They didn't call it the Four o'Clock Strip because it slanted southeast.
They called it that because there wasn't any outside traffic there at four o'clock in the afternoon; just far enough out of the way of the Mistmane Memorial secondary school district and the University of Manehattan campus to not warrant a casual wander-through, and just early enough in the afternoon that the first shift workers downtown wouldn't have gotten off of work and started heading home. And there was never any outside traffic there at four in the morning, because even the brightest-eyed and bushiest-tailed joggers didn't start making their way through the area until 5:00 AM.
Twice per day, from four until five, the strip sat like a mile-long vein of aluminum and concrete: flat rooftops pockmarked with pipes and vents and cable, polychrome billboards unread and balcony guardrails untouched.
And twice per day, from four until five, they came: bankers and juvies, hipsters and factory horses, artistes and adrenaline junkies and talk show hosts and survivalists and more, clad in an uncannily homogenous array of sweatsuits and ready to throw themselves into and over an urban abyss.
Sandbar wasn’t sure if he could pivot and twist to keep balance with more intensity than the flip-flops in his stomach were putting on. He wasn’t sure if he could throw his weight around even an inch, given that somepony had filled his running shoes with lead and tied bricks to his aglets.
So he sat on the roof of a cart suspension factory, silently watching a blonde unicorn and a thinning-maned zebra take positions near the lip of the building. A thick cable less than a foot away from the unicorn trailed off over the foggy pavement below; on the far side, it promised a makeshift runway on the top of a dilapidated cannery, and in between the buildings it promised a sharp fall and a messy ending.
On an unspoken cue, they went, one after the other. Plucking a steel bar up off of the rooftop, the unicorn lept. Her front legs swung upwards to clamp around the bar, and for a split second the bar and her hooves formed a beautifully imperfect triangle around the cable. Then gravity took hold, and the unicorn’s entire body shuddered as she clung to her improvised zipline for dear life.
When the zebra followed her, it was easy to tell who was less of a stranger to the course. His body barely shuddered as his bar hit the cable, and he soared down the line with the sort of frictionless grace that belied the body of a colt two decades younger. Sandbar watched him sail down into the darkish-bluish-grey of a dawn that hadn’t quite come, and it wasn’t until the fog had begun to mask the zebra’s dwindling body that Sandbar snapped out of his daze.
To the neutral expectation of everypony else, he inched a little closer to the edge. To his own intense surprise, he didn’t immediately scurry back again. It was half a relief to know that he had some control over himself, but the full satisfaction of knowing he had control over the situation escaped him.
“Turtle.”
“Daedalus.” Sandbar saw her without turning his head, felt her without leaning back to touch the mare’s withers.
“Today?”
“Yeah. Today.”
That much, Sandbar was absolutely sure of: today he either did the course or left. Even if the Four O’clock Ponies were into voyeurs, he knew he wouldn’t be able to look at any of them, much less himself.
Sandbar tugged his hood down, let his ears pick up the ambient pulse of Manehattan proper. There was the thrum, of course — anyone in a city couldn’t escape the dull background throb of commerce and industry — but it was almost eerily quiet in spite of it. There was enough quiet, and enough time, to hear the contours of the route he’d either take or not take in the next couple of minutes.
“Turtle.”
Last chance. Five o’clock was almost here.
Sandbar staggered to the edge, grabbed a cool steel handle and waited. He didn’t need to turn his head to see Daedalus crouch behind him, didn’t need to lean back to feel the mare’s muscles tense in anticipation.
On an unspoken cue, he lept.
To his delight, his body didn’t immediately betray him. His legs swung up, grabbed the bar nice and securely and kept his forelegs slightly loose, and took his mind off of the shuddering jolt of impact. Then he was flying, too, down the makeshift bridge above the void, keeping his thoughts on where he was going to be.
And there it was, the cannery strip, a stony great-aunt waiting for a hug. Sandbar let go, relaxed, curled —
— rolled —
— And there he was again, upright, and the lead in his shoes turned to rubber and launched him forward as Daedalus landed behind him.
Maintenance guardrail. Who sticks a maintenance guardrail on top of a building? Ponder questions about scenic view later - Sandbar could all but feel Daedalus breathing down his neck. Couldn’t think of the guardrail as a blocker - had to think of it as a springboard. The thin metal rail sat like a gate as Sandbar barreled towards it, and he leapt without thinking, curling his hind legs back in a vault before pressing back against the other side of the rail.
Again, Sandbar soared. This time, he didn’t know what roof he was gliding towards. Textile factory? Didn’t matter. Sandbar curled as he landed, momentum decreasing by only a fraction of one percent, and his spine barely registered the impact of his roll as he continued running.
This time, the building in front of him wasn’t meant for a clear landing - there was no way anypony could gain an extra ten meters of height on a single jump. But the weathered fire escape hugging the building’s sides gave its identity away: the former history museum of Manehattan Municipal Judge Peaceleague, with wide stairs and landings to accommodate his similarly wide frame.
