The autumn storms of Canterlot pounded on the glass entrance of the Equestrian Museum. Frazzle Rock waited just inside the doors trying not to look pathetic.
Would Izzy show up?
The young mare’s attention felt undeserved to Frazzle; their one-night stand a few days ago was a random lightning strike of good luck for an aging mare. They’d met during a Rock Solid show at her neighborhood bar, Buckowski’s. Buckowski’s mostly served as home to a small but loyal crowd of thick-glasses-and-sweater-vest wearing hipsters, and to a completely different but allied group of theater ponies—actors, stage crew, writers, directors. But sometimes a band popular outside that narrow and incongruous demographic took the bar’s tiny stage, and the Rock Solid were on their way up.
Frazzle had noticed the tall unicorn mare with the long legs and the fabulous hair hopping up and down near the stage and had looked a little too long. The mare had glanced over her shoulder and they’d made eye contact. Frazzle had looked away, embarrassed at being caught staring. Minutes later the tall mare had shown up at her shoulder.
“Hello new friend!” she’d said. “My name’s Izzy! Can I buy you a drink?”
Proximity confirmed that Izzy was at least ten years younger than Frazzle—grad school age, she’d guess—and, appearance-wise, well out of what Frazzle perceived as her league. Soft round cheeks, perky little snout, enormous dancing purple eyes (maybe held a little too wide open), and her hair. Flawlessly wavy. In contrast to Frazzle’s ginger rat’s nest that would not behave for any amount of care and product. Frazzle wanted to sink her face into it and just float away.
“Oh, golly, I couldn’t,” Frazzle stammered. But her friends had disagreed and gently pushed her out of their booth to go ‘expand her social circle’, as they put it.
Things had gone well, and Izzy was old enough to buy alcohol, so when Izzy had suggested they go back to her place, Frazzle had agreed. She emotionally prepared herself for it to be a single beautiful night. She would sneak out the door in the early morning, and treasure the memory of the night forever.
But the two of them were awake, still tangled in each other’s long, sweaty legs come early morning. Frazzle fell asleep around six-thirty. Izzy woke her up an hour later with gigglecakes and coffee.
“Hey,” she’d said. “Do you want to check out the Equestrian Museum this weekend?”
Frazzle had not done a walk of shame to work. She had done a float of shame. Her hooves did not touch the sidewalk once.
Two days later, in the cold rainy light of a Funday1 morning, Frazzle was becoming convinced that the whole thing had been an elaborate prank.
A lot of trouble to go to, but ponies did like their pranks.
A dark shape bounced up the stairs of the museum, resolving itself into a lavender mare in a slate gray rain slicker with a pincushion heart emblazoned on the shoulder like an insignia of rank with several pride flags beneath it like campaign ribbons.
Not all of which she could remember the meaning of, though Trudgeday night’s activities gave her a pretty good baseline. When Frazzle had been her age her sexuality had been “oh harmony I think I might like mares what do I do?” Now she sort of wanted to collect identities like pretty stones. There were a bunch of lesbian ones. Some gender ones, too? Demimare? Did she dare? She imagined her mother telling her she was putting on airs.
Izzy shook the rain off her coat like a dog and pushed the hood back. Indigo curls hung down, soaking wet but still beautiful. “Sorry I’m late. Canterlot weather, huh?”
“I didn’t think anything could be worse than Whinnyappolis weather, then I moved here,” Frazzle said, taking care with her sibilants. Decades of elocution practice and she still hissed and sprayed spittle when she got excited. A flicker of worry crossed her mind as she worried about how Izzy would react when she found out.
Then she remembered that Izzy already knew exactly what she was like when she was excited.
Izzy wrung out her hair onto the stone floor of the museum foyer with her magic and somehow managed to look fabulous doing it. “Ugh, yeah, I’ve never been to Whinnyapolis but the rain here is like little icy needles. Unless it’s like big icy needles. Or unless it’s snowing. But snow isn’t rain, I guess.”
“Yeah,” said Frazzle. Yeah? That was what she said to this improbable romantic windfall? “Thorry… I mean, sorry. I never… never know what to say on dates.” And she laughed. A fake-sounding, inappropriate laugh.
Harmony hopping on a pogo stick, she was doomed.
Izzy flicked a hoof in a magnanimous gesture. “I wish I had that problem. Straight from the brain to the mouth. No filter. I guess you could say I never know what to say either? But most of the time I don’t let that stop me. I just, you know, keep talking! A lot of ponies find that irritating.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Frazzle. “I kind of like it. I don’t have to worry as much about what I’m going to say.”
