Starlight sighed and closed the curtains of her office. She doubted any student would come to her at this time of the night, but then again, she had several of them coming to her at midnight before. The cherry on the top was when some stallion, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Prince Blueblood, came to her office and tried to awkwardly flirt with her.
This was, as Starlight called it, a three-bottle problem. It took one bottle from her liquor cabinet to smash it on the creep’s head. Another to disinfect the stallion’s wounds and drown her conscience when it turned out that Prince Blueblood was, in fact, Ocellus in disguise. And eventually, the third one when Starlight wanted to stop thinking about Ocellus having a crush on her.
Upon the thought of bottles, Starlight turned to her liquor cabinet. Most of the bottles were labelled with names of magical potions, but those were just in case Twilight or some curious student asked. Starlight knew well that “Hair-growing potion” was actually Prench absinthe, “Hard Stick Brew” was ouzo she’d gotten from some shady-looking minotaur, and “Super Strength Concoction” was Berry Punch’s brandy. Which, indeed, could give the drinker quite a lot of strength.
Starlight opened the cabinet, thinking of her poor liver and what her life had become. Back in Our Town, life was simple and homemade vodka was hideous, but at least it was always cold. In fact, everything was cold, but that was never a problem. Now, in the School of Friendship, days were warm, she had a cabinet full of carefully-smuggled liquor from all around the world, and yet she still felt she was spiralling downwards.
She wasn’t spiralling alone, though. In fact, she felt that while she was desperately trying to find a way out of the abyss, Twilight was always finding a way to dive head-first into it. Starlight felt they were somehow connected; or maybe she just worried about her friend, she wasn’t sure. She had a lot of time to worry about things, these days. It was, in fact, her main pastime, along with finding more creative ways of self-destruction.
Another groan, as Starlight shuffled through the bottles. Even when she did try to do something productive, it was all for naught. For example, the camping. Starlight, having lived in hiding for a while, didn’t quite like campings, but this one was exceptionally weird, even for a camping planned by Twilight. And anytime Starlight thought about those events, they were getting weirder.
In that brief fit of clarity that appeared one night between one bottle and another, she decided to ask her enthusiastic, newly-appointed Friendship tutors to go on an extracurricular friendship mission and do some digging. What they found, didn’t calm Starlight down. For starters, no one in The Canterlot Historical Society ever heard of a photographer named Shutter Bug. A further investigation revealed that she indeed had a photo studio in Lower Canterlot, but it was closed after its owner died in a freak accident involving a mango, a hairbrush, and a load of cobblers.
No matter how long Starlight looked at the calendar, the date of her death and the date of their camping trip just didn’t want to add up. And Twilight was too busy planning more friendship activities to listen to her.
Starlight sighed again and grabbed a bottle, carefully avoiding those standing on the bottom shelf. Those were already empty, but Starlight filled some of them with her emotions whenever she was in a particularly sour mood. She knew she shouldn’t be doing that, but it was better than lashing out on some student. Or Twilight. Someone wouldn’t survive that.
Eventually, Starlight settled on a large bottle labelled as “Temporary Immortality Mixture”. The label warned that side effects included playing accordion and a desire to get rid of traditional griffonian dishes, so Starlight figured out it was Slivovitz.
She sat at her desk and took a long sip. The aroma of plums hit her nostrils while a hot wave assaulted her stomach. She winced, nearly throwing up; her liver was definitely not in its top form and she was pretty sure constant stress would eventually result in stomach ulcers. Unwilling to go to the doctor, she’d once asked Berry Punch whether she displayed any symptoms of alcoholism. Berry kicked her out of the bar yelling that, not being alcoholic, she wouldn’t know.
Starlight shuddered and took another large swig. The taste was much more manageable this time. Starlight almost managed to forget about the newest inanities the students and teachers in Friendship School had come up with.
Events swirled, just like the contents of the bottle. She wasn’t sure what came first. Sunburst leaving the town or several students catching some funny disease? Twilight adding paragraph twenty-two to the school rules or that one winter night in Our Town when they ran out of firewood, vodka froze, and they had to spend a night bundled together in Sugar Belle’s bakery around the cold stove?
