From her prone position on her bed, Sunset Shimmer looked at her phone screen, and then let it fall on the covers. Her head quickly followed.
What were the odds? How did every single one of her friends have plans for tonight?
Twilight was at a science expo, Rainbow was at practice, Rarity was at a dress rehearsal with some of her other friends, Applejack was at a family reunion, Fluttershy was petsitting, Pinkie was covering a shift at the diner, even Wallflower was busy. Wallflower!
Well, in fairness, she was on a trip with her family, but still. And she’d only been left behind at a gas station once (which was a marked improvement on how things usually went for her).
Sunset sat up, suddenly feeling resolute. Even if nobody else was here, that wouldn’t stop her from having a good time. She was by herself, so by default, she had the voting majority. No need to compromise on plans or worry about various schedules or inadvertently leaving anyone out. She could do anything she wanted to do!
That just left one question. Her hands slowly lowered.
What did she want to do?
Sunset stood and threw her head back, draining the rest of the mug, then slammed it back on the table. She threw her hands into the air and stuck her tongue out triumphantly. She knew she’d just consumed four pounds of milkshake and that she’d probably regret that later, but in this moment, she was Sunset Triumphant and she was on top of the world.
Or, at the very least, the coolest person in Mooriella’s Milkshake and Karaoke Bar.
As the other guests cheered, the waitress checked the stopwatch one more time to make sure it had been fast enough, then obligingly marked it off her bill, laid it down, and walked off.
As everyone else returned to their own milkshakes, Sunset sat back down, feeling very proud… and a little too full.
Still, worth it.
She glanced around. She’d been wanting to come here for a while. Now she’d definitely recommend it to her friends, if for no other reason than watching Rainbow Dash and Applejack talk each other into that Milkshake Challenge. She imagined the face Rarity would make at the thought of eating so much ice cream in so little time (though Sunset knew from personal experience that Rarity was not above ice cream binges).
Her shoulders wilted slightly. Great. Now she was missing her friends all over again.
Still feeling triumphant but now a little sad, she glanced at the menu. A happy cow holding a tray of milkshakes smiled brightly back at her, ostensibly Mooriella and her two best friends (not the milkshakes). With a smile and a little head shake, she opened it up. She considered ordering something salty to offset how sweet that milkshake had been, but she didn’t make it to that side of the menu before her stomach grumbled threateningly. “Ok, maybe I won’t do that, then,” she decided, setting it back down.
Well, she’d wanted to come here to check out both sections of Mooriella’s Milkshake and Karaoke Bar, so karaoke it was.
The restaurant was split into two areas, with food service on one side of a half-wall ‘Wall of Fame’, complete with signed dollarydoos and other mementos covering the surface, with karaoke being hosted on the other. With steps that were just a little bit wobbly, she left the dining area and followed the sound of the music.
As much as it could be called such, that is.
She slowed down as she approached, wincing. Whoever was singing right now, really couldn’t. “Ugh,” she grumbled. “Someone had better go get that poor cat to the vet.” Slightly buoyed by the fact that she couldn’t possibly be worse than the current performer, she made her way over to the signup sheet to give it a try.
And then she stopped short. She blinked, then took a step back to confirm what she already knew.
That was Adagio Dazzle up on that stage.
She held the microphone in one hand, bent over, eyes closed, and singing just as hard as she could. Her shirt was a low-cut crop top that looked a little smaller than it should have been, and she was seemingly unaware that her current position was giving the front few rows a bit of an extra show. Her voluminous hair went further down her back than her tight short shorts went, brushing against the tops of the tall, heeled boots she wore.
Sunset watched, fascinated against her will. Adagio was absolutely awful. Dreadful. Terrible. Horrific. She couldn’t have thought she sounded like anything other than nails scraping on a chalkboard, or Zephyr Breeze’s van when he thought that the mechanic telling him that brakes need to be replaced was trying to scam him.
But judging by her enthusiasm (and the crowd’s reaction), she was having the time of her life.
The song soon ended. With a cool, collected confidence that belied her performance, Adagio set the microphone back on the pad and descended proudly in almost a strut, hips rocking slightly.
And then she locked eyes with Sunset and stopped short. “Sunset Shimmer?” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?” she asked accusatorially.
Sunset’s stomach chose that moment to gurgle. “Making questionable decisions,” she said wryly.