Izzy clapped her forehooves together. “That’s great! You’ll like talking to me then! What say we make our wet raincoats the coat check’s problem and go look at neat crystals!”
Frazzle was in a hurry to get her soaking jacket off, so she didn’t ask about the crystal thing until after the coat check. “So. Neat Crystals?”
Izzy pranced around in front of her, tail flying like a flag. “Yeah! That was why I brought you here! You mentioned you worked for the Canterlot Geological Survey, and I remembered they had a new crystal thing in the unicorn wing, and I thought, ‘Hey, Fraz might like that!’” She grinned down at Frazzle. “Do you like it? Also, can I call you Fraz? Is that okay?”
“Oh. Maybe? Maybe?” A creeping doubt wiggled through Frazzle’s chest. The thought was very sweet, and Frazzle did love the gem exhibits so so much but what a laycreature might find interesting about crystals and what an expert would find interesting were very different, and she worried the exhibit had been curated with the laycreature in mind. She might not be excited enough, and Izzy would be able to tell, and then she’d be disappointed that Frazzle wasn’t excited and it would be awkward. “What, um, kind of crystals are they?”
Izzy’s eyebrows arched smugly. “You’re telling me you haven’t heard?”
Frazzle narrowed her eyes. “What haven’t I heard?”
“You don’t get out much, do you?” Izzy dance-pranced in a circle around Frazzle.
“Just to Buckowski’s twice a week,” said Frazzle, craning her neck to follow Izzy, then snapping it to the other side as she passed behind her.
“And nocreature there told you?” Izzy whispered in her ear, standing slightly behind her, which Frazzle found a bit creepy.
“Um, no? My Buckowski’s friends are mostly theater ponies. They don’t get their rocks off so much.”
“Get your rocks off. Is that a geologist joke? That’s funny.” Izzy bounced out ahead of her. “Anyway! That’s great! I can’t wait to see the look on your face. I was going to take you straight there, but I think since you don’t know I’ll make you look at old clothes to heighten the tension. I love old clothes so much!”
Frazzle followed Izzy’s bouncing skirts into the unicorn wing. Near the entrance, Frazzle noticed a sandwich board with some sort of gem on it, but Izzy appeared in front of it without crossing the intervening space.
“I was trying to read the…” said Frazzle.
Izzy folded the sandwich board up and turned it face-in against the wall. “Nope! No peeking!”
Frazzle frowned as Izzy pranced away again. How did she have so much energy? This is what she got for dating a youngster.
“Hey! Stop staring at my butt and come look at the pretty dresses!”
Frazzle cringed. She’d said that embarrassingly loud. Ponies had heard. But she had been looking at Izzy’s butt, bouncing and round and cute beneath the lacy hem of her dress. Better stay close to her so Izzy didn’t have to shout again.
✭☆✭☆✭☆✭
Rows of glass cases on either side of the dark, narrow museum corridors held everything a pony had ever made that could charitably be described as a ‘dress’, from little decorative skirts to preposterously vast hoop dresses wide as a cart. Though this was the ‘unicorn’ wing, they put all the clothes here, just like they put all the agricultural stuff in the earth pony wing. It seemed a little unjust to Frazzle that the rocks and crystals were in the unicorn wing. Sure, you used crystals for magic all the time but who did they think grew-slash-mined those crystals?
Anyway. Frazzle had always passed over this part of the museum before. Her taste in fashion tended more towards the masculine and there were enough other exhibits at the Canerlot Museum to keep a visitor busy for a lifetime. But Izzy’s enthusiasm was infectious.
“Oh, look at the stitching on that one! They did that by mouth, can you believe it?”
“You can do a lot with your mouth,” said Frazzle, meaning only to defend earth pony prowess.
Izzy giggled. “Nasty!” and she socked Frazzle in the shoulder. “Oh, hoop skirt!”
Again, Frazzle missed Izzy moving through the intervening space. Was she teleporting? There was usually more of a light show when unicorns did that. She trotted over to join her new friend. “Oh. Golly,” she said.
The top half of the dress was tight; it probably had a fitted corset with boning that would close tight around the chest, barrel, and upper half of the rump. Large bows were tied around the base of the ponykin’s tail and at the back of its neck. The skirts concealed all four legs, decorated with ruffled petticoats, arched out in a perfect geometric curve to the floor.
