In Which Sunset Shimmer searches for a way to win a parakeet.
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In Which Sunset Shimmer searches for a way to win a parakeet.
2:37am.
Sunset Shimmer couldn’t sleep. Even if she could she wouldn’t want to. Even if she wanted to she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. That damn parakeet!
What was it, though? What about it could cause her to lose sleep? It was just a big stuffed animal that vaguely resembled a parakeet. So why was it unobtainable? It shouldn’t have been. It was a sure thing: throw the rings on the bottles, win the parakeet. Twilight had even done calculations. So many calculations. There was no way that winning that parakeet should have been so difficult. There’s no way the game should have been so difficult. Sure, it was a carnival game and those things are notorious for being rigged against the player. And to makes matters worse, Flim and Flam were running the booth and they’ll swindle you out of your soul if they stood to profit from it. But even with the odds stacked against them, Sunset and Twilight should have been able to win that damn parakeet.
Growling in frustration, Sunset got up from her bed and walked over to her desk. It was littered with books and papers and fizzy drinks to keep her awake. She twitched a little as she turned on the lamp and stared at a notebook full of scribbles. To be fair, the word scribbles did not do it justice. What lay before her was a tangled web of mathematical formulas, physics equations and vulgar tautologies that evinced her rapid descent into madness.
“Launch angle,” she seethed, slamming her hands on the desk. “Object projectory. Trajectory! Projectile trajectory.” She breathed heavily through her teeth. Taking a deep breath, she calmed herself and took a seat in the chair. After taking a pen in her hand she noticed the bandages wrapped on her fingers. They reminded her of her failure that day. She had tossed so many rings that her skin began to wear away with each throw. She growled at the bandages. In a fit of aggravation and madness she began to gnaw at the bandages, making cartoonish gnawing noises as she went.
Quickly growing tired of the taste of bandages she slowed her gnawing and glared at her fevered calculations again. Her eyes wandered over to a bottle and ring she’d stolen from the booth before she’d left the park.
“Don’t mock me!” she hissed at the inanimate objects. “I don’t like to lose, I don’t like to lose,” she repeated over and over. She flipped open a new page in the notebook. Instinctively she started scribbling out formulas for determining the landing path of the rings onto the bottles. On one page she repeated the formulas and solutions Twilight had already established back at the park. On the opposing page, she began work on a new thought.
“Okay, she took into account friction, air drag, and varying initial velocity.” She scrunched her face in thought. “It’s a tiny plastic ring. It doesn’t have any of those. Yes, it does!” She stewed in thought. “She also took into account…propulsion, aerodynamic drag. You already said that! I said air drag! It’s different!” Her eye twitched. “Gravity. Gravity is the key! It’s what’s keeping the rings from staying on the bottles. The gravity it too light there. If we could only find a way to strengthen the gravitational pull under the bottles.” She picked up her pen and began chewing on it. “Maybe we could build some sort of gravity well under the booth. Yeah…”
With that she began plotting out a formula to determine how a gravity well would affect the rings’ ability to stay on the bottles. She weighed and measured the ring and bottle for the ninth time. But the new measurements only gave her another thought and more wrinkles to iron out. Plastic and glass weren’t the same. Were they? No, of course not. So the two materials must react differently to gravity. Yes! No!
“Gravity isn’t a chemical! It doesn’t react with anything.” She gnawed a little on her bandages again. “Does it?” She gave it some thought. “No, you stupid pony person, it doesn’t.” She went back to work.
4:01am.
Sunset stood up from her chair and began pacing around her room. She mumbled to herself and then stopped in her tracks. She eyed the ring and bottle on the desk. “FOOLS!” she bellowed, “You thought you could keep your secrets from me?! I’m Sunset Shimmer! I’m a pretty pony, damnit!” She stomped over to the desk and roughly pushed aside the notebook. Slamming the bottle into the middle of the desk she grabbed the ring and stepped back ten paces.
Breathing deep to calm herself, she focused on the bottle and tossed the ring. Just as it had at the park, the ring bounced harmlessly off the bottle. Sunset’s eye twitched as the ring rolled on the floor before falling over. It had to be something else.
“Gravity. No. Parakeet. Yes. Not gravity. It must be relationship between plastic and glass. Of course! Why didn’t I see it before?” Her mind raced again. There had to be a reason the plastic ring would not stay on the glass bottle. Was it molecular? She pulled at her hair and let out a cry of rage. In a flash of orange and red she grabbed the ring and ran to the desk. Repeatedly she slammed the ring onto the bottle. “WHY. DO. YOU. HATE. EACH. OTHER?!”
She pushed the offending objects aside and sat down, seething and panting. “Glass and plastic hate each other. Everyone knows that. It’s a naturally occurring occurrence. Everypony knows that.” Her eye twitched. “Wuaha!” She pulled a couple of science books from the stack and pored over them. She began jotting down notes in the margins of the books and in her notebooks.
Nearly half an hour ticked by before she set down her pen. “Maybe not air drag. Air speed! We didn’t calculate for the resistance of the air. Not just the drag, the speed! The air speed! HA!” She immediately got back to work. After another ten minutes she began to chant again: “I don’t like to lose. I don’t like to lose.
