Everypony Assume 'Rising Dunce'
At the end, once it had all ended in what could be argued as only mostly self-imposed humiliation, Rarity considered that it was the small details which were truly important. This felt like the most crucial thought to keep a jaw grip on, even when it wasn't quite enough for pulling herself out of a pit filled with slow-simmering rage.
You had to think about the little things. This included some careful body-twisted reflection on the fact that if she'd just paid a little more attention to them at the outset, she wouldn't be in this mess. Also, there would likely have been one less cloud over the back of the Boutique and even if the count had remained exactly the same, none of them would have been laughing.
And she was used to working with those small details. It was the only way to survive, and that held true even after she factored some of her friends -- she had to make an effort to remember that one of them was her friend -- out.
A creative vision could arrive within a single instant. And you couldn't plan for when inspiration could strike. Trying to force such moments... well, it was rather hard to dream on command. (Rarity kept a sketchbook waiting at her bedside, just in case her nightscape produced something worth recording.) But when it happened -- the vision would often be whole. This is what the dress looks like. Witness the flow of the fabric, the exacting drape lines. See how all the colors interact, balance and complement in a way which allows each to be both their own distinct entities and part of the whole. And now, while there's still time, record it.
(There were also sketchbooks all over the Boutique. Just in case. Additionally, Rarity had asked Pinkie to plant a few around Ponyville for Creative Emergencies, and was dearly hoping to eventually find where all of them actually were.)
Here is the creation, safely captured in paper and ink. It is just as it arrived within a special form of dream. It is complete and perfect and whole.
It also doesn't work. At all.
See those drape lines? They're fine on paper. Exactly how were you planning to make it function in reality? Because getting that kind of flow out of cloth is either going to take a very special kind of fabric, some extra-creative stitching, or possibly a few spells which the designer can't necessarily cast. Does the required fabric even exist? Because it doesn't look like cotton is going to take the weight of the gems, and linen doesn't always have the desired flexibility. Silk might be ideal, and it'll continue to be so until you actually try to do anything with it. Like, just by way of example, moving. Movement can produce sweat, and silk doesn't like that. But if you really want to get the perspiration flowing, try putting yourself in a stressful situation. Like trying to prevent silk from self-destructing when a pony is actually wearing it, because silk doesn't like that either.
The colors are perfect, aren't they? They were captured accurately upon the page, because the ink was readily available. Pity it's impossible to say the same thing about fabric dyes. Some hues resist recreation. Others need exotic ingredients. Far too many require a seventeen-step process to adjust them by a single shade. The brightest colors tend to react poorly on contact with fur and feathers: the most common result is to create a slick coating. Something where the stain requires special chemicals to remove, and you'd better reach them quickly because two hours after that contact, you're going to start itching. A lot. And this happens rather frequently, because some of those dyes don't keep very well and you're forever mixing your own...
Does the storage area have enough gems of the proper type? Are they the right size? Will any attempt to bring a larger specimen down result in a burst of shards and some rather glittery splinters? And once those requirements are brought together, it's time to figure out how to get them onto the dress. Invisible thread cradles aren't easy. Rendering them into something which can actually be washed without falling apart is decidedly harder. Dry-clean only, please.
Yes, the captured vision looks perfect. It is also perfectly still upon the page, and so is its model. Living ponies move. Movement stresses fabric and, when the designer tries to figure out how a pegasus customer might fly while wearing the creation and ideally not have it explode... the stress will multiply. Most of it stays with the creator, and thus there were spa sessions and that one room in the Boutique's basement which might not have been sufficiently soundproofed. Her neighbors did occasionally complain about the noise -- but none of them had successfully identified it as screaming, and a few had tried offering helpful suggestions on how she might fix her plumbing.
The designer had an ongoing need for relaxation. And if there were those who claimed that she regularly went a little crazy, she crossly asked them to consider the magnitude alternative.
Perhaps just about anypony could imagine, although she'd had some proof that Applejack tended to do so in terms of canvas. But to make it real -- that was when she had to consider the small details. She had to focus finely. In Rarity's profession, doing so was the only way to survive.
In terms of simply getting through life without undue embarrassment, and doing so when one happened to have a certain -- 'friend'...
...well, it probably would have helped.