“Can you imagine wearing something like that?” said Frazzle.
Izzy tossed her head with mock vanity. “Oh, I don’t have to. Did I mention I model?” she said in a fake upper-class accent. “I mean, for the other students. Not professionally. I’m a little old for that.”
“Um, how old are you, again?”
“Twenty-three! That’s like five hundred in runway model years.”
“So you’re in grad school for fashion design?”
“Oh, no no no.” Izzy shook her head. “I mean I am. I design clothes. I like to design clothes. But being an artist for a living is horrible. Do you have any idea the things they have to do? They have to promote themselves, so they have to be real pony people. Always on. Constantly on. In your face twenty-four-seven. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
Frazzle raised an eyebrow.
“I’m studying fashion design and museum curation. I’d love to work…” She threw out a hoof. “Here!”
“That’s a wonderful dream,” said Frazzle.
Izzy grinned as they moved on to the next display. “I know! It might not come true! But I can be flexible. I have a whole list of things I want to do and places I want to work. And if that exact dream doesn’t work? There’s always another one.”
“That’s a really good attitude,” said Frazzle.
Izzy danced in a circle. “It’s super important to stay positive. So I guess you always knew what you wanted to do, Doctor Rock? Geology all the way through?”
Frazzle laughed. “Have you seen my cutie mark?”
“Yeah. It’s paperwork? I was wondering. What’s your story?”
Frazzle turned to look at a display of a stallion ponykin in a formal military coat with red bars across the chest standing next to a mare ponykin in a white lacy gown with a long train. A bouquet of fake flowers stood on a narrow metal pole gripped in colored plastic wrap ‘magic’. A bride and groom? “It’s kind of sad. Maybe another time?”
“Oh, sure! Sure! I don’t want to bring up anything unpleasant.” She nuzzled the side of Frazzle’s throat.
The gesture sent a shiver down her spine. All the furs from her withers to the base of her tail stood on end. “It’s okay. But it is a long story. I did my undergrad in actuarial science.”
“Actual what now?”
“Actuarial science. Actuaries evaluate business risk for asset management, valuation, and liability…”
Izzy’s head flopped straight down and she began to snore.
“I know,” said Frazzle. “I switched to studying rocks because it was more interesting. I was good at it, though!”
“I can tell,” said Izzy. “It’s written all over your butt.”
✭☆✭☆✭☆✭
“They have a time crystal?”2 said Frazzle, staring wide-eyed at the banner over the rocks, gems, and minerals section.
“They do!” said Izzy.
“But those were only recently declassified!”
“That’s what I heard!”
“Only MAREPA3 has those! The Canterlot Geological Survey doesn’t even have one!”
Izzy grinned manically. “But the Equestrian Museum does! What does that tell you about the power structure in this country.”
Crowds pushed past them on either side. Everycreature wanted to see the time crystal. No one at work had thought to mention this to her? No one at Buckowski’s? Not Poindexter? Not Lovely Bubbles behind the bar? Not Light Bright or Breaka Leg? Not Maud?
“Are you ready?” said Izzy.
She wasn’t ready, but she went in anyway. Normally, this part of the museum was her absolute favorite. All the glittering treasures from the earth. Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Oxygen and silicon, aluminum and iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. They called to her earth pony magic; if she closed her eyes she could feel them around her. Patient, solid, waiting, welcoming.
But today she felt a strange presence, a gravity, drawing her in through the chain of linked rooms to the heart of the exhibit. She passed through the exhibits in a trance until she came into its light.
Guards—not the normal museum guards but firm-jawed, heavyset ponies in dark suits and glasses—funneled visitors through a long line bounded by velvet ropes into a dark room with a pedestal and a glass case in the center. Though the time crystal was barely a quarter-hoof high, it dominated the space. Bright spikes rotated around an indigo heptagonal core. Each of the spikes rotated on its own axis, growing or shrinking uninfluenced by anything but its inanimate whims. It drew in her gaze like a black hole.
Illusions began to form. Quantum memories. She saw herself fawning over her childhood rock collection. Her parents fawning over her perfect A+ report cards. Remembered her awkwardness shading into camaraderie her first time drinking with Breka and Light Bright. She saw Maud’s slight smile for the first time, and remembered cracking up at one of her early standup routines when nopony else even giggled.
