally here for much longer? I hear being a Princess is a lot of work. To say nothing of being a teacher."

Sunset stared blankly at her friend. "Was that an auditory hallucination from sleep deprivation, or did you just say what I think you just said?"

"Depends on what you think I said. As for teaching..." Twilight leaned forward and wrapped Sunset in a tight hug. "It's an important part of my life, true. But you're every bit as important to me, Sunset."

Sunset, exhausted and tongue-tied, squeezed Twilight tightly and rested her head on her.

A yawning Sunset Shimmer strode into her kitchen the next morning, refreshed and rejuvenated after a twelve-hour nap. Out of habit, she made her way to her broken coffee maker, before recalling that the thrice-damned thing was––

"Huh," she said with genuine shock. "Hello there, big ol' pot of coffee."

The pot was filled to the brim with steaming brown liquid, filling the room with the heady aroma of hazelnut. Sunset, not convinced that she wasn't dreaming – or hallucinating – slowly and shakily poured a cup for herself. She breathed deeply – certainly smelled real enough. She took a slow, tentative sip. Tasted real enough, too.

A glance at the pot sent needles of paranoia up her spine – the amount of coffee inside hadn't decreased in the slightest. It was still filled to the brim.

And for all Sunset knew, that could be literal.

The Eye had done something before it left, Sunset remembered. It looked at her, deliberately; it formed a shape with its pupil. A U. Or so she'd assumed. In hindsight, it was more likely...

"A smile," she murmured. "It was trying to smile at me. That creepy, floaty, monocular... huh. Guess it really liked the squeegee thing."

Sunset downed a swig of coffee and refilled her cup – yet again, the pot remained filled to the brim. She set her mug down and stared pensively at it, gnawing her thumb between her front teeth. The Eye had freed the robbers when Sunset complained about it – took them in the first place because, Twilight had guessed, it saw them as a threat to Sunset. And it bade farewell to her in its own impenetrable, oblique sort of way. Could this have been a show of gratitude from the Eye? Repairing a minor inconvenience in her life, simply because she mentioned that it bothered her?

She wasn't sure, and had no way to be sure, really. But, she mused as she finished her coffee and poured herself a refill, it would probably be a good thing to discuss with Twilight.