Of Glass (and the many deceptions within)
“Normalcy” is a foreign concept to the siblings of the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
They had normal periods, of course. Small chunks of time within the day in which they could sit back, sigh, and relax, content with the fact that nothing around them was presently imploding. But said moments were fleeting, blips on the radar, and often found themselves shattered in increasingly loud and creative ways. The walking cacophony that was the trio of fillies seemed determined to write a new set of workplace regulations through action, and none of them had ever been formally employed. To be related to the Crusaders was to find oneself bombproof without ever being exposed to explosive ordinance, and it seemed a bizarre twist of irony that said desensitization was provided to a group of mares who might actually have a use for it. Nopony ever said being a bearer was a peaceful career.
To exist within this constant onslaught of chaos was a feat even the bravest of Guards would struggle with. It also had side effects. For instance, nobody in Ponyville had a larger social circle than the older siblings of the crusaders. It was a rather simple and organic method of making friends; all you had to do was send a sibling out for the day and wait. Eventually, there’d be a knock on the door, with a disgruntled pony and freshly-ashamed sibling on the other side, and all they had to do to diffuse tension was look down and say “what did they do this time?” Small talk and promises of recouped damages would then turn the confrontation into an amicable one, and from there, friendships blossomed. The number of ponies in town who didn’t know Rarity by name was rapidly dwindling to a number that could be counted on hooves alone.
Normalcy didn’t exist within the Boutique. But rarely, the day’s disruptions would take on a gentler form, where the trio’s shenanigans would become, for lack of a better term, self contained. Activities that didn’t spread collateral outside of the Boutique were few and far between, but welcomed nonetheless. It provided a respite; both from having to talk down a furious business owner yet again and from another insurance rate hike.
The time was five in the afternoon. It was a Tuesday. The Boutique was preparing for dinner. Sweetie Belle had gone out earlier in the day, returned alone with a book, and immediately retired to her room without a word.
Suffice to say, Rarity was afraid.
She had almost finished cooking when the other shoe dropped. Because with the Crusaders, the other shoe was an eventuality, not an anxiety. You didn’t wait for it to drop, you spent time bracing. She had experience with this sort of thing, after all.
It started innocuously, as it always did. Rarity heard Sweetie Belle’s bedroom door creak open, and a pink-and-white head peeked around the top of the stairs. “Rarity?”
The eldest sibling sighed, letting her magic that was in the process of stirring a pot of noodles dissipate. “Yes, Sweetie?”
“You know the doorknobs in my bathroom?” And it was at that moment that Rarity turned around, met the filly’s gaze with her own, and noticed the blankness to it. The kind of stare that meant the pony weren’t really present in the conversation, that their mind was a thousand miles away and racing. One’s eyes lose a bit of their shine, the muscles in their face relax just enough to be uncanny, and their voice enters a committed relationship with the adjective tepid. The sheer shock of seeing Sweetie like that nearly made the bizarre nature of the question skim right over Rarity’s head.
“The ones that look like big diamonds?” When the question was met with a nod, she rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m quite familiar.”
“What are they made of?” And before Rarity could answer, she spoke again. “And where did we get them?”
Rarity turned back around, picking up the stirring spoon again. “I wouldn’t know. Dad did the decorations in that room.” A pause. “They probably came from Home Depone. I think I’ve seen them on the shelves.”
Sweetie Belle and Rarity didn’t share too many common interests, nor many common behaviors. It was always a delight when they managed to find common ground.
In a way, Rarity was almost proud of Sweetie for demonstrating a need to purchase a second fainting couch. She just wished she hadn’t done so at the top of the stairs.
“There is absolutely no way that they came from Home Depone,” said a recently-bruised filly, currently walking towards Ponyville’s Home Depone.
Rarity shrugged. “Sweetie, it’s not like we can afford someone to do the doorknobs custom.” Though most shops in town were entering their closing hours, the sun had yet to be lowered, so business raged on. The pair had found themselves passed by frantic shoppers racing to beat closing time, searching for ingredients they’d sworn they had in the pantry right up until the moment they were needed. They’d made a quick stop at an ice cream parlor, if only for Sweetie to immediately stick her cone on the biggest lump forming on her head like a second horn. Neither she nor the shopkeeper paid it much mind. You got used to oddities around the Crusaders.
“But they’re fancy,” Sweetie asserted firmly, trotting just a bit faster. “Like, really fancy. I didn’t know they were fancy.”