Cursing under her breath, Starlight downed the bottle. Given the students and their silly diseases, proper disinfection was vital. Also, she wanted to drown a realisation that dawned upon her – a few months ago, she wouldn’t be able to just down a bottle of slivovitz like that. In those innocent times, the taste would make her retch, but now she was much better at drinking, as much as she hated to admit it.
She stood up. The room spun around her and she staggered on her hooves. As she found out, she got much better in holding her liquor; normally, she’d already be lying on the floor, ready for a trip to Wonderland or, if things were particularly bad, up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe. With a toilet brush for a paddle. However, this time she felt there was still a part of her brain that was sober and wouldn’t allow her to drop dead or at least close enough to death to meet her high standards.
Starlight couldn’t allow that. Struggling against gravity, she walked to the liquor cabinet and picked up a random bottle with her magic, faint and cracking. She opened it and took a sip.
Suddenly, she felt her taste buds exploding. She swallowed hard, her body shuddering, and looked at the bottle. Her stomach twisted and turned when she realised that it was one of the empty bottles she’d filled with her rage before. Her breath slowed down as blurred images flashed before her eyes. For a second, Starlight thought that she should get some bucket in case the bottled feeling was an overall shitty mood rather than rage, which could cause a violent diarrhea, but no such thing happened.
Reality was much worse.
Starlight wasn’t the only creature in the School of Friendship that couldn’t sleep.
Spike was wandering down the corridors. There were several reasons for that. For starters, he finally realised what Twilight meant when she said her wings wouldn’t let her sleep. Indeed, there was no way to lie down comfortably with them and if there was, Spike didn’t find it yet. He was full of hope, though – if Twilight managed it, he could do that too.
On the other hoof, however, Twilight, who slept for three or four hours a day, wasn’t the best example. But Spike was trying not to think about it.
The wings weren’t, as a matter of fact, the main reason why he was walking around the building. Some time before, he heard some strange noises coming from Starlight’s room. They weren’t just regular noises, like clattering of bottles or the distinct thud of a body hitting the floor. No, this time it was something more. It was very hard for Spike to stop thinking that the noise resembled powerful spells being fired at some innocent furniture. It was also hard to ignore it, despite his best attempts to do so.
He turned and walked towards Starlight’s office. A simple question wouldn’t hurt. Clearly, when it seems like your friend decided that 2 AM is a great time to practice target spellcasting, any question about their current state was definitely a good idea. If years of dealing with Twilight taught him something, it was the ability to fix small personal issues before they led to a country-wide disaster.
Unfortunately for Spike, he barely managed to reach the door, when it suddenly advanced towards him, propelled out of its hinges by a wave of magical force. It hit Spike and threw him at the wall along with his good intentions, disintegrating around him into splinters.
It wasn’t enough to kill a dragon. But it still hurt.
Letting out a powerful roar, Starlight ran out of her room, leaving scorched hoofprints on the floor. She galloped across the corridor and jumped, hitting the window and piercing right through it. Spike, still dazed after getting smashed against the wall by what seemed like at least a hundred pounds of solid oak, could only watch as Starlight fell out of the window in a cloud of glass shards.
Spike shook his head and stood up, rushing to the window. The sight outside, as he noted, was mildly interesting, at least comparing to what he’d already witnessed in his short life.
Owing to the School of Friendship being surrounded by waterfalls and moats, Starlight managed to avoid breaking her bones, snapping her neck, or rupturing her organs – in other words, all the attractions usually associated with failed attempts to defy gravity. Instead, she landed in the moat and emerged from it accompanied by hissing steam; the water evaporated, revealing the book of EEA guidelines, still lying at the bottom.
Starlight darted out of the moat like a pinkish ray of light, leaving a vapour of steam and dust in her wake. Spike half-expected her to run into the forest in order to stop dramatically in the middle of some clearing and scream into the sky, but no such thing happened. Instead, Starlight rushed towards the town.
Berry Punch’s bar, as usual, was full of ponies. Originally just a small addition to the wineyard, built of leftover planks, sticks and whatever Berry’s ancestors found or stole, it soon turned into one of the town’s major meeting points. While it lacked the charm of Sugarcube Corner and the food was worse than in HayDonald’s, the large assortment of wine, brandy, beer, and other drinks was most definitely what firmly put it on the map of town’s attractions.
