Home again, home again, jiggi- ...the heck?
Sunset slipped out of the boxcar carefully. It probably wasn't necessary, both the line and the yard had a good reputation. Word was that they gave precisely zero shits about freight hoppers. Even so, it never hurt to be careful.
It wasn't hard to slip through the train-yard unnoticed given how light Sunset traveled. Everything she owned fit into an ordinary backpack with room to spare. No bulk to move, nothing to slow her down.
As promised, the freight yard hadn't changed much. No fence, no security to speak of. Nothing to hinder her on her way back to Canterlot.
There wasn't much to do as she walked but think about the past.
The last time she'd been here she'd been a kid, a nine year old who thought she was an adult. She'd wanted to prove to the world --and herself-- that she didn't need anything from anyone, so of course she set about doing that by begging someone --anyone-- to take her with them.
Some teenagers had taken her in, probably because they were worried for what might become of her if she kept asking random strangers to take her away with them.
Sunset smiled to herself at how stupid she'd been back then, and thanked the universe for the people she did end up with. Things could have been unspeakably bad for her if it had been someone else, but she got them. They'd taken her with them, they'd taught her how to survive on the move, they'd shown her an entire world that had been beyond her reach before then. Cities and countryside and everything between.
By the time she was fourteen she really was self-sufficient, but didn't care as much about that anymore. She'd made friends, made family, and liked traveling in the company of others.
Things had happened, though, and she'd been on her own for about a year.
She shook her head, cleared her thoughts and looked around. She was going to run out of things to think about long before she got to downtown Canterlot. It barely seemed any closer than when she'd left the train yard.
For some reason she'd decided to come back here. She didn't know what, if anything, she really expected to find here, but here she was.
Granted Sunset didn't have the clearest memories of what Canterlot had been like, people were often nicer to a child than a teen, and her clothing screamed, “Homeless person!” which was off-putting to a lot of the moneyed classes, but the death-glares she kept getting didn't feel like they belonged in the Canterlot she remembered. They seemed out of place and felt downright disconcerting.
Most of them were coming from kids her age, who, while not necessarily the nicest demographic in history, weren't usually the ones Sunset expected to be angered by her very existence. That kind of outrage took time and effort to cultivate and was usually the province of people who were old enough to have graduated from student to workforce.
Sunset had long ago learned that nothing got you more calories for your money than fast food.
Ideally you didn't use money at all, but that kind of scavenging was best done after dark and she was hungry now. She had a five, three ones, and enough change to stick in a sock and use as a pretty devastating defensive weapon. Thus: burgers.
Some things didn't change no matter where you went. There was a certain comfort in that, she thought, as she walked into a burger place indistinguishable from restaurants in the same franchise she'd visited more than two thousand miles away. The comfort went away when the silence that had accompanied all the glares finally broke.
“Go away!” some boy Sunset had never seen before shouted.
Sunset wasn't quite prepared for that and responded with, “What?” more or less without thinking.
“No one wants you here anonymous,” a girl, sitting with the boy, said.
Sunset was confused and asked, “Anonymous?”
“Everyone knows it's you, Sunset,” someone else said.
Sunset spun to face the new voice, it was a mauve girl with teal hair sitting alone in a booth.
“How do you know my name?” Sunset asked.
The girl laughed. It was not a kind laugh.
“I was wondering about the getup. Is that outfit supposed to be a disguise?” she asked in the most mocking way possible.
Sunset looked at her clothes. Yeah, they were an obvious sign of her poverty, but as far as she was concerned there was nothing worth mocking about them, and given they did nothing to hide her features there was no way they'd be mistaken for a disguise.
The girl kept talking, “Trying to go incognito so you can steal more secrets?”
For a moment there was blissful silence and Sunset was back to just being glared at. She had no idea what was going on, she wondered if she could be losing her sanity, and she had one of those headaches that meant she really did need to ingest some kind of fuel in the near future. She made a decision. No matter was happening, no matter what had happened or would happen --even if it turned out she'd been transported directly into The Twilight Zone-- she wasn't going to play along with this shit.
“You seem to be confusing me with someone who knows what the Hell you're talking about,” Sunset said the mauve girl, then she turned back toward the counter and went to get food.