5:42am.
Sunset balled up another piece of notebook paper and tossed it aside. “Parakeet!” She muttered in tongues, throwing in a few streams of actual words like “bump and tingle” and “the radius is pi!” for good measure. As she continued on her frenzied calculations she was unaware of the poem she was reciting:
The game is won,
Twists and turns;
It’s my paradise,
The parakeet burns.
Time ticked on and her eyes grew bloodshot and her hair disheveled. The twitching in her body steadily increased throughout the night and into the early morning. She still wore the same clothes she’d gone to the park with. She could not smell the body odor she was now emitting. But it didn’t matter. There was no stopping her until she figured out how to win that game. Then, she jumped out of her chair.
“I got it! It’s the air speed and velocity of an unladen parakeet! HA!”
Frantically, she returned to work, expecting the answer to be within her grasp.
6:24am.
The sun crept over the horizon and Sunset twitched at the waxing light. A new thought occurred to her. Rainbow Dash had been able to win a parakeet lickety-spilt. But that wasn’t ring toss. That was chucking a baseball at stacked bottles. No, that parakeet didn’t count. It couldn’t. “We didn’t win it, Rainbow did. I didn’t win it.”
That last thought stuck with her. For a minute or two she considered deeply the words she just spoke. There was something there but it remained opaque and impenetrable. Try as she may she could not force her mind to break through to the deeper thought. But it was there, lurking behind the facts and figures that tormented her so.
“Damn Flim and Flam!” she cried. “Waving that damn parakeet in front of our faces. They were insulting us!” She remembered that she’d slapped the damn stuffed animal out of their hands. Some kid caught it, clearly making his day. She and Twilight worked so hard for that – all the calculations and Sunset hurt her fingers – all for some kid to get the parakeet without doing any work. She chewed a little on the bandages again. They’d asked Applejack for her tickets and she’d handed them over. But that didn’t help. In the end, they’d accepted the parakeet Rainbow Dash won from a different game.
Sunset ran with that thought. Applejack gave tickets. Rainbow Dash gave the parakeet. There was a connection. But what was it? She threw open another notebook and drew a Venn diagram. “Maybe it’s not the game. Maybe it’s everything around it. Parakeet! JackelApp gave the tickets. Were they part of the design? What about Applejack? Could she have won?” She filled in one circle with Applejack’s traits and characteristics. “Dashbow easily won. Different game, different outcome, different game, different outcome. But rings on bottles? Could she have won?” She filled out the other circle with Rainbow’s traits and characteristics. But she couldn’t fill out much in the middle. The best she could come up with was athletic and female.
She let out another cried of frustration. “Ooo, look at me, I’m Applejack. I don’t care if I win the parakeet and I wear a hat,” she mocked, doing her best impression of her friend. “And I’m Rainbow Dash,” she said, switching impressions. “I’m really good at winning parakeets. And I’m arrogant and condescending but that’s only because I have multi-colored hair and, like my personality, I don’t know how to tone it down!”
Her eyes darted between each side of the diagram, desperate to find a connection. There was nothing substantial to go on. She buried her face in her hands and her legs bounced wildly. Thoughts raced around her mind and she manically picked at them, hoping for something firm to grasp. Her mind ruminated over the possibility of a biochemical link between Applejack and Rainbow Dash that rendered the parakeet unobtainable.
The room grew quiet and still. Sunset peered over her fingers at the diagram on the desk. “Maybe those two have some otherworldly connection that can only be discovered if it were possible to break the fabric of reality and see who or what created us,” pondered Sunset in a moment placidness. “Parakeet,” she whispered.
Taking advantage of this brief sanity, Sunset quickly recalled the entire sequence of events surrounding the parakeet incident. They went to the amusement park and decided to split up. She and Twilight found the games while Fluttershy went missing, as she’s known to do. Rarity had a meltdown, Rainbow discovered her dislike of rollercoasters, Pinkie impersonated a garbage can, and Applejack just kind of wandered around. Sunset and Twilight played, they lost, they calculated, they lost, and all the while Fluttershy remained lost. Eventually, they gave up on the game, reunited with their friends, and then were whisked away to perform in a parade. Following that, they enjoyed the rest of the night together. Simple. They were happy and the experience, through all its twists and turns and ups and downs, only strengthened the bonds of their friendship. And on that thought Sunset stopped cold.
The words crept out of her mouth as quickly as the realization entered her mind: “It’s not scientific.”
10:22am.
Twilight and company walked down the sidewalk toward the diner. They chatted amongst themselves, mostly discussing what kind of brunch they were going to have and why Sunset wasn’t answering any attempt to contact her.
“She’s probably just sleepin’,” said Applejack. “Y’know she ain’t a morning person.”
“Perhaps,” considered Twilight. “I mean, she was pretty stressed at the park last night.”
The conversation skipped around lightly, and they continued down the sidewalk until they saw a familiar person spastically wandering down the sidewalk, ranting about something, accosting anyone she came across. Then she spotted them. She quickly ran up to the girls.