She couldn’t help herself. She snorted. “I assure you they’re not,” she said, doing her best to contain the laughter in her voice. “When mom and dad had you, they wanted to replace the countertop in that bathroom, and wanted knobs to match. They got acrylic ones because you liked how they sparkled. That’s all there is to it.”
“They’re not acrylic.”
A blink. “Oh?”
Sweetie sped up again, if only to round the street corner in front of her at an angle. “They’re crystal.” When that failed to elicit a response, she looked back. “Crystal, Rarity. Like the stuff on the top shelf of the china cabinet. The really fancy wine glasses.”
“Oh.” Rarity’s eyes focused on the street ahead of her. “Well, isn’t that a nice surprise.” And she kept walking.
Sweetie’s mouth hung agape. Her steps hitched, and she stumbled for a second. “That’s it?” She bumbled past another pony on the sidewalk, who took one look at the rapidly melting second horn on her head and trotted away, a baffled o hanging on his lips.
“Should there be more?” Rarity inquired. Ahead, the bright orange Home Depone sign came into view.
“Uh, yeah?” The filly’s words emerged with incredulity, like she couldn’t possibly believe what she was hearing. “Crystal is stupid fancy. Like, status symbol fancy. Diamond Tiara brought a crystal tea set to show and tell once just to gloat that her family has had it for like eighty years.” She looked up at her older sister. “And we’re using it for doorknobs.”
“Apparently.”
If a window sat in between Rarity and Sweetie’s stare, twin holes would have melted in it. “Do you have any idea how jealous I could’ve made Diamond and Silver Spoon if I’d known my bathroom had crystal doorknobs?”
Rarity, for what felt like the eightieth time, rolled her eyes. “Sweetie, darling, she would have laughed at you.” By this time, the Home Depone was close enough to adjust course for, so the two of them began to curve towards it. “Crystal used to be fancy and expensive. Nowadays, it’s just another kind of glass.”
The ensuing “WHAT?!” nearly made the doors to the hardware store irrelevant. More accurately, nonexistent. As the two of them walked in, the glass panes were still vibrating.
“Do you know what crystal is?” Rarity asked, giving a kind nod to the employee pushing trolleys by the door. She didn’t see when he went to the store PA system, but when the string of numbers and colors that meant a Crusader is here, try to keep them out of the lightbulb section and do NOT let them ANYWHERE near the large equipment rental was read out over the speakers, she mentally recited the code to herself. The trio hadn’t yet realized that the town had begun implementing Crusader Mitigation Measures (CMMs™), but their families had been explicitly told.
“Yeah! Carved natural crystal.” Sweetie answered confidently. “And you want me to believe that the Home Depone is selling it.”
“Wrong, actually,” she said, a smirk on her face. “Crystal is lead glass.”
A pause, but this time, of both the verbal and movement variety. “Huh?”
Raritiy slowed her own gait to let Sweetie catch up, looking up at the aisle numbers. “Yeah. Glasshouses take lead oxide and they mix it into the silica and potash. It makes the glass sparkle a bit more than normal.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Sweetie asked. “Why would-”
“It’s a little dangerous, yes.” She spotted the aisle number for Doorknobs and Cabinetry and began to trot there. “But only if you’re leaving everything you drink in it for several hours, to let the lead leach into the liquid. I’ve let you have juice out of our fine crystal before, darling, I wasn’t trying to poison you.”
“I know, but…” Her snout scrunched up. “What about crystal chandeliers? Every castle in the movies has big, gaudy crystal chandeliers. And royalty will only drink from it.” A pause. “How isn’t that fancy?”
“Well, for starters, those were props,” Rarity laughed. “When it comes to real crystal, though, most of the value came from the pony designing the crystal,” Rarity answered. “Their time and craftsmanship is what you were really paying for. Only a few ponies had the marks to become true crystal artisans, y’know.”
“Oh.”
“You can’t forget the marketing angle, either.” They turned into the aisle. “I can almost guarantee there’s some sort of sponsorship between the movie studio and a big glasshouse to make sure that their crystal was shown to be fancy on the big screen. Helps them justify the price to the buyer.”
As Sweetie began scanning the aisle, she looked back at Rarity. “So what changed?” A pause. “It used to be really fancy and valuable.”