Things were worse after she'd eaten. More than a few people “accidentally” bumped her with a shoulder as she walked the sidewalks. Once she came dangerously close to being tripped, and had had to break into a run just to keep her feet under her. That got jeers, but she was happy to leave the group doing it behind. She cut off into an alley after that one and decided to stay away from well traveled streets.
She'd known that coming back to Canterlot in the winter was stupid (though she hadn't really expected there to be snow yet) but she'd done it anyway for some silly reason or other. She didn't even remember what put the damned idea into her head.
Still, it wasn't like she had a way of knowing it would be like this. No one warned her that Canterlot would be like this. And she had asked around. Apparently it was a good thing she'd gotten out of this cesspool as a child. She couldn't imagine growing up in a place where everyone was so cruel to a total stranger.
A total stranger whose name they somehow knew.
That part was weird.
It didn't change the frustration and outrage she felt at the idea that she'd come to Canterlot, in the snow no less, for this.
“What's a matter, Sunset?”
Sunset was immediately alert. The voice was cruel; the voice had used her name. That was not a good sign. She looked around frantically, trying to figure out where it had come from.
“Not as brave offline?”
She still couldn't figure out where it was coming from, and now it was spewing non-sequiturs. Could she be-- no. She'd never heard voices. She'd never--
“Can't look your victims in the eyes?”
That's when it hit her: the voice was an echo. She couldn't find it because she she'd been looking to the walls it had been bouncing off of. There was definitely someone saying these things somewhere, she just had to work out where the echo was coming from.
She ignored the words and just listened for volume. It took a sentence and a half to tell her the direction she needed to go. Another two sentences to get there. It was farther than she had expected because, it turned out, the owner of the voice was yelling.
Angry, angry yelling.
Maybe it wasn't the wisest thing in the world to rush toward a voice that clearly belonged to someone who was belligerent and upset with, if not her, her name, but it was also a possibility of getting answers. What she found were a group of kids her age. All she saw were backs. Whatever was going on, it wasn't directed at her this time, and that might be what was needed to--
“I swear I didn't do it!”
Twilight Zone it was; she knew that voice. It wasn't the voice she heard when she spoke, but it was what she heard when a recording was played back to her. It was what she heard in her own echo. It was her voice, the way it sounded when it was coming from outside her head.
Sunset shook her head. She was imagining things. She had to be.
“What would I have to gain!?” the voice that sounded too much like her own cried out, “People finally forgave me; you think I'd--”
“No more lies,” the original yeller shouted then walked away.
Sunset hid herself, to the best of her ability, but kept her eyes on the group.
“If you wanted to restore your bad girl image,” another said, “it worked.”
More left. Sunset could see a girl on her knees. She was crying.
One spat in the girl's general direction, whether by luck or intention it missed. Mercifully.
When they were gone all that remained was the girl on her knees. Now sobbing.
Sunset didn't care what was going on anymore. She didn't care about the mystery of people knowing her name, or the voice that sounded like hers but was probably --had to be-- her mind playing tricks on her. She didn't care about how she'd been treated or the strangeness of it all. She had something else to care about right now.
She took one last look around.
She and the sobbing girl were alone.
She walked to her.
Knelt down in front of her.
She said, “It's ok.”
The sobbing girl didn't seem to notice, so she said, “It's ok,” again. No response. Well, what had she expected? It obviously wasn't ok. Why would the girl dignify the lies of a total stranger with a response?
“Ok,” Sunset said. She sighed. “It's clearly not ok.” She closed her eyes and thought. “But I promise you,” she opened her eyes, “that whatever is going on I'll try to help you. Maybe we can make it ok.” The girl hadn't stopped crying, but the sobs were more controlled now. She was clearly listening to Sunset. “Ok?” Sunset asked.
Sunset was going to reach out to the girl, but she stopped herself. You never knew how people felt about being touched. Still, she wished she could see the girl's face. Look the girl in her eyes.
The girl got her breathing more under control. A moment later she spoke, “Who are you?” she asked while lifting her head.
“I'm--” Sunset got a look at the girl's face, “What the fuck!” she shouted as she fell backwards and scrambled until she was stopped by a wall.
The crying girl had her face.
Her exact face.
Not a similar face; not an uncanny resemblance. Not anything that could possibly make sense. Her face. Her eyes. Her hair. Her mouth. Her nose. Her God-damned ears. Everything.
