“Derpy, what are you doing?” Time Turner asked, staring up at her from directly below.
“I’m just sitting, doc,” Derpy said, staring down between her knees at him. She flashed him one of her brilliant smiles. “I didn’t think it looked all that complicated.”
“Well I can see that you’re sitting,” he mumbled in reply, caught vaguely off guard by the completely normal answer she had provided. Internally he chastised himself. This was Derpy. Of course she had a normal answer. Had she provided an entirely ridiculous answer, she probably would have been doing something entirely mundane.
“Then why did you ask?” She blinked down at him, happy to be the focus of his attention. Time Turner got distracted pretty easily, so it always made her feel special when he was entirely zoned in on her.
“Well, because, you aren’t really—well, I suppose you are, in the strictest sense of the word—or would it be loosest, I’m not entirely sure—regardless!” He shook his head, dropped to his haunches, and huffed. It was going to be one of those days.
“Honest, doc, I’m just sitting here!”
“But you aren’t sitting on anything!” he gasped, exasperated.
“Oh.” Derpy looked up from the stallion and blinked her walled eyes. “Is that a requirement?”
“Obviously not,” Time Turner sighed.
“Oh good!” She perked back up again and—shifting somewhat to get more comfortable—settled into place. “I’m happy to hear I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“Derpy,” Time Turner practically sobbed, “Why are you in the air?”
This gave her pause. Why was she in the air? She went back through her decision making process. There weren't really any particularly good seats in Time Turner’s lab, to begin with. She had been on her hooves all day, and really wanted a nice rest in the company of her favorite pony. However, sitting down in the middle of the floor also tended to cause problems. Either she would sit on something she shouldn’t, and cause a disaster; or Time Turner would distractedly forget she was there and trip over her while carrying something incredibly valuable or fragile. Usually both.
Really, it just made sense then.
“There wasn’t any place to sit down there,” she concluded. With a start she realized that Time Turner had moved away from her, and had begun pacing and muttering to himself while she was deliberating her motives. With a disconcerted frown, and then a devilish grin, she shifted over in the air until she was once again directly above him.
He looked up at the sudden shadow cast over him and immediately froze, his eyes very clearly locked directly on her. Derpy’s grin spread to a full smile. She did so love his attention. Especially when she didn’t need to do anything except be there to get it.
“Ohhh… kay. Okay. Okay,” Time Turner choked. He blinked himself back to reality and looked down in thought, before shrugging and allowing himself to glance back up one more time before officially setting his chin in his hoof and pondering the situation at hand. “How is it that you’re sitting, Derpy?” he asked, tentatively.
“Oh, well, like this,” she responded. She stood up tall—still on thin air—wiggled her butt, and then flumped her haunches down. “That was my… what do you call it, doc? My process.” She giggled at the scientific word and at Time Turner’s gaping mouth. “Really, I’m just sitting. I’m sure you have more important things than little ol’ me to worry about.”
Time Turner blushed and scoffed. “There’s nothing more important than you, of course,” he said quickly, “but I am rather discombobulated by this. You’re not just sitting, Derpy. You’re flying.”
Derpy stretched her wings out and preened a single feather before nestling the pair away onto her back. “I’m a pegasus, doc. That’s what we do.”
“But you’re not using your wings.”
“Am I supposed to?”
He dropped his head into his hooves and groaned. “That’s the generally accepted method, yes,” he grumbled through them. He loved this mare, but she could really be trouble some days.
He recovered his composure and snapped his head up, ready to give her a stern talking to for her to immediately quit breaking the already-loosely-enforced laws of physics.
Derpy had spread her knees again and was looking down at him—and somewhere off in the corner—with her bright, golden eyes shimmering from all the electricity in the lab, and Time Turner immediately forgot what he was going to say to her. He stammered and stuttered up at her, blushing harder and harder as time went on, earning himself a wider and cuter smile with every abandoned word. Finally, he stopped, smiled warmly up to her, and then flopped to his own haunches yet again.