A mare whose livelihood depended on creating the new tended towards embracing such wherever it might appear, and so Rarity liked to think of herself as one of Ponyville's innovators. She was often the first to try recipes, browsed through inventor expositions with great curiosity, and was the proud owner of the town's only surround-shower -- although that last had admittedly resulted in a few installation problems, plus it wasn't her fault that the entire water tower had been emptied out in one go. Again.
It didn't always work out. But she was known to give the new a chance. (As it turned out, a little too well-known.) After all, a mare who had a subscription to the Innovation Inspirations! catalog was hardly a mare who was stuck in the past.
As opposed to, once the worst of it truly got under way, being stuck in --
-- at any rate, she loved to read through the catalog. To see what had recently been birthed into the world from the wombs of endless creativity and -- well, if she had to admit it, to also do some preliminary judging on just how feasible the new creations were. Something which had been strongly advised by several friends, because emptying an entire water tower in one go would likely upset the mayor if it happened for the fourth time.
If she had thought about it, she would have realized that the majority of Ponyville residents had some awareness of her subscription. Not only did she enjoy talking about whatever she'd seen within (especially with her friends), but she tended to place a just-finished catalog in the Boutique's waiting area: it made a nice addition to the hoofball magazines in their mutual desperate attempts to distract trapped stallions from the fact that it had been three hours and their beloved had yet to narrow their potential selection down to a mere five colors.
And of course, like just about everypony in town, her mailbox was outside. At ground level: something which even persisted with cloud-residing pegasi, because not every deliverypony could fly. And as with the vast majority of models, it possessed absolutely no enchantment-based security whatsoever.
She'd never really had a reason to worry about that.
On the night it had started... well, it had been so late as to very nearly be morning again. Stress came with many prices, and this particular bout had extracted its toll from her ability to sleep. It had been a day of irate customers, added to those who only pretended to 'customer' and to compensate, increased the degree of the irate until it reached the level of a full tantrum. Plus there was a commission whose deadline was approaching more quickly than any true idea she had for fulfilling it, and one of the more recent attempts at doing so had rediscovered that she still couldn't create a new kind of fabric just by wishing for it...
It had been the kind of day which made an extra spa session into a necessity. Unfortunately, both Lotus and Aloe possessed an odd reluctance to enter twenty-four-hour operation, and this was added to an angry insistence on being allowed to sleep (when their presumed-favorite client could not). Apparently corona-slung pebbles bouncing off their bedroom windows had a way of interrupting that.
(Rarity had rather reasonably tried to point out that with all of the near-constant suggestions she made for improvements to the spa, she practically counted as an employee. And therefore, all they had to do was kick down the keys which she should have had years ago, and she'd tidy up before relocking the place when she was done. And they could just take the cost for any expended supplies out of her overdue salary. For some strange reason, this hadn't gone over particularly well either.)
She could fall asleep. She couldn't seem to remain in that state for more than ten minutes. Trotting about the empty streets under Moon had done nothing, and she couldn't use her screaming room because somepony would inevitably inquire as to why her plumbing was producing that kind of noise at this hour. So she was spread out across her bed, 'resting' on belly and barrel as she nosed through the newest catalog. Because it was something to do and very few ponies ever complained about the sounds produced by flipping pages.
...well, one pony. But it was Rarity's home, the scant decibels produced had to cross a considerable distance, and she was almost completely sure that Twilight was asleep.
...lucky Twilight.
Rarity browsed through the catalog. There was a fresh take on a kitchen utensil which allowed for improved jaw leverage and increased fine control. Somepony was advertising a hoof bath: it was designed to smooth out natural ridges and soften imperfections with a simple soak -- but it also admitted to working chemically, and Rarity had some rather natural concerns about extended exposure to anything which softened keratin.
She nosed over to another page. (She was so weary as to make corona use feel uncertain, and had already noticed that the soft blue was flickering at the edges.) This mostly served to remind her of just how tight her neck muscles were and once her body had received a renewed notice, her leg cramps sent out for reinforcements.
Opal was half-curled up at the far end of the bed. Cats were naturally more active at night, so hers was awake. Every so often, the feline would stand and languidly stretch in a way which demonstrated that no involved muscle could become more relaxed without the use of heavy sedatives. This was then followed by regarding Rarity with a facial expression which was in no way sadistic smirking, because a cat's features weren't configured for that sort of thing. All of the smugness had to be confined within the eyes.