The girl dropped her head back down, looked away, then muttered, “Well this is just great.”
Author's Note
You all have no idea how lucky you are. I considered calling the Equestria Girls version of The Twilight Zone "The Sparkle Zone".
Also, you're lucky because River Road read this over before it was inflicted upon the public. Beyond pointing out some egregious errors that I had somehow managed to miss, River also deserves thanks for helping bring modern sensibilities to my writing style.
If you're an oral poet living in 7th or 8th century BC Greece, you do certain things. One of them is a lot of repetition. If you're writing on the internet in the 21st century AD, you don't do that. Unless you're me.
There are times where I'll take a list that should be "[introduction] item, item, item, item . . ." and instead do "[introduction] item, [introduction] item, [introduction] item, [introduction] item . . ." You'd be stuck reading that kind of thing if not for River Road.
Repetition is hardly the only thing I take from that, and I don't restrict my out-of-style-ness to a single period or place (I can totally do bad English composition by way of Latin too), but it's a relatively easy example to explain.
Finally, River Road provided the chapter title, adapted the fic's title from a bad title I'd come up with, and provided immense help with both the short and long descriptions.
Should anyone ever wonder if this is the first fic where human-Sunset meets Anon-a-Miss. No. No, it is not.
I've been planning this since before Blamed by Madox was published, and I'm pretty sure this isn't influenced by that at all, but Blamed was most definitely published first.
I'm not a monster. . . well, technically, I am
Author's note:
You know that feeling, the one where you feel like you're going to lose all your followers, piss everyone off, and have no one read your stories ever again?
I've kind of had that regarding this chapter for a while. Part of me just wants to replace half the dialogue with "Then the human Sunset said stuff that didn't matter to the story." But then the unspoken stuff that does matter would have no context.
So this chapter has just been sitting around done for a while because I've felt uneasy about publishing it.
The one person not to treat her terribly was the native version of her, which was fine, and was now, having seen Sunset's face, apparently terrified, which was less than ideal. The other her had scrambled backward until she was stopped by a wall, and, as of when Sunset looked away from the pitiful sight, was pressing back into that wall as if she hoped the bricks would give away so that she could retreat farther and further.
Sunset just looked at the ground and waited for things to somehow get worse.
Then came a frightened, “What are you!?” from the other her.
Sunset sighed. Then she looked back at the other her. I’m a transmogrified unicorn, did not seem like an ideal answer. Before she could think of anything that was worth saying, the other her started talking again with a speed clearly driven by fear:
“There is no natural way you could look so much like me, you couldn't fake it, and –even if you could– why would you? Why would anyone want to steal my identity? I hardly have an identity to steal!” the other her caught her breath, and the way it sounded made Sunset worried that the girl might be on the verge of hyperventilating. “So the only options are the ones that don't make sense, and none of those are good!”
Part of Sunset knew that she should pick her next words carefully.
If she just came out and said that she was a creature from another world who took on human form in this world –except for that one time she had been a demon– as a result of a magical portal, that would likely do more harm than good.
Right now, part of Sunset knew, she needed to carefully steer the conversation into a direction where the other her would be comfortable, keep it there for long enough for the other her to calm down, and do it all in a way that wouldn’t destroy trust when the truth inevitably did come out.
This was a time for a delicate touch and a sensitivity to the other her’s feelings, part of Sunset knew.
That part, however, did not remotely win out.
Most of Sunset didn’t even care about the other her. It was still focusing on everything else that had happened of late.
Sunset had been abandoned by her friends in a way that turned the entire school against her, with her closest allies deeming her irredeemably guilty in the public forum that was a high school hallway and pronouncing her the kind of scum who deserved to be left in tears on the ground.
Now everyone was against her at every turn, and she was constantly taking flack for something she didn’t do, even though whoever was framing her was doing an incredibly poor job. Everything she’d worked for had been torn away from her not because someone had set into motion a meticulous and well executed anti-Sunset Shimmer plot, but instead because the entire student body, her so-called friends first in line, were so very ready –eager, really– to believe she was despicable that they’d turn on her at the first sign, however poor of a sign it was.
If her supposed friends had confronted her in private then at least she wouldn’t have the whole school against her. She apparently wasn’t worthy of that luxury.