“You guys! Great news!” she giggled, bouncing in place.
“Sunset, darling, what happened to you?” inquired Rarity. “You look…worn out.”
“Ya look terrible,” offered Applejack. The observation was correct: Sunset looked terrible. Her hair was gnarled and oily, her eyes were red and twitching, and the smile she wore suggested a murder was about to take place. She wore the same clothes as the day before except now they were wrinkled and covered in soda stains and crumbs from various snacks.
“Twilight!” hollered Sunset, grabbing Twilight’s shoulders. “The parakeet!” The jovial tone of her voice juxtaposed with her physical appearance suggested that she was clearly stressed beyond sanity.
“Uh…what?” Twilight asked, cringing at the volume.
“I was running the science last night! A little. The parakeet! That damn parakeet! It’s the answer!” Her eye twitched and she chuckled in a very off putting manner.
“The parakeet from…”
“YES!”
“Ok. What’s it the answer to?”
“All! Everything! I was wrong – it is about the parakeet. It’s the answer to everything! It’s the answer! The answer to everything in life, everything in the universe, and the everything in the…everything!”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific.”
“EXACTLY! It’s not scientific, Twilight. Wuahahahaha! Not scientific!”
Twilight looked uncomfortably at her friends, who all seemed to step away from Sunset. “Uh, if not scientific, what, then?”
“Philosophical! The parakeet is philosophical. It’s a metaphor!” She grabbed Twilight’s shirt with both hands and shook aggressively. “IT’S A METAPHOR!”
“A metaphor? For what?” Twilight adjusted her glasses that had been shaken askew.
Unfazed by the question, Sunset continued. “We tried everything, Twilight. Every gosh damn mathematical and scientific calculation we could think of. NOTHING worked! But that’s not what it was about. It wasn’t about how to win the game; it was about the parakeet. Parakeet! It’s chaos! Don’t you see, Twilight? The parakeet is chaos! It defeated our every attempt to reign it in with our knowledge of the physical and structured universe. But we couldn’t! The parakeet isn’t either of those! It’s not physical or structured.” She let out a sickeningly maniacal laugh. “It’s chaos! CHAOS! We’re not meant to understand it.”
She turned her attention to Applejack. “Applejack! We even asked you for your tickets so we could continue playing. Even with your help we couldn’t overcome the chaos. Friendship cannot win against such a malicious disregard for structure. Wuahahaha! It can only be fed by it! Parakeet! Friendship strengthened because of chaos! Hehehehe! Brilliant! Wuaha!”
She went back to Twilight. “Think about it! It’s a focal point! We see it as structure but it defies our attempts to apply structure to it. Wuaha! We thought it followed the natural rules of this world. Fools! And yet, everything around it remains structured and follows a determined path. But we also followed a determined path. We followed its determined path. Or the path it determined for us. We couldn’t win at that game no matter what we did. Rainbow won but that’s because she was supposed to. And it was a different game! The parakeet determined that. It’s the answer!”
“I’m still not following.”
“Because you can’t! No one can. It won’t allow itself to be comprehended. That’s the beauty of it. The parakeet plays by its own rules. It can’t be won so the game can’t be won. And yet we came out better people. Hehe.”
“Better?” inquired Rarity. “How so?”
“We’re better friends! Right? We almost lost each other last night. The parakeet, in its wisdom, saved us. I won! I lost but I won!”
“I don’t think we were exactly in danger of having a falling out,” replied Twilight.
“Exactly! The parakeet wouldn’t allow it. Because it knows! It knows.” With another demented giggle Sunset left her friends.
The girls stared in confusion and awe as Sunset continued on down the sidewalk, mumbling to herself and barking ‘parakeet’ at passersby. After a brief discussion, the girls quickly hurried after their short-circuiting friend. It was too late, however, and Sunset had already found her way into the diner and was feverishly harassing the patrons with tales of the Almighty Parakeet. It took several minutes – and the intervention of a police officer – to get Sunset to give up on the diner and find somewhere else to extol her newfound beliefs.
11:03am.
“Ya think she’ll be alright?” asked Applejack as she looked down on Sunset laying in her bed.
“I think she just needs some rest,” replied Twilight, sitting at the edge of Sunset’s bed. She adjusted the cold towel on Sunset’s forehead as Sunset slept.
“That was freakin’ weird,” observed Rainbow Dash. “Girl’s got some problems.”
“She just needs some rest, darling,” soothed Rarity. “She’s had a rough time. There’s no need to be crass about it.”
“Do you think any parakeets are in danger?” worried Fluttershy.
“I doubt it,” stated Twilight. “But I think we should probably keep her way from the one you won last night, Dash.”
“Maybe you can give it to someone,” offered Pinkie as she set up the bottle on the desk and took several paces back, holding the ring.
There was an agreement on the decision.
“I just hope she’ll be alright,” soothed Fluttershy, gently petting Sunset’s hand. “I’ve never seen her like that.”
“She was funny!” exclaimed Pinkie Pie as she tossed the ring onto the bottle. “Yay! I win!”