...hmph. Of course Opal was relaxed. Cats were born for it. They were also natural contrarians for whatever their pony's mood happened to be and in this case, that meant Rarity's stress was leaning directly into Opal's strength. What did the cat ever have to be stressed about? Other than grooming and water immersion and her meals being so much as five seconds late: any of those things triggered the kind of yowling which suggested the world was ending, and the first two produced movement speeds which suggested the feline was trying to flee to another planet. It wasn't as if Opal had to make a living.
...Rarity's muscles were so tight...
A spa which was cruelly closed. (Really, how could two ponies whose lives and marks centered around calming ponies not have wished to help?) Nopony to offer her a massage. There was nothing to do but read, in the hopes that true rest would eventually come.
She turned to the next page. The paper's texture felt odd against her snout.
And there it was.
Most of what initially caught her attention was the headline: A New Guaranteed Adaptedtation In Innovative Relaxation!, and no small part of that was because she'd just seen the word 'adaptedtation' in print and was trying to figure out the best way to kill it before it could reproduce. But she was very much keyed to anything which promised the chance to relax, and one of the words below that headline had very specifically mentioned unicorns...
Rarity read on for a while. Carefully, as some of the wording was rather unusual and after a time, 'adaptedtation' announced that it had already found a family: something which would have presumably turned editing into a minor form of genocide. But eventually, she had the gist of it. And once she truly understood...
It had started with the buffalo, because of course it had. So many species had flaws: pony individuality could become submerged within herd instinct, griffons didn't always resist their need to dominate, and donkey endurance could quickly turn into stubbornly pushing forward into a cause which had been lost long ago. With buffalo... they were impulsive. There was a saying which had spread among the Ten Tribes: that there was no gap which a buffalo couldn't hurdle, as long as there was a hasty conclusion waiting on the other side. A group could easily turn into a ground-pounding collective version of Rainbow: act first, and maybe there would be some thought regarding what they'd done in the aftermath.
But unlike Rainbow, the Tribes recognized their flaw. And in so many ways, buffalo culture had been designed to force everyone in it into slowing down. Ceremonies stretched out across hours, and occasionally days. Rituals had defined stages and, for anything truly major, designated pauses to swap in replacements for the fainted. There was a rite to celebrate a birth, and some of the ponies who'd attended swore it didn't so much end as smoothly turn into the one for funerals.
Buffalo, as a species, had a collective need to calm themselves. To stop and think. Relax. They were the ones who had created the concept of meditation: true practitioners were occasionally hard to distinguish from those in comas. And the advertisement in the catalog --
-- was for 'Unicorn Yoga'.
(It was at that point that she ventured over to her bookcase and, after sorting through the translation guides which she'd taken to bringing along on missions, discovered that 'yoga' translated to 'take a moment, take a breath, think about what you're doing, and then recognize that you're probably about to get someone killed'. (Plainstalk could be a rather compact language. A buffalo who was about to impulsively charge something down had a great need to explain their full motivations in no more than two syllables.))
A collection of buffalo meditation exercises, adapted for unicorn use.
Rarity thought about that. Or rather, she thought about it just as much as being awake at three in the morning after an extended bout of stress would permit: not very.
And if she'd been more awake... if she'd just been allowed to enter the spa, to calm herself a little more...
It was the small details which were truly important.
Like the fact that the page which hosted the double-sided ad wasn't the same grade of paper as the rest of the magazine. The texture and gloss didn't match and, when she peered closely at the binding (which only happened during the aftermath), she found where it had been pasted in. But a catalog like Inspirations had to make last-minute additions all the time -- or so a sleep-deprived mind had assumed.
Then you had the text. The natural presumption for the weary was that the writer was a buffalo. A startup company couldn't always afford to engage the services of a translator. So the grammatical errors, and -- 'creative' spelling... were just the product of a non-native speaker trying to write in a language without possessing full fluency. And it wasn't as if fonts matched across the whole of the catalog, especially when a given advertisement was trying to get somepony's attention.
(Her attention.)
(She had numerous ways of dealing with stress. Complaining to friends was rather high on the list, and stopping before their eyes began to twitch around the corners wasn't always possible.)
(Perhaps if she'd just complained about that one commission a little less...)
There were a few sample illustrations. They roughly captured the form of a pony, in that there were four legs and since it was about unicorns (and why just unicorns?), the quasi-cone shape was probably a horn. You couldn't always afford an artist either. Having one's children substitute was an interesting stylistic choice...
