Cozy Glow was bored.
Life at the School of Friendship in Ponyville, where she had lived up until a week ago, was always interesting – sometimes too interesting for some. Now one might think only a dedicated student and lover of knowledge might think of a school that way (and Cozy Glow was not one, although it was a role she could play as seamlessly as that of the back-of-the-class straggler), but the School of Friendship was no ordinary school.
The headmare was the Princess of Friendship herself, and the school only a stone’s throw from her castle. The teachers were all heroes of Equestria and standouts in their own fields as well, to the point where one wondered where they found the time for classes. The students had been gathered from all over Equestria and beyond, often at the personal recommendation of local leaders.
And while all that would be enough even if the school was in the middle of nowhere, it was actually in Ponyville – a town that had, in just the last decade, seen a parasprite invasion, a rampaging dragon (who also now worked at the school) and all the other things which came with being right on the edge of the notoriously dangerous Everfree Forest.
To sum it up, if the School of Friendship were to be graded on it’s potential for interesting activities and interactions, it would get an A (A+ including its surroundings). Conversely Cozy’s current residence, a cell deep in the Canterlot dungeons, would be lucky to scrape an F. Not that it would have cared, having obviously aimed for its A grade in being the most basic and archetypal example of its kind.
This bid for “platonic ideal of Dungeon” status began with the cell’s fundamental form, a cube of rough, gritty stone just barely long enough each way at ground level for an adult pony to lie down (and therefore a bit roomier for Cozy, who was small even for a filly). It might lose some marks for being too bare and stark, with no real damp or interesting moulds, but that just made every part of the floor equally uncomfortable to lie on – a far cry from the cloud beds of Cozy’s home in Stratusburg or the well-fluffed mattresses in the School of Friendship dorms.
And the lighting was perfect – by day, or at least the early part of it, a thin trickle of sunlight peeked through a barred window barely large enough to warrant the name, right at the top of what Cozy thought of as the “back” wall (it had been in front of her when she entered the cell and she usually slept facing away from it). When it passed - all too quickly for this time of year - the job of illumination was taken up by a pale orange glow from an irregular pattern of holes in the cell’s ceiling. Cozy suspected there was some crystal up there that stored and rationed out sunlight somehow (hence how it would each day start out relatively bright and then slowly dim to nothing) but she was currently in no position to investigate what was sadly likely to be the most interesting feature of the cell.
Not that there was much else which could be called a “feature” at all – just a heavy metal door set in in the “front” wall, a light metal bucket tucked in the back left (of the door) corner, and Cozy herself, who was not made of metal at all - though any metal detection spell cast on her right now might disagree - and was currently in the middle of the cell looking rather dishevelled.
This would be quite a surprise to anypony who had met the little pink filly, who always seemed to maintain a certain doll-like cuteness whether she was smiling or in tears; but just like most of those smiles and tears, that look was fabricated, and the necessary ingredients to do so were still on the shelves of the Friendship School’s bathroom.
So Cozy’s pale pink coat was now matted and greasy, her hide underneath bruised and scraped and as for her once elaborately curled baby blue mane and tail … well there was only so much one could do without product or tools, but Cozy didn’t think that they would be quite as bedraggled if the dungeon guards had seen fit to leave her her ribbons – they were only plain cloth, after all. To be fair, she had received plenty of new accessories in return, but this was one case where more was less – the heavy iron shackles linking her hooves in pairs wore at her fetlocks with every step, and the tight cork straps pinning her wings to her sides precluded even the most basic of preening.
All in all, given the contrast between her current state and the pretty face she had dedicated so much effort to maintaining, one might imagine Cozy would be glad not to have set eyes on a single pony (or any other creature, for that matter) in the week since the cell’s door had been slammed in her face (she’d turned around quickly). But this would not be true. Partly it was because she knew that not seeing was not the same as not being seen; there was one portion of the door, at about a grown pony’s eye level, which looked suspiciously different to the rest of it. But mostly it was the aforementioned boredom.
Oh, it was not that there was nothing to do within the cell, at least for an intelligent and resourceful young filly like Cozy. Naturally for the first day or two she had spent much of her time trying to rid herself of her new adornments, but none of her attempts had even been effective enough for anypony to try and stop her – nor did any guard come when she asked, begged, demanded or feigned sickness. (Perhaps the door was soundproofed? No – she could hear their hooves as they came and went. Or maybe just one way; it would be some irony if they could only see in and she could only hear out.)
She had eventually given up on indiscriminate attention-seeking in the hope that maybe her captors were waiting for her to become docile before approaching her on their own terms - which meant she then needed new, harmless-seeming ways to pass the time. But the cell was too cramped for even a small filly to get much pacing in (five steps for the front and right walls, three for left and back unless she moved the bucket) and the List of everycreature who had crossed her was too long for her to think about without working herself up into a frothing lather.