If they’d given her time to think she could have pointed out that the fact she still had her phone didn’t mean no one else had ever had access to it. But no: one question, ‘Have you lost your phone recently,’ and she’d been judged guilty before she even knew she had been accused.
Compared to all of that, what did one frightened doppelganger really matter? The terror was obviously the other her’s problem and Sunset really shouldn’t have to deal with someone else’s baggage right now.
So said the part of Sunset that did win out. As a result she didn’t try to approach the situation with any care or even any tact.
“Calm down,” Sunset said exactly the way she would have before the Elements of Harmony, “I’m not one of the evil double things from . . .” and her sarcasm and disdain hit a roadblock: she didn’t actually know what they were from. That break allowed her to calm herself down a bit.
After a taking metaphorical step back and reminding herself that the other her wasn’t responsible for any of what had happened to her and thus shouldn’t be mistreated because of it, she finished up by saying, “that anthology show,” in a neutral way.
“The Twilight Zone,” the other her said, “the anthology show is called 'The Twilight Zone'.”
The other her hadn’t been calm when she said that, but compared to how she had been a moment before making the correction . . . maybe there was still room for handling this well. The correction was the way that one might say, “Khan was a Sikh from northern India, not an undeclared from southern England,” which implied a degree of familiarity with, and passion for, the subject.
Steering the other her to a topic where she was comfortable and keeping her there until the fear subsided might still be an option.
So Sunset said, “I've never actually seen it,” as though they were simply having a normal conversation.
“I have,” the other her said. She paused a moment. “These days Sandwich actually makes decent coin through underground parties –he's a really good MC– but back in the day spending a night in a hotel room was enough to wipe out the entire group's savings. Emergency Only.”
Sunset nodded. She did both because breaking the other girl’s flow might negate the calming effect she was hoping the conversation would produce, and because it did make sense. It fit with the image of the other her she was building in her head.
Hotel rooms were expensive, and the clothes the other her was wearing suggested poverty; rich kids slumming never really pulled off the kind of authenticity that radiated from those threadbare clothes. Living on the street fit with that.
“My second year on the road,” the other her said, settling into a normal storytelling manner, “long before Sandwich even joined the group, we got caught in a damned blizzard. The streets weren't safe and we didn't know the territory enough to find a good spot. We weren't even supposed to be there.”
Sunset wasn't sure exactly how one got snowed into a place you were never supposed to be in the first place, but it didn’t really matter and she was sure she could come up with plausible explanations if she were to try.
What was more important was that the other her got visibly more at ease with every passing sentence.
So Sunset listened and watched.
“So the five of us were huddled in a one bed hotel room, and there was a Twilight Zone marathon on. Shadow said I was too young to watch, so they kept the TV off until I pretended to go to sleep.”
Part of Sunset’s mind immediately wanted to dissect all of the possible implications. The other her was too young to watch a scary show in her second year on the road, that could be used to guess when she originally went on the road. Someone named Shadow was the one who decided the other her was too young. Leader? Parental figure?
Sunset had to quash that line of thinking. A lot of progress has been made in a handful of sentences, but things weren’t good yet. Even the telling of the story was indicative of things being not right, it was the kind of rambling, to a stranger no less, that bespoke nervousness at best.
The wrong approach could still send the other her back into a panic. The safe move, the option with the minimal risk, was simply prolonging the conversation in its present form.
So Sunset offered up, “And you watched it without them noticing,” with a bit of a conspiratorial tone. That got a nod. Strike one against continuing the conversation in its present form.
Sunset tried to gauge the other her. It was probably safe to talk about other things, but that opened up the minefield of trying to guess, at random, which topics were safe and which were not. Sunset definitely didn’t want to dive into the weirdness of the present situation just yet.
She wanted something normal, mundane, and completely casual.
Again she took the easy route: making a second attempt to sick to the original topic.
“Was it good?”
“A lot of it was cheesy,” the other her said, “some of it was funny –even some stuff that wasn't meant to be funny like the scout for an alien invasion getting warned off of invading the world by the other aliens who were already in the middle of a secret invasion– some was heartwarming –the show had more happy endings than people give it credit for– but some of it was really, really creepy.”