Rarity shrugged again. “Glass evolved, I suppose.” A glint of refraction caught her eye, and she moved closer. “Molds, factories, and the division of what was once an artisan’s work into a million tiny steps that can fit on the assembly line. Suddenly, what once took a pony with a cutie mark for glassblowing hours to make can be manufactured by the thousands. The art of making crystal was reduced to chucking a bunch of powders into a furnace and pumping the slag into molds.”
Sweetie’s face scrunched up at that, like she’d just bitten into a lemon. “That’s depressing.”
“It’s marketing,” Rarity replied. “Jewelers did it too, for the longest time. Do you remember how you used to think gems were so valuable?”
“And then you took me gem hunting with you and started pulling rubies the size of my hoof out of the ground like it was nothing,” Sweetie finished, and her ears wilted back just a little bit. “Yeah, I remember.”
“But there’s a second part to that equation, darling.” Cerulean light sparked around her horn, and a glass knob floated down from a shelf. “I don’t tell the customers the jewels that I use in their dresses were yanked out of the dirt like a potato. I make sure the customer knows how many carats went into their dress, I make sure they know each and every type of stone I decided to set, and when they buy the dress from me, they make sure to tell their friends, too. Every good salespony knows that value doesn’t exist until someone shows up with bits, and sometimes, you have to create your own.”
“Isn’t that lying?”
She shrugged. “The alternative is going out of business.” The doorknob held in her field floated down to Sweetie’s eye level. “Is this the same as your doorknob?”
For a second, Sweetie didn’t say anything. Her horn lit with her own magic, and a small circle of pale blueish-white light shone on the doorknob. To Rarity’s surprise, it lit up a brilliant, near-royal blue. The color of the light then changed to purple, and the blue vanished. “I guess it is. Huh.”
“What did you just do?” Rarity asked slowly, an eyebrow creeping up her forehead.
“Simple light spell. Learned it from Twilight’s library.” She looked up at the price tag next to the display. “Only four bits?”
“Told you,” Rarity said with smug intent. “It really isn’t that special anymore.”
“Dang.”
As they walked out of the Home Depone, they were silent. Rarity quietly looked her sister over. Though her tumble down the stairs had dinged her up quite a bit, and the rapidly-melting second horn was very quickly turning into a mandatory bathtime, that wasn’t was drew her attention. It was the way that her spine seemed to slump in the middle, how every hoofstep forward seemed unsteady, and the uncertain look in her eyes that gave her pause. “Are you alright, Sweetie?”
Her answer was slow. “I thought they were acrylic, too.”
“Hm?”
“The knobs.” She hesitated. “For the longest time, I thought they were acrylic. Nothing special. And today I discover that they’re crystal, real actual crystal, only to find out that that’s just a fancy way to say lead glass and that the knobs cost four bits…”
“Oh, dearie, I’m sorry-”
“No, don’t be.” Another hesitation. “It just feels like I watched a little magic leave the world, you know? That this fancy thing I’ve been in awe of my whole life is just… lead. In glass.”
“I know the feeling.” Their hoofsteps filled the air for a moment. “If it makes you feel any better,” Rarity began, “crystal artisans still exist. It’s not all factory-made and mass produced.”
Sweetie blinked. “Really? … how do they make money?”
“They change the marketing,” her older sister replied. “When you used to buy crystal, the artisan nature of it was implied. The mere existence of a crystal glass on your shelf told anyone who looked at it that not only did hours and hours of personalized effort go into something, but you had the ability to pay them to do so. Artisans never needed to advertise themselves as artisans, because the entire category of products was, by definition, artisan.”
“Huh.”
Rarity smiled. “It’s no longer implied, so they move it front and center. These crystal glasses were hoof-blown, shaped by an artisan, completely hoofmade.” A pause. “If an artisan gets well known enough, all they need to do is stamp their maker’s mark on the glass and put their name on the box. It’s always been the point that crystal stuff was hoofmade. Nowadays, it’s just… more explicit with the fancier stuff.”
“That makes sense,” Sweetie replied, absentmindedly kicking a pebble down the road. “Do they charge more?”
“They charge absurd amounts of money,” Rarity scoffed. “The wine glasses on the top shelf of the china cabinet? Those took a whole year to save for.”
“Dang.” she whistled.
“I don’t intend on getting any more any time soon.”
They lapsed back into silence briefly. The sun began to dip towards the horizon, and various oranges and purples began to saturate the sky. Songbirds changed shifts, called in the cool evening air, and the lights in shop windows began to flick off. “It still doesn’t feel the same,” Sweetie eventually said.
