Keeper of Harmony

Raymond sat quietly on a firm wooden chair in the cold kitchenette of Lyn's home, reading the aged and leather spine diary that he had found from the garage.  He placed his right elbow on the kitchen's round, glass table while resting his head on a right-hand palm.  His tired eyes had been glazing through every worded page -- sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph -- for what felt like an eternity.  Sadly, it had only been an hour passed since he started.  A ceramic mug full of delicious cocoa next to his arm that he had made at halfway through the journal remained untouched and was by now bitterly chill.

He heard his best friend, Andrew, sitting in the house's office, singing aloud of lyrics that were quite queer and strangely random.  "Cut my steak into pieces.  This is my plastic fork.  Masturbation.  Hard Breathing.  Don't give a fuck if I jizz while I'm eating!".  He hunched Andrew was parodying off of 'Papa Roach - Last Resort'.

Raymond tried his best neglecting the annoyance as he further deepened his focus into reading the diary.  Scooting the chair closer, he nudged his flat stomach against the end of the table, and gave a slight grunt moving his sore elbow.  Yet.  Not once had his eyes looked away from the journal's dusty pages during the sudden shift of uneasiness.

"Jeez..." Raymond groaned mildly while stretching his arms out.  "How many pages are in this thing?" he yawned.

It was awful enough that Raymond had to hear the TV on at almost full volume from the living room in addition to Andrew's annoying sense of parodied songs, and this tested him as his irritation steadily grew and grew, to an extent where he no longer could maintain his focus on the diary.  He carefully closed the book and pulled his chair away while staring up at the bland, featureless white color stretched across every inch of the ceiling.  The bright, harsh kitchen lights were then hurting his sensitive vision, and he came back to glancing down at the book before him.

Exasperated, Raymond inhaled deeply and sighed.  "I can't do this under these conditions," he mumbled.

He decided he should relax; unwind as a curative method to ease his irritated conscience.  The idea of it was appealing, so Raymond did just that.  Sliding out of his chair, he first made his journey to the bathroom as he hadn't remembered since the last time he went.  He blamed it was the journal's fault that he lost track of time, but he found Rick's past much too fascinating, especially when 'My Little Pony: Friendship is magic' became involved later in the read.  Whenever there was something MLP related it would pique Raymond's interest, and he would hover all over it like flies on crap.  Still, it left Raymond wondering whether or not Lyn's father was a brony.  Nah, he thought, chuckling to himself.  He knew very well if a person would go far to write something such as MLP fanfiction (as he believed it was) they'd be considered a brony automatically.  No matter how much that person denied the fact.

After Raymond had emptied his bladder in the bathroom, he finally made way into the living room and slumped on the sofa, surfing channel to channel with the Comcast remote on the plasma television screen.  Seeing there was nothing that caught his interest, he pressed a button which killed the TV to a quiet slumber.  Without much to do, Raymond shifted restlessly until he lied on his back, staring at the ceiling once again while his mind wandered through the deep valley of limitless thoughts.

Something about Andrew bothered him, beside the singing and all of that nonsense.  No.  He wondered about the peculiar about why his friend wasn't able to read the diary.  Raymond was sure that Andrew knew how to read, so that wasn't one of the plausible reasons.  The probability of it being all a prank did came to mind.  Andrew was always the kind of a prankster type, that Raymond was fully aware when they became friends, and Andrew still was the class clown of yesterdays and today; cherry bombs in the toilet, vanishing ink in the teacher's pen, the one time teachers found a pornographic magazine in Raymond's locker.  All of that mischievousness was Andrew's doing and got away with, and honest to God Raymond found it more annoying than watching 'Fred the Movie'.  Raymond was more inclined to believe this was a prank merely.

However, despite Andrew's wicked habit for pranks, Raymond recalled the seriousness in Andrew's tone when he asked if he couldn't read the diary.  He was very surprised seeing his friend acting serious or stern.  If that was the case, then... what if... possibly.

"Now I'm pretty much making things up." Raymond said to himself as he shook his head in doubt.

He implemented a ludicrous thought that what if whatever Lyn's father wrote was actually real, what if Rick had raised a genuine Fluttershy, and what if Princess Celestia had rewound time?  The idea spun around his head unnervingly.  So Raymond leapt from the couch and hastened towards the home's office where Andrew resided in.

He swung the door open carelessly and hollered to his friend, "Andrew, I-..." he paused and glanced at his bulky friend sitting on the chair in front of Lyn's laptop. "What are you doing?" Raymond asked, cocking a curious brow.

"Just watching Dota 2 videos," Andrew replied nonchalantly.

"Anyways, Andrew," Raymond continued.  "I think I may have solved the diary problem."

"And what's that?" Andrew asked.

"Bear with me on this," Raymond heeded.  "But if if we're to test if this theory is true... you have to become a brony."

A moment of silence filled the air.  Andrew yet never spoke another word after what Raymond said.  However, Andrew rose from the black swivel chair and walked up to Raymond impassively.  Suddenly, with a fast hand, he slapped Raymond across the face.