Adagio raised an eyebrow.
“Uh… buy you a milkshake?” Sunset tried, knowing full well that Adagio was likely going to dismissively turn her down.
Adagio grabbed the salt shaker and added even more salt on top of her salted caramel delight, stirred it with the straw, and then drank it quickly and eagerly.
Sunset blinked. Adagio had accepted—irritably and with barely a word, but had accepted. Now, they sat in a small booth in the back corner of Mooriella’s, in the milkshake half but still within sight of the karaoke stage. Honestly, she wasn’t sure what to do next. She hadn’t expected to get this far.
Adagio let out a soft, contented sigh, then quickly tried to suppress it. She gestured at the empty space in front of Sunset. “What, milkshakes aren’t good enough for Sunset Shimmer?”
“I just did the milkshake challenge,” Sunset explained. “I’m a little milkshaked-out for now.”
“Ugh. And I thought Sonata was crazy.”
“Did get it for free,” Sunset said in her defense, realizing as she said it that that wasn’t quite as strong a defense as she would have liked.
Adagio smirked.
“So,” Sunset continued, “what’s a nice siren like you doing in a place like this?”
“Singing,” Adagio deadpanned.
Sunset tried to turn her scoff into a cough.
“What, you didn’t like my performance?” Adagio needled.
Sunset hesitated. “It was…” Her voice trailed off.
“Say it,” Adagio invited coolly, one eyebrow raised.
“Not your best work,” she tried.
Adagio scoffed. “I owned that stage,” she said.
“I couldn’t look away,” Sunset conceded.
A brief scowl flickered across Adagio’s face, and she took another drink of her milkshake.
Sunset tried to save it. “It wasn’t… bad, just…” But she didn’t know where to go from there.
“Lying doesn’t become you, Sunset Shimmer,” Adagio said coolly. “It was dreadful and we both know it.”
“Then why did you do it?” Sunset had to ask.
“Oh, I see,” Adagio said knowingly. “You don’t get how a proud siren like me would go up on stage in front of a huge group of human scum and humiliate myself by sounding like I’m doing my best impression of an alley cat in heat?”
Sunset blinked. Adagio had read her like a book. “Scum?” she protested, because that was the only objection she could think of.
Adagio smirked at her expression and offered no further explanation.
“I guess I’m just surprised you’re here instead of on a tour somewhere,” Sunset continued. “With a few more people in the audience, tickets, and microphones that don’t sound like-”
As if on cue, they heard a brief burst of feedback. The singer currently on stage nearly dropped it in surprise.
“-that,” Sunset finished, wincing.
“Little something known as an off season kinda puts a damper on that,” Adagio said airily. “We’re picking up what gigs we can, but festival season is over.” Her smirk returned. “Come see us next summer,” she invited, with the air of a spider inviting in a fly. “Maybe I’ll get you a backstage pass.”
Sunset cracked a smile. ‘Sunset’s Backstage Pass’, eh? That had a nice ring to it. She brightened as something occurred to her. “Oh, hey, with Post Crush re-retired, did you girls get bumped up?”
Adagio scowled.
Sunset winced. She got the distinct feeling she’d inadvertently touched a sensitive spot.
“We should be headliners,” Adagio said, her hand tightening around her milkshake glass as she jammed the spoon in harder than necessary. “Vocal processing is an abysmal substitute for magic. Every day is the same. We can’t take requests, we can’t change up our set on the fly, we can’t have audience participation, we’re very… stagnant. And since what we do have takes so long to process, we can’t do whatever song is popular with the unwashed masses this week.”
“Oh, like that kitty cat song?”
“Yes,” Adagio said with a hint of exasperation. “Sonata would definitely, gladly, make a complete idiot out of herself on stage while singing that song. Not that she isn’t one already,” she amended, “but you know what I mean. By the time we got that sounding good, we’d all look like idiots for performing it when they’ve moved on to whatever new song the mindless masses have trending on SnapGab.”
Sunset decided to skip over that for now. “There’s got to be a way to do that processing thing live, though, right?” she tried.
“Oh, there is,” Adagio conceded with faux cheeriness. She pulled her phone out and swiped, choosing a bookmark from the browser. “It’s just…” She held it out.
Sunset looked at the price and choked. She didn’t even want to think of how many shifts she’d have to work to have that kind of cash.