Sadder sights. Being bullied for her lisp, cornered behind the one-room schoolhouse in her hometown. Her father wasting away in a hospital bed, little more than purple skin on a workhorse skeleton. Serious ponies with briefcases coming to the family farm. Her mother weeping on the floor next to a kitchen table covered in refinance paperwork.
Izzy’s gentle touch pulled her back to her body. “You all right?”
“I’m okay,” said Frazzle, rubbing her damp cheeks dry with the backs of her hooves.
✭☆✭☆✭☆✭
Hours later, they sat by the window in a cafe a couple of blocks from the museum. The rain had paused, fortuitously, as they’d exited the museum. They’d navigated icy puddles to the Beehive, one of Frazzle’s favorite places. Now, the rain was starting again, and they watched as earth ponies fumbled out umbrellas, unicorns cast rainshields, and pegasi fluttered for shelter.
“Can I ask about your flags?” said Frazzle. She stared down at her latte, reluctant to disturb the flower drawn in the foam. It was a rose, with individual petals and thorns; a work of coffee art.
“‘Can I ask about your flags?’ she says,” said Izzy with a smirk.
“Are you my narrator now?”
Izzy giggled and tilted the shoulder of her jacket towards her. “Of course, I want to talk about them! That’s why I put them on. Which ones do you know?”
“Well. The top one’s trans. And then the LGBTQI+ one and… bisexual, but I don’t know the one underneath it.”
“Pansexual.”
“You’re bi and pan?”
“I couldn’t decide!”
“What’s the difference supposed to be again?” said Frazzle.
“Well, ‘bi’ means I’m attracted both to my gender and any other gender, whereas ‘pan’ means I’m attracted to all genders.”
“A very clear and important distinction.” Frazzle. Overpowered by the rich nutty smell of the latte, decided the foam flower had lived a full life, and leaned down to lap up a few tonguefuls.
“I know! It’s so hard to choose!”
“So what about that next one. Does that mean you’re sexually attracted to irrational numbers?”
“Oh, no, that means I’m polyamorous, silly. Who’d be attracted to a number?”
Frazzle raised her hoof.
Izzy raised an eyebrow.
“Have you heard of the monster group? I’m kind of a size queen.”
Izzy pursed her lips. “You’re saying that like it’s a joke.”
Frazzle grinned. “It is!”
“But you are a size queen. You begged for my hoof the other night.”
Frazzle blushed but nodded. “Yes. And I also like absurdly big numbers.”
Izzy squinted at Frazzle. “Is this what it’s going to be like dating a nerd?”
“Yes. What’s the last one? With the bird and the sequins?”
“Oh, that’s for drag. That’s part of how I figured out I was trans. I never wanted to take the dresses off.” She looked up at Frazzle. “What would yours be?”
Frazzle bit her lower lip. “Um… I don’t know. Pride. Lesbian. And… I don’t know. I don’t always feel like a mare. I know ‘demimare’ is a thing.”
Izzy nodded. “Demimare is a thing. You seem to like to dress in a masculine way.”
“I do.” She realized she was blushing, and laughed. “Why do I find that embarrassing?”
Izzy shrugged. “It can be embarrassing to be yourself. Other people might judge you—think you’re bad, or strange. But it’s still worth it, usually.”
Frazzle raised an eyebrow. “Usually?”
“Like if your real self is being mean to creatures or hurting ponies I’m gonna guess it’s probably not actually your real self.”
Frazzle frowned. “Do you think all creatures have the potential to be good? Because I’m not sure I’ve seen that.”
“You were here when the city fell, weren’t you? My family wasn’t living in Canterlot, but that was really scary.”
Frazzle shook her head. “I was in the field. It was horrible anyway. But that’s not what I’m thinking of.”
“You saw something in the time crystal.”
“Lots of creatures do,” said Frazzle. “Time is nothing but pony perception of the flow of entropy, and a time crystal violates entropy just by existing.”
Izzy sipped the last sip of her coffee and waved to the waitress for more. She leaned back in her chair, crossed her forelegs behind her head, and said “Well, massive nerd, if you need to talk about it, I’m all ears.”
Frazzle squinted at Izzy. “Are you sure you want me to unload this on you? I just met you Trudgeday night.”
Izzy narrowed her eyes coyly and smirked. “Yes, and I feel like I have enough good dirt on you already. I don’t need to dig for more. Harmony, the sick shit we’re into.”
Frazzle fluttered her eyelashes. “There’s plenty more sick shit where that came from.”
