The Backup Pair

by Mica

Rating: everyone
Tags: Pipp Petals, My Little Pony: A New Generation, Slice of Life
Length: 2344

Pipp Petals loses her contact lenses. And her self-confidence.

Pipp Petals loses her contact lenses. And her self-confidence.

Published 2021-10-21 22:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2021-10-21 22:20:00 UTC

Cygnet

Where’s the package?

Where’s the package!?

Pipp sits up in her bed, and feels around her right-side nightstand.

It’s not there!

Her package of contact lenses hasn’t arrived!

What could have possibly gone wrong!? She told the guards the same instructions she gives at the beginning of every month: drop the box of contact lenses at her room once they arrive. If it doesn’t arrive after midnight, just quietly place it under her nightstand while she’s asleep, so she can open it up in the morning and put them on.

She begins to panic.

Scratch that. She’s already been panicking for the past five minutes.

She doesn’t use her cell phone. She has a landline with direct connection to the guard staff for emergencies. And this is an emergency, all right.

“Ah, Your Highness, you’re awake,” is the first thing she hears after dialing.

“Zoom Zephyrwing, you have some explaining to do! Where in Equestria are my contacts!?” It’s the most lively she’s ever sounded at 7:30 in the morning.

“We were waiting until you had woken up to tell you, Your Highness. Your package was being delivered overnight by a grey pegasus mailmare, who unfortunately crashed into the Zephyr Muffins Inc. billboard in Downtown, due to the fog last night. Your package was completely destroyed, and the contact lenses were unrecoverable. We deeply apologize for the mishap, Your Highness.”

“Ugh, well, fire that mailmare and replace her with somepony competent!” Even though magic returned and the pegasi now had true flight, it seemed that some pegasi were slower to pick up flying than others.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Well!? Tell me, when am I gonna get my contacts!?”

“Yes, Your Highness, we’re doing everything we can, but unfortunately the ‘special’ contact lenses you require are on backorder. They won’t arrive until this afternoon.”

“This afternoon!? But I have a livestream scheduled later this morning! And a pancake luncheon with the unicorn delegation after that!” She rehearses the batter-pouring and flipping motion with her hoof. Maybe she could pull it off without burning herself on the griddle.

She can’t. If there’s a griddle in front of her now, she’ll become horse barbeque.

“Ugh, this is, like, the worst day EVER!!” Exasperated, Pipp hangs up.

Sitting in her bed, she tries to parse her surroundings. Nothing but blurry dots of gold and beige. If she hadn’t remembered being in here the night before, she wouldn’t know that she’s in her bedroom.

Special contact lenses. Pipp needs “special” contact lenses because they don’t make prescriptions strong enough to fix her horrible vision.

It isn’t fair. Zipp looks at screens too. She reads all those science books. And yet she still has perfect 20/20 vision. Zipp must have inherited her good vision from Mom. Of course she’d inherit all the good things from Mom.

Pipp gets up from bed and tries her best to navigate around her massive bedroom in the castle. She can see a faint trace of the dark border around the rug. She uses that as a guide. If she gets too close to the border, she’ll hit the wall.

She follows the border.

She trips and falls as the border travels under her bed. She pouts as she sinks back into her soft mattress.

Okay. Get up again. Different strategy this time.

The walls. The walls are a bright gilded color. If she feels along the walls, maybe she’ll be able to orient herself.

Which one is the door to her walk-in closet?

She opens the door—

No, that’s the bathroom.

Or is that the janitor’s closet?

She tries flying around in the high ceilings of her room, but she quickly abandons that after colliding head on with the chandelier and getting bits of shiny gold leaf on her face.

Not quite the “Glow Up” she expected.

She lies in resignation on her bed. She bites her lip. Guess this means she’s going to have to wear…

…The Backup Pair.

Her backup pair of super-thick glasses from fifth grade. From before she became famous.

Once she finally was eligible to wear contacts in seventh grade, she couldn’t wait to never wear those horrible glasses ever again.

She would’ve crushed them into a million pieces if she had the choice.

Everyone at Zephyr Heights Academy, the most prestigious private school in the city, was from an important family. The son of the lead news anchor at ZBS. The daughters of the CEO of Z-Mobile Telecommunications. Nopony at school seemed to care that Pipp was a Princess. If anything, all eyes were on Zephyrina. The Crown Princess. The normal-winged one. The smarter one.