A flash of fear, not nearly as bad as earlier, crossed over the other her’s face. Maybe Sunset should just give up on avoidance. It was the perfect way to move toward the subject at hand without taking it on directly, after all.
“The doppelganger episode,” Sunset offered, knowing it could potentially ruin the degree of calm that had been achieved so far. It was a risk she was willing to take if it could get passed the point where she was trying to use her manipulation powers to calm the native version of herself while kneeling on the sidewalk with the feeling of freshly dried tears on her face.
Besides, the episode was something the other her had apparently experienced while young. Even if it wasn’t the source of the fear Sunset was seeing now, it likely played a role, and talking about it might help.
“It takes place in a bus station,” the other her said. “This woman is moving from point A to point C and the bus station is at point B, where she's having a stop over. Things start going strangely, people say she did things that she's pretty sure she didn't do, she thinks she saw an exact duplicate of herself standing behind her when she looked in a mirror.”
The other her was still in storytelling mode and still seemed to be getting more calm the more story she told. No real indication how much of an effect the episode had had, but the parallels were easy to spot.
The other her had to be from somewhere else, like the character, since Sunset would have found her before now otherwise. The other her had probably already run into people who thought she was Sunset.
Ponyfeathers.
The other her had probably already taken abuse for being Anon-a-Miss, and unlike Sunset she wouldn’t even have known why. And Sunset had responded to her by being sarcastic. Maybe Sunset was going back to her old self after all.
The other her just went right on talking:
“For most of the episode you don't know if there really is a doppelganger or she's just losing her mind.”
The words were largely unremarkable, but they were said with an urgency and gravity that drew Sunset in and for one fleeting moment she actually forgot that the only reason this conversation was happening was to get the other her more comfortable and less fearful.
Sunset herself settled into a different position, sitting instead of kneeling.
“Her faith in rationality gets shattered and she relates a story she'd never believed in before. There's a universe of evil beings that sometimes comes in contact with our own, when it does some cross over. The only way they can survive is by stealing someone's life.”
There was a similarity to actual human changeling myths there. Of course, in those myths the doppelganger killed their double, as a baby, so that the double wouldn’t turn up try to take the stolen life back. Equestrian changelings never killed the ones they replaced. Even though they were undeniably real, something that couldn’t be said of the changelings from human myth, Equestrian changelings were far less frightening than the human-world version.
Still, there was more to do than just analyze some story that had been made before she’d been born. She needed to alleviate the other her’s fear, and while getting her talking had been the start of that, actually engaging her in conversation would push things further in the right direction.
“Thus the setting,” Sunset said. “She's in a place where no one knows her.”
Just like the other her was now, of course. Except the present situation could be considered worse because Sunset already had an established life here. As if Sunset had stolen the other’s life before the other her even noticed there were two of them.
Still, they were passed the point of avoiding the issue.
The other her nodded and resumed talking:
“And going to a new place, so the people there won't catch on to any early mistakes the doppelganger makes. All that needs to happen is to take her out of the equation, and the doppelganger steals her life and, because the doppelganger is there in place of her, no one ever comes looking for the real her.”
Well, at least that part didn’t matter in the least. At least Sunset was pretty sure it didn’t matter. Unless . . . No, it didn’t matter.
“Plus, the very first thing that happened, before there was any suggestion of a doppelganger, was her bag going missing, so she doesn't have any proof as to who she is.”
Sunset figured that that mattered just as little as the part before. She’d tried to find the human with her name after Twilight told her that everyone seemed to have a double, not just Celestia and Luna as she’d initially suspected. There was nothing. The other her had obviously lived a life off the grid, which meant she wouldn’t have any identifying documents to steal.
The other her took a deep breath, then continued:
“The male lead in the episode, just a random guy who happens to be at the same bus station, doesn't believe a word of it but tries to help her through what is obviously some kind of breakdown. The audience doesn't know for sure what kind of breakdown. Is she imagining all of this, or is she having a hallucination-free nervous breakdown because an evil being intent on her destruction has been gaslighting her the entire time?”
Sunset allowed herself to do stop doing meta analysis and just think about the story as it was being told. Mostly she did this because there was, what seemed to be, an obvious problem with creating that kind of narrative ambiguity: “Wasn't the show sci-fi and fantasy? Wouldn’t that give some clues?”