“Yeah,” Adagio said snippily, pulling her phone back. “Not really feasible. And touring isn’t as profitable as you’d think, at that. And gas is getting expensive,” she added under her breath.
“So is that why you’re here?” Sunset asked, realization in her voice. “Because you don’t have to worry about any of that?”
Adagio exhaled tensely.
Sunset knew she was right and that Adagio didn’t want to admit it; and for a moment, she wondered if she’d pushed too far.
And then the tenseness faded. She looked down at her milkshake, now almost gone. “Here, they don’t care,” she admitted, her voice suddenly weighed down, weary, exhausted. “They’ll cheer just as hard for the male model here every week fishing for a date as the mousy girl out with her friends for the first time in public since kindergarten. And that makes it tolerable and excruciating at the same time.” Her lip twitched. “I would give anything to be able to sing again. To get up on stage and command their attention just by my presence, to have them adore me before the first word, to sing like I know I can sing, to let the words and music flow as I bring the song into existence because I will it and it belongs to me by birthright as the demigoddess I am.”
Sunset blinked uncomfortably at her intensity.
“But no. My consolation prize is a group of people who will cheer and sing along to any tone-deaf idiot who gets up on stage. Even me.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “As long as I’m showing a little cleavage, that is. It’s funny and a little pathetic how the reactions go from-” She pulled the neck of her shirt up to her chin, “‘boo, get off the stage, you suck’, to-” she pulled it down low enough to show that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, “‘work it, girl! Let her sing again!’”
Sunset’s eyes flicked down. She caught herself wondering just how much lower Adagio could pull that shirt before she’d be asked to leave.
A ghost of a smile touched Adagio’s lips, but then it was gone. She released her shirt and took another drink of her milkshake.
Sunset thought she should say something.
“I’d let you sing again.”
Wow. She was just whiffing today, wasn’t she?
Adagio intentionally misunderstood and raised an eyebrow, the smirk returning to her face. “How crass,” she said, folding her arms indignantly over her chest. “Sunset Shimmer, I am baring my heart and soul to you here. The very least you could do is pay more attention to my words than to my titties.”
The thought of actually complimenting her breasts flitted through her mind, and while it wouldn’t have been undeserved, Sunset decided it was probably safest to avoid that avenue of conversation. “Ok, guess I deserved that,” Sunset admitted disarmingly. “Bras do suck, though,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“Right?” Adagio agreed. “They’re uncomfortable and restricting.”
“And yet if we don’t wear them, people lose their minds.”
“How does that make sense?” Adagio groused. “I have no control over my nipples, but you have control over your eyes, so how is that my problem?” She huffed, crossing her arms. “Humanity.”
“Humanity,” Sunset agreed.
There was a brief pause as both felt a very slight (and not entirely welcome) bonding over the fact that neither of them was native to this world.
Adagio daintily pushed the empty glass away with a fingertip. “Milkshake’s gone,” she said disinterestedly, “so unless you want to buy me another, this is where our evening ends.”
Sunset hesitated, feeling her stomach get a bit queasy again.
Adagio smirked. “Well, that’s it, then. Unless you wanted to get up there yourself?”
“I did want to sing at least one song tonight,” Sunset admitted.
“Better get up there, then,” Adagio said, gesturing at the stage with a toss of her head.
Sunset was sliding over before it occurred to her that she was technically being dismissed from her own invitation, but she shrugged it off.
She made her way to the front and flipped through the notebook, looking for one she hadn’t heard tonight. Even the most friendly and tolerant crowd would turn angry after the third or fourth rendition of ‘Don’t Start Unbelieving’.
She decided on a different but equally nostalgic feel-good anthem from that era, and it was soon her turn to take the stage. The lights were a little garish and the microphone felt plastic in her hand, and it took a little while for the singing part of the song to get started, but once it did, it was magical.
Figuratively speaking, anyway. She didn’t want to go so hard that she’d pony up here, but she definitely felt herself start to glow and get close a couple times.
As she finished the last note, she saw a flash of orange out of the corner of her eye. She looked up to see the last bit of Adagio’s voluminous hair disappear out the door.
Sunset’s brow furrowed. Had Adagio stuck around to watch her perform? What did that mean?
And then as she passed the microphone to the next singer, she paused, and then quickly left the stage before she could be connected with what she’d just done. Next time—if there was a next time—she’d definitely skip the milkshake challenge.