Pipp was the short and ugly one. The little sister. The Not Crown Princess. With thick glasses and downy feathers like an infant pegasus. “Baby Pipp,” they used to call her at the playground, while making little baby coos and stuffing a pacifier in her mouth.

She spits—

—out of reflex. Trying to get the pacifier out of her mouth.

It’s like just by touching The Backup Pair, all those memories just come flooding back.

Yet she still keeps the pair right in her nightstand drawer, out of necessity.

Like a tumor of her past that she can’t separate from.

Pipp feels around her room to her vanity desk. Her “Glowing Up” table. The bright motion-activated lights around the mirror make it easy to locate.

She slips the frames on.

The reflection in the mirror suddenly becomes much clearer. Her first instinct is to breathe a sigh of relief, but the feeling quickly disappears.

Square lenses.

Square lenses.

Square lenses!?

Whose grand idea was it to make her wear square lenses?

No wonder the kids made fun of her. She forgot how…how square they are.

There’s a knock on the door.

Pipp quickly slips off the glasses and hides it in the seat of her chair. She fixes her posture. “Enter.”

She hears the door open. “I have your breakfast, Your Highness.”

She recognizes the voice of Thunder, one of the other guard ponies. “Just set it down over there, Thunder.” She points to a brownish blur where her coffee table usually is, in the other corner of the room.

She hears the plate softly clink on the table.

“What’s in it?”

There’s a brief pause. Perhaps the guard pony’s confused. “It…it’s just your usual, Your Highness.”

Her usual? With her vision showing her nothing but blobs, she aimlessly samples the air with her nose. She can barely smell butter, which might be from croissants. Strained yogurt doesn’t have much of a smell. Neither do peaches and grapes.

“Erm…could you actually set it right here, Thunder?” She taps the surface of her vanity desk.

“Very good, Your Highness.”

Now she can smell it much closer. It is her usual. Croissants. Peaches fragrant enough to smell. And what could be a hard-boiled egg, if her vision’s correct.

Or maybe that’s the salt shaker.

Pipp scans the contents of her breakfast plate, her snout just a few inches from the food. It’s probably a very bizarre sight for the guard pony to witness.

“That will be all, Thunder. Leave me.”

“Very good, Your Highness.”

She hears the door close shut. Pipp turns her chair to face the vanity mirror, she puts the glasses on, she exhales a sigh of relief as the blurry inconveniences go away—

—then she gasps before wiping a dot of yogurt off her snout.

“Ugh,” she mutters to herself as she crumples up the dirty napkin.

The old glasses barely fit on her face—she has grown. More precisely, she has blossomed.

Finally in high school, the downy-winged little duckling turned into a swan. Suddenly, being short was “cute.” She became recognized for the singing ability she always had, and everypony suddenly started to pay attention to her. The foals at school that once made fun of her now posed for selfies with her and complimented her on all her sold-out concerts.

With her glasses on, Pipp scrolls through her recent smiling selfies from having dinner with her now 20-something friends from Zephyr Heights Academy.

The pink one pushed her off the swing in fourth grade.

The sky blue one with the variegated wings threw a diaper in her face in sixth grade and called her “Pee-Pee Petals.”

Looking at the photos through those glasses…somehow makes her remember those things.

She chose to ignore the truth behind those fake smiles. She chose it call it “kids being kids” or “teenage drama.”

You never really want to be friends with your classmates. You just become friends with them because you don’t have much of a choice.

At that moment, she gets a direct message from the sky blue one with the variegated wings.

Hey Pipp, any chance of some “special discount” tickets for your next concert? I’m kinda broke rn and 500 Bits seems a lot

That’s not a friend. Even if she’s never had a true friend in her life, she knows that that is not the way to be a friend.

That’s why she likes having fans. She expects nothing from her fans. If they don’t like her anymore, they just leave. And her heart would only break a few hairline cracks.

Friends are close enough to hurt you. Friends could betray you. They could be two-faced and stab you in the back. Or stab you in the back one day, then pretend to care about you again by paying for your hospital bill the next day.

It isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair. Stupid guard pony. Stupid fog. What an excuse for incompetence. She’ll fire her and sue her, that incompetent fool.

And Zipp—Zephyrina, the pony who’s got her whole life perfectly arranged for her, all the science equipment she wants, her name engraved on the crown (and she can actually see the engraving with her naked eye).

Meanwhile Pipp’s had to sweat and toil just to make a name for herself. And now Pipp’s all in a blur, can’t even find the stupid bathroom, and she’s at the mercy of some lowly guardpony and a beyond-menial, inexperienced mailmare.

She hates that guard pony. She hates Zipp. She hates her two-faced “friends” from school. She’ll fire them. She’ll fire them and sue them and punish them—

Pipp never truly became a swan.

She’s ugly.

As ugly and hateful and bitter as the bullies at school.

Sure, some of those bullies were truly evil to her. But becoming just like them is never going to solve anything.

There’s a knock on the door.

Her hooves have the reflex to pull the frames off her face, but she stops herself. “Come in.”

With her glasses on, she can see right away it’s Zoom Zephyrwing.

“Just to inform you, Your Highness, your contact lenses are enroute via express ground shipping. All the best mail couriers are monitoring your package every step of the way. We expect them to arrive by 2 o’clock this afternoon.”

“Great,” she says, stopping midsentence.

“We’ll deliver them straight to your nightstand once they arrive, or perhaps you’d like it hoof-delivered to you?”

“I’ll be at the pancake luncheon then. Just have somepony let me know, and I’ll excuse myself to receive the package.”

“Very good, Your Highness.” The guard pony turns to walk out of the room.

“Oh, Zoom?” she stops her.

“Yes, your Highness?”

“Th…thank you.” The Princess smiles.

The guard pony smiles back. “You’re welcome.”

The door closes shut.

Pipp walks up to the window of her apartment on the top floor of the castle. She pulls aside the curtain, revealing the camera-flash-proof glass. (Since the pegasi regained flight, height is no longer a guarantee of privacy from the paparazzi.)

Zoom is right—the fog is pretty dense. But it’s slowly lifting. She can faintly see the downtown skyline. There’s a construction crew busy repairing the dent in the giant Zephyr Muffins Inc. billboard hanging in downtown.

She smiles a little.

Perhaps that grey pegasus mailmare crashed into the billboard for a reason. To teach her a lesson.

“Thank you, grey mailmare,” she whispers to herself, barely audible. “Thank you, grey mailmare, whoever you are.”

Wearing her glasses, she navigates to the sofa in her bedroom. She sets up her ring light and phone stand on the coffee table.

She presses “Start.”

Loading…

She takes a deep breath.

00:00:00

00:00:01

“Hi, PippSqueaks! Today I’m wearing these glasses, because I want to tell you a story. About the pony I once was, back in grade school.”

Epilogue

Closer to 1pm, there’s a knock on the door.

“Hi Pipp!”

Even if Pipp weren’t wearing her glasses, she could recognize that voice and clinking of friendship bracelet beads from a mile away. “Izzy! Ohmygosh, what’re you doing here?”

“I’m here as part of the Unicorn Delegation for the pancake luncheon thingy, but I wanted to stop by first and say hi!” She stares at Pipp’s glasses with curiosity. “Th…those are new.”

“Actually they’re not.” Pipp chuckles to herself. “They look pretty hideous, don’t they?”

“Well, if you’re looking for a change…” Izzy pulls out a whole rack of glasses frames, seemingly out of thin air. “I make all my own fun glasses frames! I have heart-shaped ones, I have pink light-up ones, and ooh, ooh, these are my favorite!” The unicorn puts on a pair with thin, black round frames. “Claaaaassy, amirite?”

“Izzy, these are nice…but I need really heavy prescription lenses. What you have here are just fashion frames.”

Izzy slips off her fashion frames. “Oooh…well why didn’t you say that was your problem!? Unicorns get vision problems all the time, y’know! But since we got magic back, there’s a super easy fix!”

“What’s that?”

Izzy points to her horn. “Lasik surgery, of course!”

Author's Note

I don't know what the hay this story is, but it's been a really rough past few weeks and I wanted to try to get a story out.

I myself have had prescription glasses since 3rd grade. Never worn contacts in my life.

A sequel/spinoff may be coming.