Berry herself was standing behind the counter, watching the patrons carefully. She’d accept anyone who paid for their drinks, but she had to admit that the drunk changeling who was entertaining patrons by changing into famous celebrities wasn’t someone she’d want to see it her bar. Not that she had something against changelings, but if some punk with a camera showed up just in time to see Princess Celestia dancing on the table, it could mean trouble.
Suddenly her ears, trained for years in fishing out the smallest noises from the usual crowd chatter, perked up. Those were definitely hoofsteps, but the cadence was just wrong. Nopony could move their legs that fast, Berry was sure of that. She looked under the counter where she kept a baseball bat, in case someone needed to be violently calmed down.
As usual, Berry’s instincts didn’t fail. Suddenly, the interior of the bar filled with plaster, splinters, and bits of something impossible to identify as Starlight pierced the wall right next to the door, and smashed one of the tables, leaving Lyra and Bon Bon looking unsurely at the path of destruction and debris between them.
Seeing that the pinkish blur was at the collision course with the shelf full of brandy bottles, Berry raised the baseball bat and prepared for a swing like a power hitter observing the incoming ball. When Starlight got closer, she swung the bat with all her might.
She immediately knew that something strange happened. The hit connected, but instead of falling to the ground with bits of her skull in all the wrong places, the intruder continued to run, although at much slower pace and in a slightly different direction. When Berry looked at her bat, she noticed that it somehow turned into a flaming torch.
Meanwhile, Starlight staggered towards the kitchen where Berry’s daughter Ruby was in the middle of burning some toasts. Ruby, being born in Ponyville, was much better at avoiding whatever dangers were awaiting her than she was at cooking. She dealt with Starlight in a much less awesome but more pragmatic way than her mother – by simply tripping her and grabbing a fire extinguisher, pouring foam all over her.
Shaking, Starlight tried to get up. Berry helped her, seating her on a chair in front of the counter and giving her a glass of brandy. Starlight’s vision was blurry; she couldn’t hear much and all she remembered was a wave of unstoppable rage and a feeling of being wet and on fire at the same time. How it was possible, she didn’t know. She levitated the glass, but she was barely able to take a sip before collapsing on the ground.
Berry Punch looked at her and only shook her head.
The hospital bed was pretty comfortable and the sight of green walls was pretty soothing for Starlight’s bloodshot eyes. Still, her head hurt. It wasn’t just a hangover, as Starlight felt. She was, in fact, pretty sure that her last slivovitz odyssey involved falling from a great height and getting hit in the face with something hard. The bandages on her forehead seemed to confirm that observation.
Aside from the headache, she felt pretty well. Her rage disappeared; whatever demons born of boredom and helplessness were in her head before, they were now gone. Starlight suspected that the main reason was a translucent substance in the IV drip hanging above her. Whatever it was, she wanted more of it. However, her plans of stealing more of this stuff had to wait; right now she was too tired to think of anything more complex than square pegs and round holes.
She blinked. There was some kind of ruckus outside of her room. Starlight had a vague feeling that it meant an immediate end of her serene, almost otherworldly state of peace and harmony.
The door opened. Starlight noticed Nurse Smartass and Nurse Fatass—she was pretty sure those weren’t their actual names, but at this point she felt it’d be awkward to ask—followed by no one else but Twilight Sparkle, who entered the room with a concerned look on her face.
Starlight took a deep breath. She briefly considered strangling Twilight, but she felt that it could mean a prolonged stay in the hospital, possibly in a padded cell without a doorknob.
Twilight sat next to Starlight’s bed and looked at her. In her gaze, Starlight could see everything. She confused the bottles, yes. Again, at that. Yes, at least this time it was rage and not, for example, “intense feeling of guilt after Starlight turned into a filly just to–”
Stop! Starlight didn’t want to think about it right now. Or ever.
Twilight opened her mouth to speak. Starlight frowned, stopping the Princess of Friendship in her tracks.
“Oh, shut up.”
Author's Note
I think my Starlight and my Roseluck would become best friends (in a rehab, maybe).