Rarity always browsed through the entire catalog. But she seldom purchased. Life wasn't always kind to innovators, and The New tended to command a price which was at least three times that of The Old. The Boutique turned a yearly profit -- but the tides of fashion were seldom calm, and her sales totals during individual moons could come perilously close to capsizing. She had to work within her budget.
But this was -- she rechecked the description, making sure -- just a gramophone album. Paired with a book. She could afford that. And it talked about relaxation and calming oneself, and then it went on to speak about how the meditative state created by proper yoga was known to boost creativity.
(Of course it said that. It was selling to an audience of one.)
How could she not purchase it?
The prepaid voucher was sent out shortly after Sun was raised. It was rather reasonable to expect a short turnaround time, as her filled-out order form was only going to Canterlot. And having the address as a postal dropbox... well, it was a new company. You couldn't always afford a storefront either.
She only pulled out the map during the aftermath. Discovering that said dropbox was directly across the street from the capital's Weather Bureau headquarters was something less than a surprise.
The package arrived six days later. And in spite of her increasing needs to relax (some of which had been triggered by Lotus and Aloe hammering up a Never Midnight Hours sign), she didn't open the whole of it for two more. Getting the initial box open had her encounter an initial instruction, and Rarity was very good about following those. There were times when creativity was about breaking the rules, but you couldn't realistically shatter those into a better configuration without knowing what they were. This was learning a new subject from scratch. She was best off in allowing herself to be instructed by the expert.
The expert had placed a note in the box which instructed her to hold the first session outdoors, so she would be among the harmony of nature. Oh, and it had to be partly cloudy, because the alternating nature of Sun and shade would bring a necessary amount of relaxing contrast to the environment.
...best off allowing herself to be instructed by the expert...
Well, buffalo were known to do rather a lot outdoors. Perhaps this was a standard thing. (Rainbow might even know, as the pegasus had kept up some degree of correspondence with Little Strongheart.) But the weather schedule said two days, and so two days it was. Something which happened to coincide with a later-than-normal opening for the shop.
The instructions also said not to start too early. You had to get warmed up, which seemed to mean a normal trot and having some breakfast.
(Also, there was going to be somepony observing the whole of it, and that one hated getting up early.)
There was a decent amount of clear land behind the Boutique. Rarity generally used it for hanging up some of her washing, allowing Sun to do the last portion of drying work. There was also a small barbecue pit: this was mostly used for grilling peppers, roasting corn, and burning any sketchbook which fashion historians could potentially use against her. Rarity's corona carried the gramophone out onto the grass, then wound it up.
The box was brought out next. She undid the second layer of wrapping --
-- well... that was... certainly an album cover. You didn't often get that sort of thing in a Surrealist style. The other option was that it had been created by someone who had never actually seen a unicorn. The art had been created by listening to the description of another. Also, that party had recently been concussed, had a swollen tongue, and didn't speak Plainstalk. Or Equestrian. Actually, speaking was potentially off the list entirely and if it had somehow been present, whatever language had been utilized was visibly confused on the concept of 'knees'.
Her corona extracted the actual album, mostly in self-defense. A passing ray of Sun told her it had been created by a vanity studio, because a new company couldn't always afford to pay for a full pressing either. The name of the commissioning party, however...
...the print was too small. She would need her glasses to make it out, and she seldom used them outside: the glare became especially fierce under any degree of Sun. Partly cloudy wasn't sufficient protection: she would have to be indoors.
Rarity glanced up. There were certainly enough clouds, and they were rather well -- organized, actually. There almost seemed to be a pattern...
(It had been set up as something very close to a checkerboard. As tribute.)
(The small details...)
The book was under the album. She began to follow instructions.
The first said to cover the ground with something soft-yet-firm. Which would have been a problem for most ponies, but Rarity had made the mistake of trying to get in on the ill-advised fad which had been the Poof! Look and had been hiding the last of the results in the basement to await a sufficiently-large fire.
It took a few minutes to bring them out. (Most of those were used to check for witnesses, and she failed to look up. Not that it would have helped.) De-geming occurred. And then the dresses were carefully layered upon the soil. Something which normally would have bothered her, but this was a group which could only be improved by dirt and in any case, a passing observer would probably just wondered why she was laying out a selection of oddly-colorful mattress pads.
She was now supposed to place herself at the center of the padding. Followed by starting the album, and then she would be reading and listening in concert. Because yoga was apparently something which happened at a given pace, and the audio portion of the innovation was meant to keep her on the right temporal track.