By now her attempts at diversion followed the shape of the day: during the light hours she looked for patterns in the walls and floor that reminded her of the ritual glyphs that she had no way of using, and at night she listened to the bugs that scuttled by unseen and imagined they were her former classmates; it made it more satisfying when she accidentally crushed one. And of course there was the more fixed twice-daily rituals of chewing at a plate of limp vegetables and gulping stale water from a dish as if she were a dog; and some more variable time afterwards, the ever-engaging challenge of perching on a bucket that stood nearly as tall as she did at the withers. (Like many pegasi, Cozy had never had any need to master the art of standing – or, more relevantly, sitting – bipedally without the use of her wings.)
But all these things could only take up a few hours of a pony’s day at best, and Cozy had never been much of a sleeper. This would also surprise many of her past associates, because Cozy often seemed to doze off so quickly and turn in so early that the leading bet for her cutie mark had been a pillow; and then they might think on how often they had said private things in front of her gently snoring form, or how rarely they had checked that she was actually in bed after she turned in for the night.
But in truth Cozy was used to long days of plotting and scheming, and without anything to focus her talents on nor any ready means of physical exertion she could not tire herself out enough to sleep properly, not on that cold rough floor while the straps dug into her sides and the stink of both the bucket and her unwashed self hung in the stagnant summer air. Instead she napped in short bursts, waking and sleeping almost randomly - though never to the point where she missed a meal, and by that she could still keep track of the days. At least she thought she had … but how could she be sure when every day was the same anyway?
What Cozy was missing most was the raw materials of her talent; other ponies. The tall tower resembling a chess piece on her flank (currently hidden under a layer of dust) represented how she looked down on others from above and moved them around like toys; but this week was the first time since it appeared that she had no pieces left to play with. What satisfaction she could get out of scheming in private depended on her knowing things that others did not, and right now it would be hard to imagine a pony less informed of current events. Indeed the only thing which told Cozy that Equestria (or at least Canterlot) probably hadn’t been overrun by an outbreak of Swamp Fever or demolished by a horde of angry yaks was also the closest thing to equine contact she had each day.
Not long after the window brightened in the morning and not long before the holes went dark each night, a unicorn’s aura (she’d counted at least three distinct ones) opened a flap shorter than Cozy’s legs at the bottom of the door and floated a full food plate and water dish through. Then shortly afterward the same aura opened the flap again, took back its gifts empty or not (although it would leave food if she took it off the plate first), and then for a final trick lifted Cozy’s bucket up to the top of the cell and emptied any contents it had accumulated since the previous meal straight out of the window.
This feat stood out to Cozy not for the telekinetic dexterity it took to accomplish with almost no splashback (some auras leaned more into that almost than others) - no, Professor Rarity could do that with her back turned (as it would probably have to be for her to bear horndleing such an object in the first place). Nor was it the literal way in which magic was being used to remove the need for actual interaction between ponies (and they’d thought losing it all would have been bad for Friendship. As if.) No, what the use of such an awkward method here made clear was that someone didn’t want Cozy’s door open even for as long as it would take to switch in a fresh bucket.
They could be rightly cautious of even a chained Cozy, but even she had to admit that they were unlikely to fear her physically overpowering them. So what they wanted to prevent was either her seeing the guards or her talking to them. And since she had already seen at least most of them and marked them on her List (in the brief minutes of embarrassingly thorough search and redressing between the Cage and the cell) she didn’t see any point in them hiding now. No, what they were obviously trying to avoid was any chance at conversation – and while she had put up with this unsociability for a time, enough was enough. Today she had a plan.
The sun was just peeking through, so any minute now one the guards should be along with another mediocre excuse for a breakfast. When they passed it through, Cozy would do nothing unusual, lulling them into a false sense of security (and, a part of her mind whispered, ensuring that she wouldn’t go hungry even in the slight chance that the plan went wrong). Then, when the guard returned to collect the empties, she would simply refuse to relinquish them. If they tried to float the bucket, she would latch on and pull it back down as best as she could (just in case this part went humiliatingly wrong, she had held back from using it overnight).
Surely such blatant defiance would not be ignored, and the guard would have to open the door to do anything about it. (Unless they used magic somehow.) Even if they punished her, that would in of itself require them to show their faces. (Unless they punished her by not bringing her any more food – no, they wouldn’t have fed her in the first place unless they wanted her alive. A more worrying possibility was that they kept feeding her but stopped emptying the bucket, which would only take a couple of days for her to fill up – but just because she would deal with such recalcitrance that way didn’t mean that some hornbrained jailer would think to, right?)
However Cozy’s plan never quite got to the stage of (surely successful) action because of an unexpected event, one which disrupted the regular patterns she had become used to over the past week. Oh, the delivery was the same as always and the food as bland as ever - the first hint of irregularity was the strange sounds as the guard returned - the creak of wheels alongside their hoofsteps, a hard thump soon after they came to a halt, and a series of strange splashing noises which followed. But Cozy was too busy going over the plan one last time in her head to pay conscious attention to any of these signs – her outer awareness was limited to waiting for the flap to move.