One jump more, and his hooves kissed the wrought iron of the landing. The back-and-forth descent of the steps made straight pivots impossible without losing precious speed. Instead, he lifted a hind leg as he spun, took the impact and sprang off again, hurtling down the steps with the grace of a pinball smacking cleanly against a bumper. Bam, bam, bam, bam, he was down one story, two —
There was his next target. The guardrail ahead was neatly broken off to reveal a fire escape on a building just too far to cleanly vault to, space broken only by a billboard to his right: the label and slogan of a stocky “green living” office complex below. Different from the rest of the run, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
This time, Sandbar sprang up slightly to the right, and let momentum carry him in an arcing sprint on the billboard, hoofsteps in nigh-parallel sync with thick plywood and reinforced steel. The humor inherent in advertisements actually proving useful flitted through his head in the briefest of moments; then it was gone, torn away by the air pressure that struggled with his frenetic charge.
Springing off the billboard, Sandbar cleared the guardrail with ease, bouncing once again down staircase after staircase. Dimly, he recognized the pounding of hoofbeats on the metal above him. Faintly, he recognized the city around him was growing brighter, as dawn crept higher into the sky.
There was the next break in the guardrail, revealing a broad, flat rooftop ahead. Brain barely registering the air ducts and vents that pockmarked its surface, Sandbar cleared the gap with ease and headed into his final stretch. Vault, slide, vault, vault - the nubs and veins of the building couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even hope to hamper him. This was exactly what he had trained for: he was a crossbow’s quarrel now, unfettered and unstoppable, liberated by the rush of adrenaline and speed. Two challenges left, now, and he had stared at them for more hours than he cared to admit. Two challenges, and he was in the clear.
Almost abruptly, the roof gave way not to a sheer drop, but a glistening slope. It had been the last of Manehattan’s demiskyscrapers to use a semi-angular ceiling as an inspired architectural flourish, only months before it became expected and mere years before it was trite. Curving his body as he lept, Sandbar took the slope cleanly, letting gravity aid his breakneck descent. Only ten meters until the last bit. Five —
Pulling himself off of the slope, Sandbar leapt one last time. Almost like a target circle, a large rectangle of cotton and cloth and packing peanuts jutted up from the rooftop down below. Sandbar’s jump carried him high into the sky, higher, the sun lighting his silhouette in aureole —
Wait. Wait, this was wrong, he was going too fast, he was going too far. This couldn’t be happening he was going to overshoot the strip and he was going to become so much paste and he had trained for this and this wasn’t supposed to happen and he was going to no no no no —
Abruptly, something caught Sandbar’s legs. He jerked back, momentum still sending him forward - but it had been stopped just long enough to soften his arc. Gasping in spite of himself, Sandbar fell, almost straight down, plummeting almost dead center into the target strip.
Whumph.
For a second or two, Sandbar lay there. Motes of light danced in front of his eyes, and his empty lungs curled in on themselves, too impacted to give him space to breathe. Then, finally, Sandbar gasped, coughed and gasped again.
The idea of moving seemed ridiculous, now. The idea of doing much of anything but laying there for approximately forever seemed ridiculous. And yet he blinked, and turned his head ever so slightly to the shadow that loomed above him.
“Turtle.”
“Daedalus.” Sandbar coughed. “I...I’m sorry, I…”
“Need to work on sticking the landing. And making the landing. Dismount needs practice.” Daedalus began to unzip her hoodie, apparently unfazed by the major concussion the cotton-cloth-packing-peanuts landing should have given her thirty seconds ago, and her mane caught the sunlight as it slid off her shoulders. For a moment that seemed to stretch for decades, Daedalus’s head and shoulders seemed to shine brighter that the unbridled power of any unicorn, almost as bright as the sun itself.
“Still. You’ve got good momentum.” Daedalus tucked her bangs behind her shoulder, grabbed Sandbar by the forehoof and hauled him upright. “Clean enough for government work, honestly. Glad to have you with us, Sandbar.”
Overall, it was a wonderful reunion: the food was great, the music was better and the meetup with everyone else was the best of them all.
Naturally, Sandbar celebrated the success of the reunion by pretending he had to go to the bathroom, sidling over to the local lake and idly staring up from the edge of the pond at the evening sky.
The party should have been winding down by now. Even if his other classmates decided to stay for a few more days, everyone would still likely be packing it up and heading off to sleep. With luck, they’d have decided that he needed to catch up on sleep, or that he had a stomach bug, or something else convenient and excusable. It wasn’t hard to come up with reasons, really, but it was much more courteous to make up reasons for the absent party.
Equestria practically ran on courtesy. Etiquette was effectively its currency. Deference was its national motto. Most of the students at Twilight’s friendship academy learned at least that much during their classes, and it’d be ridiculous for classmates to to forget absolutely everything they learned in front of each other. It wasn’t too much to hope they’d remember a smattering of decorum, right?
Sandbar leaned back against the grassbank. Staring at the stars was, frankly, really boring. Trying to daydream was way less effective than just letting it happen, but he’d already tried that enough that it had gotten boring. It would have been nice to remember to bring headphones, but of course he’d been courteous and polite enough to not bring over the equipment that lead to the universally-recognized symbol of “I’m not listening to you, go away.”