“Not all of the episodes were,” the other her said.
That was what Sunset got for talking about a show she’d never watched.
“There was one episode in particular where the real twist at the end was that it was all in the main character's head and nothing out of the ordinary was going on,” the other her continued.
“That's disturbing,” Sunset said. If you couldn’t trust your senses then . . . it was just disturbing.
“Very much so,” the other her said, “but the edge got taken off by the fact that the main character of that episode was a horrible person and his delusions were karmic punishment: tormenting him with the same lie he'd intended to torment others with.
“In the doppelganger episode, the main character is just an ordinary person who has done nothing wrong. That makes it so much worse.”
Sunset nodded.
Celestia had given lessons about the just world fallacy. The short version was that ponies who believed that bad things only happened to bad ponies were often afraid of the implications of the alternative. If bad things happened indiscriminately, then avoiding them would have to depend, at least in part, on luck. If luck were involved then complete safety was impossible.
Rather than face the reality that one could never be totally safe, some ponies would convince themselves that bad things only ever happened to ponies unlike themselves. One easy way to do that was to believe that only bad ponies suffered, so the fact they were good (a foregone conclusion) meant that they would never suffer.
While the lessons didn’t apply directly to the work of fiction in question, the indirect implication was clear. Monstrous things happening to a monster is justice. You don’t have to fear them unless you’re in the habit of tearing apart friendships or stealing magical artifacts. Monstrous things happening to an innocent is frightening. They can happen to anyone at any time.
They can happen to you.
Back in the present the other her was wrapping up, at least Sunset thought she was.
“When it's finally time to board her bus, she sees her own face in the window. That's too much for her. She faints, and the bus leaves without her. She's convinced that she has to make it to the destination first, so that people will know that she's the real one. Male lead says he has a friend who can drive her.”
“Lie?” Sunset asked.
“Lie,” the other her answered. “She's taken away to be institutionalized.”
“Has it occurred to no one that maybe the reason people are afraid to seek mental health help is because treatment is presented as some hellish ordeal?” Sunset asked. For whatever reason, this was a topic that made her very upset. It was, perhaps, the reason that, for all her bullying and manipulation, she'd never set out to gaslight anyone.
“The show is a half century old,” the other her said. “Things were bad. Not as bad as they'd been in earlier times; definitely worse than they are today.”
“And it's not like everything is perfect today,” Sunset said.
And then Sunset realized that that entire exchange had gone definitively not-bad without her calling on any of her manipulation skills. Progress was being made.
“Yeah, so the episode had basically ended and you still don't know whether she had a breakdown and imagined the doppelganger, or whether her breakdown had been engineered by a real, and really evil, doppelganger.
“Well, the episode started with her bag going missing. So how does it end?”
Sunset had no idea and motioned for the other her to continue.
“After she's taken away, the male lead reaches for his briefcase. It's missing, but he catches sight of the thief. He chases, but with a head start, the thief gets away. Cut to the thief: someone with his face running with an expression of absolute, perverse, glee.
“Thus proving the evil doppelgangers were real, nothing was in her head, and a sane –if stressed out– woman has been institutionalized because everyone else thinks reality is a delusion.”
Well, that could explain reacting with abject terror. Then again the episode could have simply touched on fears that would have been there regardless. Most people probably weren’t prepared to run into someone who shared their name and face regardless of the anthologies they partook in.
Sunset wanted to say something that was nice, and helpful, and not at all evil, but instead what slipped out was the kind of thing she’s say in the old days when she was preying on insecurities and generally unnerving people who weren’t useful to her:
“Disturbed you, did it?”
“Like you wouldn't believe,” the other her said.
It was said with calm. That was a good sign. Not a ‘Tell her you’re a monster from another universe who steals magic gemstones and mind controls people,’ sign, but a good one nonetheless.
“Well,” Sunset said, “I have no intention of gaslighting you.”
It was true, sincere, and totally avoiding the subject of her inhuman nature.
“Who are you?”
“My only name is 'Sunset Shimmer'.”
“Not helping with the whole, 'Not an evil doppelganger,' spiel,” the other her said, but the playful delivery implied that the talking had worked. Worked far faster than Sunset had expected, even.
Still, might as well say it out loud.