“It won’t. Ever again. That’s just part of growing up, Sweetie.”
“Ew.” Rarity dignified that with a laugh, and Sweetie sighed. “It’s just… the real crystal stuff is too expensive for most ponies to buy, but the stuff we can is just… factory, mass produced glass with lead in it and a price hike?”
“Exactly, darling.”
“And we can’t even get mad, because it is technically crystal?”
“Mhm. I could get a nicely-patterned set of crystal wine glasses for twenty bits.”
“Decadence is dead.”
“On the contrary, it’s never been more alive. The decadent are few, and their imitators many, and that’s one tradition that will never die.”
When they got back to the Boutique, few words were exchanged. The leftovers were packaged, the lights downstairs turned off, and the shop doors were bolted and locked. Neither seemed to have the energy for conversation as they got ready for bed.
Eventually, though, Rarity knocked on Sweetie’s door. When a faint come in! was shouted back, she entered.
“How did you find out they were crystal, anyway?” she began, looking at the offending doorknobs.
“Light spell,” Sweetie replied. When all that did was cause her sister to raise an eyebrow, she laughed. “I’m serious! It was a normal light spell, just cast at a frequency where it’d put out ultraviolet light instead of visible.”
Rarity’s eyes shot open, and she smiled. “Oh! Are you and the girls gonna go searching for yooperlites?”
“We were thinking more Cutie Mark Crusaders Antique Glass Appraisers, actually,” she replied.
Rarity paused. Let that sentence bounce around between her ears. Tilted her head to the side, stuck her tongue in her cheek, and held the pose for a second. Eventually, her mouth cracked open. “That’s… fairly harmless,” she said carefully.
“Thanks!”
“What do you need the ultraviolet for?” she asked.
“Crystal,” she replied. “It fluoresces under certain ultraviolet wavelengths.”
“I didn’t know that,” Rarity replied.
“Also uranium.”
“What,” Rarity said. Not asked, said. But it wasn’t a surprised statement, nor an angry one. It was the kind of statement that felt braced, like the speaker had spent a good deal of time preparing to say it. Because the siblings of the Crusaders knew you didn’t wait for the other shoe to drop. It was already coming down. You just didn’t know when it would.
“Ponies used to put uranium in glass,” Sweetie said.
“Oh, did they now?” Rarity said faintly, her vision starting to swim. “Is it safe?”
“Kinda.”
“Noted,” she said tiredly. “Please never bring any into the house.” Because a kinda from the Crusaders could mean anything from a mild irritant to a hospital stay.
“Don’t need to. We have some in the china cabinet.”
“What.” This time, it was a shocked statement.
Sweetie giggled. “It was really common! And you organized the cabinet by value and color. You put all of grandma’s green glass on one shelf. Half of it’s uranium.”
“Oh, lovely,” Rarity replied. “Say, Sweetie, do you know where my visual periphery has gone?”
“No?”
“Fantastic. I’m going to go turn my normal bed into a fainting bed.” And she did.
“Rarity?”
The sound of eggs sizzling on the stovetop found itself briefly interrupted as she turned around. “Yes, Sweetie?”
She was at the top of the stairs again. This time, her stare was focused, present, and alert. Her gaze was tinged with worry and a fair amount of disgust.
“Can we try to get our marks in bathroom cleaning today?” the filly asked awkwardly.
“Sure, as long as you do it anywhere that isn't here. Why?” Behind Rarity, an egg popped, stinging her flank with hot oil.
And that was when her front legs crossed, and a sheepish grin appeared on her face. Rarity sighed, turned off the stove and turned to fully face her sibling. The expression was not unfamiliar - in fact, it was the most familiar one Sweetie’s face could hold. An expression of shame, of that-didn’t-go-how-I-planned, a face that silently pleaded with her older sibling not to be too mad.
“Well…” Sweetie began.
“Just give me the damage,” Rarity replied, headache building behind one of her eyes.
“I… went back to look at the crystal knobs.” A back hoof began nervously tapping. “Because it’s cool when they glow, even if it’s not particularly special…”
“Out with it, please,” Rarity said.
“That was it.”
A pause. “Oh?”
“Rarity, I took a blacklight into my bathroom. At night.”
And for a moment, no words could be said. Even if they were, they wouldn’t have traveled far. It’s very difficult to be intelligible over the sound of peals of laughter.
Author's Note