“Derpy, please come down,” he asked through a chuckle.
“Sure thing, doc,” she said. A moment later she began to descend, though otherwise continuing to sit perfectly still.
It seemed to Time Turner as if he was watching a pony in a purely glass elevator from directly below. At the last moment he shuffled to the side and, when Derpy had gently settled down onto the floor beside him, he set his jaw onto her shoulder and beamed as she nestled her cheek onto it. He puffed away a lock of pale blonde mane and kissed her cheek.
“Alright,” he muttered after several quiet minutes of contact. “Was that enough for you to tell me what you did?”
Derpy giggled. “I’ll tell you now, but you’ll owe me more cuddles for it.”
“Deal.”
“So, earlier today I was going through all the old undeliverable mail. We keep parcels for like, ten years or something, in case somepony finally decides to ask what happened to it or whatever, right?”
“Right.”
“So anything older than that we inspect. Sentimental stuff we try to get to the owners, useful things we might take if anypony wants it. Sometimes it’s just junk.”
“Sure,” Time Turner said, his mind already racing to figure out how this could possibly be connected to her new special ability.
“Anyways today I was doing that and I found this real garbage lantern. It was all bent and warped, like, the place for the flame was like a spout out the side! I figured nopony woulda sent that as a gift, right, so it had to be a special heirloom or something. I sat down to clean the gunk off of it to find if there was a name, and then there was an explosion!” She spread her hooves wide, knocking Time Turner off her shoulder and onto the floor. He laughed and recovered his balance, and then nodded for her to continue.
“There were boxes and letters everywhere, doc, I’m telling ya, it was a mess. But in the middle of it all was this blue, see-through Kirin. She said her name was Jeanie, and that the lantern was hers. Now, I’ve seen ponies live in stranger places than lanterns, so I just told her she couldn’t park her home in the post office and that she had to leave.”
Time Turner had already clenched his eyes shut, desperately wanting not to believe. Unfortunately, this was Derpy. The more ridiculous it was, the more real it was. He bit his lip while she carried on.
“But this Kirin, I tell ya, she was all stuffy and weird! She insisted she help me out for cleaning up her house. I didn’t think it was all that important, but it seemed to be the only way to calm her down.”
“Uh huh,” Time Turner replied through gritted teeth.
“Anyways she told me she could give me one of three special powers, and whichever I wished for I would get. But I told her the only thing I wished for was for you to pay a bit more attention to me.” She paused and then flinched, quickly wrapping Time Turner in clasping forelegs. “N-not that you don’t do enough! Just… you know, more is always good right? …Right?”
He looked into her giant, glistening eyes and smiled. “Of course. It’s okay, Derpy. Go on.”
“Well, she told me she could let me read minds, turn invisible, or fly. I already had wings, so I didn’t think of that at first. Reading your mind wouldn’t help me none, because I know how free it is at times!”
Time Turner frowned, unsure if he should be insulted.
“Turning invisible would be ‘specially unhelpful to you seeing me more, of course.”
“Of course.”
“So I thought back to the flying thing again, and I realized that if I could be in the air without, well, flying, you’d think that was pretty neat, right!”
He smiled and kissed her cheek again, though a strained groan slipped through his lips. “You’re right,” he said, almost begrudgingly.
“Hey, what’s wrong, doc?”
He caught her eyes again and gave a weak chuckle. “You gave up the power to read minds or turn invisible just to get an ability you already had, purely to catch my interest. You can be a really silly pony sometimes, Derpy.”
She caught his eye with one of hers and he was shocked to find a wicked, knowing glint in it. “Well, sure, I guess those woulda been useful sometimes… But this way, I can sit down riiiight above you, like I’m on glass.”
Time Turner blinked as the realization of how much thought Derpy had actually put into it hit him.
“Would you like me to show you again?” she asked with all the innocence she could muster.
“Yes please,” he answered, before she finished the question.