If he wasn’t banking so heavily on courtesy, he’d almost be annoyed at it.
But he could curb annoyance for the moment. Smiling and nodding wouldn’t be too hard to do for however long he needed to do it for, and then he’d get some actual time alone to do, uh…
Whatever. Stuff. Didn’t matter all that much, he’d figure something —
“Yo! Sandy!”
Oh, for crying out loud.
“Heya, Smolder.” Sandbar turned his head a fraction of an inch; enough to acknowledge that the dragon was there, but not enough to seem excited about it. “How’re you doing?”
“Bad. Because you ditched, and now I feel like an idiot for having to make sure you’re okay.” Completely ignoring his carefully crafted body language, Smolder stomped across the grass, covering an unreasonable amount of distance in an unreasonable amount of time. “What the heck are you doing over here?”
“Oh, y’know...just kind of thinking. A little overwhelmed by everything.” Sandbar tilted his head back up to the sky. “Trying to calm down a little.”
“Bull.”
“What do you mean ‘bull’?”
“I mean that it’s easy to tell when a pony’s actually smiling and when they’re just pretending to smile. So, yeah, bull.”
Smolder sat down on the ground next to him, and Sandbar made the mistake of looking right at her. A small twinge, like the pluck of a violin string, reverberated faintly from inside his ribcage; for a second, Sandbar imagined what might really make him smile.
“It’s never really pretending to smile, when you think about it.”
“Wrong. You wanna use verbal ballet on other dragons to make them think how you want? Go ahead. But you’re full of bull, and you know it.”
Sandbar sighed, not daring to look her in the eye. “Fine. You got me. Now what?”
“What do you mean ‘now what?’ I’m not your therapist, Sandy.” Smolder folded her arms on top of her knees and rested her head on her makeshift bridge. “But you’ve got something to say, and even if you’d prefer not saying it and letting yourself be miserable for the rest of your life, I don’t. So you’re gonna tell me, or I’m gonna drag you back by your fluffy frill and make you socialize until you can’t stand it anymore.”
“It’s called a mane.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re mean, you know that?” Sandbar smiled, despite himself. “Like, the meanest.”
“Not a tenth as mean as you are dippy.” Smolder turned her head, and Sandbar didn’t need the sunlight to tell she was smiling back. “So?”
“It’s gonna sound weird.”
“And that’s different from how you normally sound?”
“Fine.” Sandbar stretched, forehooves reaching out for the sky. “I need something to do.”
Silence.
“Wait.” Smolder paused. “This is because you’re bored?”
“I mean the sort of thing that I can talk about when this sort of thing happens.” Sandbar huffed. “For actual conversations. I need to have done something worth talking about, ergo I need something to do. I know that talking about nothing for hours is something that Equestria does, but it looks a lot easier than it is, trust me.”
“So, uh.” Smolder scratched her head. “Do something, then?”
“Like what?”
“Am I your hatchlingsitter or something? Do you seriously need me to think for you?”
“Well,” Sandbar replied as he turned back to Smolder again. “What have you been doing? Something to think about wouldn’t hurt.”
“You really wanna go down that rabbit hole? You couldn’t do what I do, trust me.”
“Is it impossible?”
Smolder smirked. “Yeah.”
“Physically impossible?”
Smolder’s smirk widened. “Yeah.”
“The sort of physically impossible thing only dragons can do?”
The smirk on her face froze. “Uh.”
“Yes or no.”
“...No.” The smirk vanished. “See, at least I can be up front about what things are really like.”
“So could I theoretically do it with enough training?”
“I don’t know. Could you?” Smolder groused. “Why are you being a butt about this?”
“I dunno. Maybe I’m just trying to rattle your chains. Maybe I’m genuinely interested. Maybe this could actually be the different something I’m looking for.”
“Or maybe you’re just being dippy.” Smolder stretched, then leaned back onto the grass, wriggling a little as she made herself comfortable.
“Maybe you’re just being mean.” Sandbar held out a hoof. Smolder turned her head and, after a half second pause, returned the trans-species hoof bump.
“Maybe I am.” Smolder confirmed.
“So?”
Smolder sat up. “I’m getting on the Ponyville - Manehattan at 10:30. Use your charm and your “Friendship Academy Graduate” cred or whatever to convince the conductor to let you on with me. We’ll take it from there.”
Sandbar frowned. “That doesn’t exactly sound legal.”
“Yeah, but smiling vacantly all the time almost certainly is legal. Your call, Sandy. Keep doing that forever, or live a little.” Smolder stretched, then held out her claw. “And come on back to the party, okay? I’m not the only one who wanted to see you.”
Sandbar took her claw and let her pull him upright. Brushing his bangs out of his eyes, Sandbar flicked his tail and stared at her for a second.
“What?” Smolder asked.
“You wanted to see me?”
Smolder snorted, spun around and marched back towards the party. “You’re such a dip, Sandy.”
“And you’re mean,” Sandbar replied as he followed her.
Neither could suppress their grins.