Rarity arranged herself upon the failed dresses. Considered that this was possibly their best use, briefly wondered if the inventor needed a supply of mat surfaces to sell, and then allowed a projection of soft blue energy to start the gramophone.
There was a voice.
The voice could be called sonorous, in that it was fairly deep and had a certain resonant quality. It could also be described as snorenorous, in that it didn't so much stretch across syllables as put up a hammock and invite the listener to fall asleep within the gaps. To find this sort of voice in the wild was generally to find oneself in the presence of a lecturing and underpaid history teacher: this would be shortly followed by discovering that one was now the captain of a pirate ship which patrolled the west coast in hopes of capturing the scion of a wealthy noble, because the dream was just that good. It was a voice which Rarity credited for her general knowledge gaps in the categories of Nightmare, Tirek, and just about every other historical event from a thousand years back because quite frankly, if you encountered what was apparently a mark-mandated voice in a classroom and didn't fall asleep in self-defense, there was very probably something wrong with you. Or you were Twilight, whose own mark was presumed to provide a degree of resistance.
(It was also the sort of voice which could be reproduced by a mare whose natural brash tones were at the low end of the scale -- with the aid of a conical speaking tube and some rather specialized recording equipment. But Rarity didn't work that part out until later.)
She forced herself to pay attention. It was somewhat like pushing her snout against a slow-spinning grindstone and waiting to see which portions of her fur fell off first.
The voice told her that this was an introductory yoga exercise. She could, of course, send off for the advanced version when she was ready.
Rarity nodded. It was polite, and the movement helped to keep her awake.
Also, the voice went on, this was an exercise which had been specifically adaptated (and the Twilight-trained portion of Rarity's mind ground insubstantial teeth) for unicorns. As such, there was one very specific instruction to follow --
-- Rarity listened carefully --
-- the horn had to remain dark. No corona use. No magic of any kind until the exercise was complete.
A flicker of uncertain light touched the gramophone's turning crank. The album paused.
...no magic? That was... a rather odd restriction. Then again, buffalo didn't possess the same kind of horn. They had two, and theirs were on the sides of the head. Perhaps a corona just -- got in the way. Somehow. Thinking about casting instead of simply meditating --
-- take instruction from an expert. Learn the rules before breaking them. That was what Rarity believed. It was certainly what she'd told her friends. Over and over as the occasion required, to the point where even Rainbow was likely to have it memorized.
One last flicker restarted the gramophone, and then her horn went dark.
The album wanted to know if the book was in front of her.
She politely nodded.
Turn to the first exercise page.
...with her mouth. Very well. She'd been a filly once. She remembered how her mouth worked.
The page was turned. The book, which lacked the reinforced corners of most pony publications, acquired its first set of bite marks.
The album informed her that the first illustration was called The Equestrian Pose. Something which had been inspired by ponies. Assume and hold.
She looked at the picture. It took a moment to translate from the Cubist, and rather longer to force the results against the needs of Reality.
...so... for a pose which had been inspired by ponies... she was supposed to support herself entirely on her hind legs. Which was to say, one hind leg would have a hoof flat against the padding, with some more of her weight supported by a bent knee. The other hind leg was to be stretched out directly -- behind her. Backwards. And as for the forelegs? Well, she was apparently meant to be rearing up for this pose. One foreleg could sort of rest a hoof around the general vicinity of that bent hind knee. The other, according to the illustration, would be busy turning into a tentacle.
The album told her to assume the position. And then it said that doing so was the first step in freeing the mind from stress. For letting creativity flow.
Music began to play. It was an authentic buffalo composition, which meant there were three beats to choose from and any given one was prepared to go on for a very long time.
...creativity...
Well, it was certainly possible for a pony body to do this. This was entirely true, because Lyra was a pony. Lyra probably assumed this pose six times per day, mostly by accident and almost always without notice, because a mare who was fully double-jointed across just about all of her body typically didn't pay attention to how she was moving until observers began to faint. Rarity, who was more of a standard model...
She forced her limbs to move. Bent the proper hind knee, reared up, caught herself with the braced foreleg just before coming back down. Something which had just about all of her weight leaning to the right...
The yoga amateur strained not to tip over. This seemed to send a certain portion of her muscles twitching to the left. A segment of her spine briefly attempted to realign itself before deciding to sit back and let the ribs go first.