“But we have reached a point where you're not terrified by my very existence anymore, right?” Sunset asked.
The other her nodded. “Yeah, yeah we have.”
Sunset stood up and offered the other her a hand. It was a sign of how much progress the tangent about the anthology show had produced when the other her took the hand and let Sunset help her to her feet.
“You are going to explain though,” the other her said.
“I will,” Sunset promised, “but before we even start to talk about that, I have an question of the utmost importance.”
“And what's that?”
“You really travel with someone named 'Sandwich'?”
“That's what you took from all of that?”
“It's a distinctive name.”
“Cheese Sandwich,” the other her said, “and he can turn an MP3 player and a glowstick into the greatest rave in history.”
“I've never been a rave person,” Sunset said.
“I'm not either, but I can't argue with an emergency fund we've never tapped out, and that's the result.”
Sunset wanted to tell the other her that it was time to start talking about the explanation, well, technically why the explanation would have to wait, but she'd get to that. She wanted to, but found she was presented with an entirely different problem.
“This isn't going to work,” Sunset said.
“What?”
“'Hi, Sunset, I'm Sunset,' Sunset said to Sunset,” Sunset said to the other her.
The other her nodded. “I can see how that would be a problem.”
For a while both were silent, then the other her said, “Well, this is your turf, so I suppose you can have the name 'Sunset'.”
“And what will you be?” Sunset asked.
“Shimmer, I guess,” the other her said.
“Do you think of yourself as that?” Sunset asked.
“No,” 'Shimmer' said, “but my best friends, Shadow and Sandwich, go by their last names, so it's not like the idea has no merit.”
Sunset didn’t really like the idea of stealing someone’s name.
“This may be where I live,” she said, “but you arguably have a stronger claim, so if you want–”
“I'll go by 'Shimmer',” Shimmer said. “Now get to the explaining bit.”
“Ok,” Sunset said. Then she stalled. “So . . .” she stalled again.
The next words came from Sunset very quickly:
“You know how it is when someone says, 'You wouldn't believe it,' and you're all, 'Yes I will, just tell me,' and they're unconvinced, but you keep on insisting you will believe it, and then they finally give in and tell you, and–”
“You don't believe it,” Shimmer finished.
“Yup,” Sunset said. When she continued she spoke at a more normal pace, “To avoid that mess, I'm going to need proof you can see, and for that I'll need help, so I won't be able to give you an explanation for,” Sunset waved her hand between them so it pointed at herself and Shimmer several times, “this, until sometime tomorrow.”
Shimmer seemed to think it over for a bit, then said, “Fine, you have until tomorrow.”
Sunset gave a nod of acknowledgment. She was about to walk away when she realized that she was missing critical information. “Where are you staying?” she asked.
“I got into town this morning,” Shimmer said, “I've spent most of my time being weirded out by the way people have been looking at me and the fact people knew my name. I haven't exactly been perusing the local real estate market.”
“I'm gonna head home,” Sunset said, “you might as well come too. If you like it, you can stay with me.”
Sunset started walking; Shimmer followed.
“You have until tomorrow to explain how you can be another me,” Shimmer said. “For now, why don't you tell me why people were calling me 'anonymous' as if the word is an insult?”
“Not 'anonymous',” Sunset said. “'Anon-a-Miss.'”
“What?”
“Anon hyphen a hyphen Miss,” Sunset said.
“Some kind of stage name?” Shimmer asked.
“Internet screen name,” Sunset said. “Someone is pretending to be me and doing everything short of saying, 'I'm Sunset Shimmer'.”
“And what are they doing while pretending to be you?”
“Spreading secrets,” Sunset said. “At first it was ones that I'd have access to, part of pretending to be me, but now it seems like anything goes.” She sighed. “The thing about secrets is that they're secret for a reason.”
“People don't take kindly to having them converted to public knowledge,” Shimmer said.
“Exactly,” Sunset said. This was the first time she’d been able to talk about this with anyone. It was so much better than every other time the matter had come up. At best she was talked atrather than to, at worst . . . she’d cried a lot of late. “The people who have been burned are outraged, others are cheering it on, but everyone is angry with me.”
“And why would someone set out to frame you?” Shimmer asked.