Izzy smirked lecherously. “Looking forward to it.”
“Anyway, this is pure 100% foalhood trauma.”
The waitress came back with Izzy’s second coffee. She thanked her, then leaned forward over her steaming cup with her ears perked forward.
Frazzle took a deep breath. “All right. When I was six, my father was diagnosed with cancer.”
Izzy reached across the table and put her hoof over Frazzle’s.
“He was… like, a tank. Huge, and strong enough to pull a house. And I got to watch him just… fade away. He fought so hard, but six years later, he was just an empty shell. After he went, the creditors started to close in. The Principality Health Service is good, but we had a rock farm to run. Things fell behind. We couldn’t pay the farmhooves. We couldn’t pay the bills. And mother was heartbroken. I was lucky to have parents who loved each other, but that meant that losing daddy hit her hard. It took her years to get over losing him, and she couldn’t handle her responsibilities. The bank sent scary ponies to tell us they were going to take the farm if we didn’t start paying. My mother talked them into offering us a refinance—put all our debt back into the property, basically; not ideal, but something we could eventually pay off. She got out boxes and boxes of paperwork and set them on the kitchen table and got out all the forms we needed and she just sat there staring at them. And she stared and stared and she just couldn’t even start.
“Eventually she just slid out of her chair, like she was made of butter, and started sobbing on the floor.
“I’d watched her get all this stuff together. I didn’t understand what she was doing, but I was honestly interested. I’d been following her around, asking her questions, and she just brushed me off like I was being a nuisance even though I’m pretty sure she just didn’t know how to answer most of them. So I was in the corner of the kitchen with a juice box. And when she slid off her chair, I asked her if she was okay. She didn’t answer, but since she was breathing I figured she was probably all right. I wondered if I could help her by looking at the paperwork. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?
“I climbed up into her chair. The forms were all across the table. Stacks of them. There were about seventeen cardboard boxes and milk crates full of old paperwork, and all of them smelled like mildew and rat poop. And I remember thinking how I was the only thing standing between my family and the bank. And I had no idea what I was doing. I was utterly hosed.”
“Must’ve been terrifying,” said Izzy.
“Yuppers. But then I decided that the worst I could do was fill out the forms wrong, and that was better than not filling them out at all. Heck, maybe if the forms were wrong they’d send them back and give us more time to figure things out. So I hunted around until I found page one out of seven hundred and eighty-seven. It asked for my name, so I put my mom’s. And after that, I just kept filling out line after line, and when I needed paperwork, I hunted through the boxes until I found it. A lot of the boxes mom had gotten were the wrong ones. What we needed was still in the basement or the attic, so I dragged it up, and I dragged it down. I put a pen in my Mom’s mouth, and when I needed her signature on something I slid it carefully in front of her nose so she didn’t get tear stains on the paper. I think it took about seven hours, all told. I got her John Hoofcock on page seven hundred and eighty-seven, and I set it on the bottom of the pile, and music started to play and I floated up into midair, and bang.” She tilted her hip towards Izzy. “I had the least sexy cutie mark possible. And then I went and got another juice box.”
Izzy blinked. “Wow. That’s a heck of a story.”
“All true. The ponies at the bank were pissed. They thought they had our farm in the bag. But I’d dotted every i and crossed every t with nothing but filly ingenuity and the power of Harmony. My mom and my stepfather are still growing rocks there to this day. So what’s your story about your cutie mark?”
“Oh, um. I made a pincushion. I was super proud of it. Still use it.”
Frazzle smiled. “That’s wonderful.”
Izzy looked away. “It’s silly. I’m silly.”
“I like silly. The ponies from the bank were serious ponies. I didn’t like them. It’s why I decided to make a living having adventures studying rocks instead of making a ton of money actual… actuarian… actuarianizg?” She pressed her hoof against Izzy’s. “So now what?”
Izzy blushed. “I don’t know. We were just going to hit the museum and do lunch. But I don’t have anything else on today except doing laundry. If you wanted… we could do something crazy. Like… go back to the museum?”
Frazzle grinned. “All day?”
Izzy nodded fiercely. “Shut the place down. And then maybe go back to my place for some more kinky stuff. If you’re up for it.”
“Yuppers. Sign me up. Let’s go.”
Author's Note
This is NOT a sequel to Tennis Butt, tho if you're curious about the kind of stuff Frazzle and Izzy get up to in their private time there's your answer.