So it was understandably quite a shock when not the flap, but the whole door opened, swinging outwards to the right to reveal a white unicorn mare who Cozy mentally matched to the lavender aura (medium splashback) which had delivered today’s food. She was just wondering if her plan was so perfect that the universe had decided to hand her success without actually having to go through the motions when said aura wrapped around Cozy and hauled her out into the corridor, chains and all.
So sudden and shocking was this turn of events that the pegasus was not only momentarily struck speechless, when she was then dropped in something hot and wet it took her several seconds to notice. Once she finally did realize, she had barely enough time to identify it as a tin bathtub bubbling with suds before the mare set about her with soap and loofah. And when she finally did manage to bring forth words, it was not any of the many scripts she had carefully prepared over the week, but rather the unplanned but sincere exclamation, “I’m fourteen! I can wash myself!”
Of course, said declaration availed her naught. Not only because the first part looked untrue (Cozy’s build was closer to a typical ten-year-old) or because the second was clearly false as long as Cozy remained shackled (she had a vague plan of playing on the one to change the other): but ultimately because, Cozy soon realised, this guard was obviously a mother in her off time. At least, she shared with Cozy’s own mother both a total obliviousness to such assertions of independence and so thorough a talent for finding all the least comfortable spots on Cozy’s body with her tools that the filly resolved to check the mare’s cutie mark as soon as there weren’t bubbles in her eyes. And mouth. And nose. (She wasn’t sure why a pony with that kind of talent would work as a jailer, but then she remembered the search she’d received on arrival – had that been this mare too?)
Still, for all her plans regarding the guards Cozy had never thought of them as individual ponies before, with their own talents, lives beyond their jobs, and even families, and the time she took to contemplate the new angles that brought to the game was long enough for the unicorn to finish – upon which she promptly plucked Cozy straight out of the bath, made one last full-body assault with a towel seemingly pulled from nowhere, and then dumped her right back into a cell and locked the door behind her.
It took the damp and dizzy filly the better part of a minute to realise that this cell was not the (now very familiar) one she had started in, but rather the one opposite. This realization came not from the lack of the usual stench (she was still sniffing soapsuds) nor the subtle differences of texture in the floor (though that would probably have been enough in time) but rather from the only substantial difference between the two rooms; the door.
While the same tapering shape (almost like a giant unicorn horn) as the solid slab that Cozy was all too familiar with, this door’s frame was hollow aside from a few sturdy bars, allowing Cozy to peer straight across into her former cell; it’s door was still open, with the mare standing half-inside. At first it seemed to Cozy that the guard had for some reason decided to this time empty her bucket (hadn’t it been empty?) all over the cell instead of out of the window, but then she lifted another one and Cozy realised that these buckets (looking around, she could count at least five) were filled with soapy water (from the bath? That was hardly cleaner, given the state she had been in.)
It seemed the mare had either already used the other buckets or wasn’t going to, however, as she then gave the one she was hovering a once-over with her trusty towel, floated it into the corner and the stepped back to shut the cell door. This should have given Cozy the glimpse of her flanks she had hoped for earlier, but she was wearing some kind of waterproof overcoat – sensible enough given what she came to do. But that wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that she was leaving - it was now or maybe never. So as the mare locked the door, Cozy decided to give talking another try. And the words this time – still fairly sincere, but carefully chosen – were-
“Thank you.”
The mare seemed a little surprised – at least, she stopped still for a moment, before turning around and looking Cozy straight in the eyes. Only briefly, though, just for the length of a “You’re welcome.” before she turned away, starting to place the empty buckets on the top of a cart that Cozy had only just now noticed but which retroactively explained a lot.
Emboldened – those were the first word’s she’d heard from anypony besides herself in a week – Cozy pressed ahead with the first thing on her mind. “You’re a mom, right? I mean, you have foals? At home?”
The mare definitely took her time to consider that one, before settling on, “That’s for me to know.” The second part, and prisoners not to find out, seemed to go without saying.
Cozy quickly changed tack. “Oh, I’m sorry! None of my business, right! You were just so good at this that I figured you did it a lot!” She paused briefly to let the apology settle, then added more hesitantly, “Um, but if I can’t know about that, can I at least maybe know how come…” The chain between her forehooves jangled as she waved one of them in the general direction of the bars. “I mean, that is my business, right?
This time the reply came with barely a pause. “You’ve got a visitor coming. Don’t get used to it.”
Cozy was ready to reply - perhaps asking who the visitor was, or what she wasn’t supposed to get used to – when the mare started loading the bathtub into the bottom part of the cart. With it as full as it was, this effort brought forth a second layer of aura around her horn, and Cozy became so occupied in wondering what would happen if you hit a unicorn there under those circumstances that by the time her attention returned to the corridor both mare and cart were gone.
Author's Note
If dialogue's your thing, there's a lot more next chapter.
Important story-related question here (spoils the identity of the visitor, if you care).