Because I turned into a demon, turned them into thalls, and planed to use them to invade another universe in hopes that, since they were innocent children who weren't acting of their own free will, Celestia would refuse to allow them to come to harm, thus making them untouchable and allowing them to hold the line against troops with significantly more experience, while I and my two willing accomplices, in demon pseudo-Alicorn mode, defeated the immortal rulers and took possession of Equestria.
Not the best answer to open with, and it didn't explain everything. Plus it left out the crap she'd done before stealing the Element of Magic. Anyway, it wasn't true so much as a snappy response that made it sound like she had a handle on the situation, which she didn't. The truth was much less impressive.
“I don't know,” Sunset said. “I mean, I sort of know, but the timing doesn't make sense.”
“What does that mean?”
“I used to be a horrible person,” Sunset said. “Most of the school had reason to hate me, but no one did anything like this when I turned my life around and all of that was fresh in their minds. Back then they just did the usual high school stuff. I was variously ignored, glared at, made the constant subject of whispered conversations, and continually 'accidentally' bumped into in the halls.
“It was all pretty generic, and certainly didn't involve anyone posing as me,” Sunset said. “I finally proved that I really had changed, helped everyone in the school in the process, and now this happens. Just when everyone was finally accepting me.”
“Maybe that's the point,” Shimmer said.
Sunset just gave a questioning look.
“Oh come on, it makes sense,” Shimmer said. “More sense than you having my face and my name.”
“A lot of things make more sense than that.”
“Everyone hated you, and you were miserable–”
“I never said I was miserable,” Sunset said, not entirely sure why that made her feel defensive; “I was holding up pretty well.”
“And so long as you were miserable,” Shimmer continued, “the people who hated you thought you were getting what you deserved. But then you 'proved yourself', whatever that means, and suddenly you're not suffering anymore. Anyone with a grudge feels like you're not getting the punishment that you're due.”
“So they give everyone a reason to go back to hating me,” Sunset said. It made as much sense as anything. If she’d somehow proved herself to the school before the Dazzlings showed up, maybe she would have had to go through the exact same thing not long after that.
“Not everyone,” Shimmer said, “just the people who only accepted you because they were giving you the benefit of the doubt. People who truly forgave you and believed you were a better person would need more than a bully with an internet account before they thought they were wrong about you.”
Like maybe photos that came from my phone. Sunset shook her head. That didn't matter at this particular moment. There was an important question that did matter:
“Why do you believe me?”
Shimmer had nothing but Sunset's word, they'd only just met each other, and apparently Sunset's mere existence called up fears dating back to Shimmer's childhood. There didn't seem to be any reason for Shimmer to believe that Sunset was actually innocent.
“I found you sobbing on the ground protesting your innocence,” Shimmer said. “It made an impression.”
“I found you cowering against a wall afraid that I was going to steal your life.”
Shimmer shrugged. “Off moment.” They walked in silence for a bit, then Shimmer asked, “What's your home like?”
“Like Heaven on Earth,” Sunset said, “just . . . more rusty.”
Author's Note
So I had "Shimmer" referencing The Twilight Zone in the first chapter, not even thinking about the fact that one of its most famous episodes was the doppelganger one.
Then Sunset insisted on saying something along the lines of, "I'm not one of those things from The Twilight Zone."
For the record, when I tried to make it into something not-jerkish, I utterly failed. More importantly, though, Sunset has a vague awareness of The Twilight Zone and honestly doesn't even have cause to know the name, Shimmer is already established as immediately thinking of it when things get weird.
Shimmer filling in Sunset's lack of knowledge made sense and gave me what I needed for the chapter, which was simply something completely innocuous for them to be talking about.
There needed to be something at a remove that could be made the subject of conversation so Shimmer had a chance to calm down before Sunset got to the, "I don't just have your face, I have your name, and I'm not going to explain yet because I don't think you'll believe me," part. It could have been, "How 'bout them Knicks?" but that would require me to know something about basketball.
As mentioned at the start, this chapter has me uneasy because it takes the form of
"Irrelevant dialogue," Shimmer said.
Sunset had thoughts that were actually relevant.
"Irrelevant dialogue," Shimmer continued, unaware of what was going on in Sunset's head.
and I would guess that that can turn off a lot of readers.
* * *
As for the Khan bit, I wanted something other than "Han shot first."