The album told her that the first portion of her worldly cares should now be flowing out of her body.
...this was quite possibly true. She had awoken that morning to find herself still thinking about that one commission, and that was certainly a worldly care because finalizing a design would allow her to continue doing certain things in the world. Like buying fruit. And that thought was still somewhere in her head, but it had been slightly dislodged to one side. The center position was currently occupied by a rather intense awareness of exactly how many muscles were involved in the movement of her ribs. Some of them had names, all of them drew salaries, and at least three were planning to unionize. The rest had already decided to go on strike.
Hold, the album expertly instructed. Hold. Hold...
...oh, and she'd just located her lungs. They were definitely working, so that was a plus. Whether they were happy about it wasn't her concern...
...and release.
A quadruped resumed her natural posture proclivities, and did so all at once. Several minor bones twanged back into place.
Inspired by ponies? How? Buffalo had been in contact with ponies for generations. What had a pony ever done to inspire that?
Perhaps somepony had once kicked a particularly substandard pie --
-- turn the page, instructed the album. The next pose is The Flying Lizard. Assume.
Rarity looked.
...so. Balancing on the forelegs this time. Bent forelegs. One hind leg would be stretched backwards. The body itself tilts forward, which at least keeps the mouth close to the book. (The bite indentations became a little deeper.) And the tail goes aloft to curl over the back, while the hind leg which was not stretched backwards --
-- exactly how was this supposed to work? One hind leg straight back, and the other on the ground. To wit, if the illustration was meant to reflect a reality which hadn't been rotated ninety degrees from their own, that planted hoof would be placed directly next to the left foreleg! What was that going to do to her back? Did a pony spine even bend like that or rather, was it going to do so more than once?
Flying Lizard. Spike, were he to assume this pose, would not fly. 'Fall over', however, seemed to be an option.
The album patiently repeated the instructions. Expertly.
...very well. It was new. It was innovation, or at least an adaptation into a different realm. She had to try...
...she was still very aware of her lungs. Also her stomach. Figuring out how they'd switched positions was going to be a different problem.
Two hooves which weren't supposed to have regular contact said hello to each other. Some unwelcome weight shifts began to grind off the rough edges she didn't have.
Hold.
Oh, holding was the easy part. She could hold this forever, especially since her muscles seemed to be locking into their new positions. Getting out of the pose was going to require a chiropractor, but holding? Nothing simpler...
Release.
Her chin almost crashed on top of the book. The rest of her body followed up. Limbs untangled. Organs snapped back into their normal locations. Her spine began to openly contemplate another line of work. But no part of her was thinking about the commission any more. She had moved to contemplation of the buffalo form.
Rarity had spent some time among buffalo. She was entirely certain that they had skeletons.
...possibly skeletons built entirely out of cartilage, but...
The next thing in the book was the Cow Pose. Rarity didn't have quite as much experience with cattle. Applejack was the expert there. Perhaps the farmer knew if the entire species could dislocate their hips on command.
Then there was a basic Lotus. Her worldly cares narrowed to wondering why her vision had just gone black. But that cleared up when the pose ended, so no harm done.
...black.
The commission. The one where she'd been having so much trouble with the colors. Why not just work with basic black? And the little gold flashes which had passed behind her eyes... those could be turned into little meteor streaks of metallic hue across the flanks, leading towards an artfully-exposed mark...
There was a Marichi Pose. A mare who was often accused of being too wrapped up in herself briefly made it literal.
The Plow Pose made her suitable for digging up a garden.
The Easy Pose lied.
For a moment, the Wheel Pose had her agreeing with Trixie. First about wheels, and then about everything else.
(The illustrations were becoming more surreal. Her joints were beginning to make odd sounds. The album droned on.)
There was a Noose Pose. The actual noose might have hurt less.
She never did manage to work out what a Half Lord Of The Fishes was, but presumed there had been a serious fight in the piscine family once the word had gossiped out.
At one point, Opal wandered out the open back door, took one look at her pony, and then demonstrated the typical concern level of a cat by going right back inside again. Only at double the speed.
And then, as Rarity's sweating, half-collapsed prone body gave the discarded dresses a staining which they fully deserved, as one of the unseen clouds vibrated from withheld mirth... the album made an announcement.
She had discarded her worldly cares. (And in the sense that she now had some degree of commission design, she had. Plus the only other thing she was thinking about was her body and since potions of it no longer seemed to be operating in the real world, that probably qualified.)
She was on the very verge of a meditative state. The absolute edge. (She still tended to listen when presumed experts spoke.)
All she needed was one more push.
She had to enter... The Unicorn Pose.
A weary extended tongue flipped the page. Blue eyes fought to focus.
...
...oh.
So that was why the horn had to remain dark. You hardly wanted to have an active corona if you were about to --
-- assume The Unicorn Pose, the album instructed. Do it. And enter -- nirvana.
(She wondered what that was.)
She was following instructions. She... just wasn't entirely sure how this was supposed to work. The illustration was, in one sense, clear enough: if you were willing to recognize the tangle of limbs and points as a unicorn, then there was only one thing it could be doing. And horns were, for just about all intentions and purposes, unbreakable. Unlike her forelegs, which seemed to be working with about four hairline fractures each.
So in theory, it could be done. But the balance --
-- the album seemed to anticipate her.
Just do it, the voice instructed. Balance will come. Balance, relaxation, and creativity. As befits a proper unicorn.
She forced herself to stand up. Every joint protested.
Her head was lowered. The tip of her horn briefly touched the padding of a dress, and then slipped slightly to the right. The gap between strewn fabric now had her in contact with the soil.
Hind legs kicked against the ground itself, tried to jump forward without going anywhere at all. The back of her body elevated, her forelegs curled in, the world rushed around her and
she was vertical.
Vertical and -- upside down.
Balanced perfectly, on the tip of her horn.
The world seemed to be holding its breath.
And then the ground, which had just been asked to bear all the weight of an adult mare upon a single point, gave up.
Dirt parted. Her horn went straight down.
It was a rather short drop, and it ended when her forehead slammed into the padding. Also some soil: enough that she would spend an hour scrubbing it all out. But on the technical level, mostly padding.
The vibrating cloud began to laugh.
Recognition of what had truly happened was instantaneous. Extracting herself from her backyard, however, took enough time to allow the pegasus a significant headstart. Enough that there was no point in pursuit.
Rarity took her time about cleaning up the backyard. The dresses were belatedly set ablaze, because there was a theory that destroying something would make her feel better: it turned out to be mostly false. She carried the gramophone back inside, insofar as that description could be applied to pushing it along with her sore head. And once she was finally clean, she put on her glasses and examined the album.
The name of the purchasing party turned out to be Prismatic Productions, and it was the first album in a press run of one.
Rarity, who made things on request to fulfill the needs of a single customer, really didn't understand the collectibles market all that well. The demand aspects had never truly registered. But she presumed stomping the record to fragmented death was going to do a lot to increase scarcity.
Several days later, well after the muscle pains had decreased to mere twinges, the commission had been mailed off in rough triumph, and she'd finally moved out of the spa... she took some time to herself. Writing a few things down. And naturally, that was when several of her friends dropped by. Asking whether she was up to going out with them for the evening.
She declined -- temporarily. Personal time, you understand. She was just... creating something, and she wanted to finish her initial draft. But she would meet them at the dance hall in -- an hour or so?
They accepted that. The group left. (Rainbow was still snickering.) And then Rarity went back to her living area, so she could review the current creation.
It was something which had come to her in a single instant. A vision, complete and perfect and whole. Something which never would have happened without the... meditation. However, such visions still required effort to bring fully into reality, and this one was no different.
But she was very nearly there. She was just working out the small details and in doing so, she was focusing very finely.
Because, like just about everypony in town, Rainbow's mailbox was outside. At ground level, because the pegasus loved to receive packages and not every deliverypony could fly. And as with the vast majority of models, it possessed absolutely no enchantment-based security whatsoever. Something which had allowed Rarity to scout it for a few days, all while carefully making notes on... the magazines.
Aerodynamics Illustrated seemed to be the best candidate for an inserted article. (The hardest part of writing the drafts had been bringing herself down to Rainbow's vocabulary.) Something about how application of the proper dyes to fur and feathers made air just sort of -- slide off the body. It would help any pegasus to fly that much faster. What else would such a slick coating do?
Well, for starters, the bright colors wouldn't come off without special chemicals. Something Rarity didn't intend to inform Rainbow of until at least four hours had passed since application. Which would be two hours after the itching had begun.
Perhaps there was something about true meditation which brought inspiration. But even without that factor in play, when it came to vengeance... Rarity was prepared to be extremely creative.
