There were times Sunset Shimmer was an adult, and there were times she was a child.
Most of the time, she was an adult. At sixteen, she was not a filly but a mare, expected to be able to make her own way in the world. She knew how to hold down a job, manage her household budget, how to compose herself in stressful situations. She was the same age as her high school friends, but when they complained about childish things, about their parents' rules, she had the uncomfortable sensation of being an adult hanging out with kids.
But there were times it went the other way -- times her equestrian upbringing showed itself. When first she’d arrived on Earth, she’d judged humans a foolish and dim-witted species. She saw vapid students ruled over by underpaid and pedantic bureaucrats, and thought her conquest of Earth would be swift.
Three months into AP History, she learned about the Holocaust.
The mare who would be ruler of the Earth cried for two hours, until finally the teacher sent her home.
Raindrops pattered against the window of Sunset’s apartment, a light drizzle, the delicate prelude to a real storm. Though it was as yet the afternoon, the clouds left the world outside the window dark, and the raindrops made it darker still. Where the drops ran down the glass, they left black streaks, until the whole of the window was smoked. The sight that would once have inspired revulsion instead elicited mild anticipation. The rain was washing the sky clean, and come the dawn, the air would be clear again.
Sunset had stopped to watch the rain when it first began, but only briefly. She’d enjoyed storm watching all her life, but other things demanded her attention. The flick of a switch activated the string of faerie lights wrapped around the loft frame over her desk, producing a pool of warm light in the otherwise dark apartment. From a desk drawer she produced a set of scales, and then set about calculating the value of gold.
Gold was not a rare metal in Equestria. It was of such little commercial value that it could be used to facilitate even minor transactions, and the Equestrian Mint made of it coins of all denominations. But on Earth, where the metal was much rarer and the inhabitants were of a more mercantile, almost griffonian character, the price of gold was considerably higher. Sunset’s fingers danced on her laptop’s keyboard: $2,337 an ounce.
Which was not to say she hadn’t wanted to apologize to Celestia. She had, and if there had been no possibility of ulterior motive for the trip she would still have gone. But did it cheapen her apology if afterwards she did some trading before returning to the portal? She hadn’t thought so, and the weight of the bits in her hands had not shifted her opinion.
Mindful of the need of subtlety in Celestia’s presence, and the implicit limits that put on her cargo capacity, Sunset had managed to pawn one of her guitars, a flashlight, some 3D printed figurines, a funko pop, and fifty packs of playing cards, netting a total of 355 bits, which translated to approximately $820,000 human dollars. The qualifier “approximately” was why she required her scales, for the Equestrian Mint was not of such refinement that the weight of coins never varied. What they called “close enough” would not be close enough for human merchants.
Though, Sunset did not begrudge her usual broker. He never asked why a teenage girl would have hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold, and never asked for ID. Without him she would have not have the apartment she had, where she could watch the rain beat against a two-story loft window. She would not have the queen size bed mounted above her desk on iron poles, or the three guitars that hung over it in turn. Sunset had worked, of course, she’d been a waitress, but a waitressing job did not pay for such a dwelling.
And so she placed the coins on the scales one at a time, noting their weight and recording their value so that she would know how much her broker was cheating her. And she continued in that way until eventually there came a knock at the door.
“Twilight!” Sunset said, a broad smile breaking out on her face at the surprise visit. She grasped Twilight’s hand, and with a smooth and natural motion, pulled them together.
She spent days on Google, on Wikipedia, on her stolen phone and in public libraries. She learned about the holocaust, the history of genocide, world war two, world war one, the British Empire (in popular culture, atrocities of). She learned that those strange metal objects police officers wore on their belts were deadly weapons, and that those little boxes in the upper corners of rooms were surveillance cameras. She learned why she should not drink anything that was left open and unattended at a party.
Eventually, she was forced back to school. Her absence had been noticed, and she could only pretend to be her own mother on the phone for so long. When she walked the halls of Canterlot High, she moved like a deer among wolves, wondering what wrong move would prompt these savage creatures to fall upon her.
As she waited for geometry to start, she pulled out her phone to check the time. Flash Sentry, one seat over, had occasion to glance at the screen. “Wait, do you not have any apps on that thing?”
She asked him what an app was. Later, she got into trouble for playing Candy Crush during class.
“I’m so sorry.” A burning flush covered Sunset’s cheeks even as her eyes went to the floor, and her body language suggested a desire to hide until the storm had passed. “I’m so -- I didn’t think. She started wearing contacts. I didn’t—”
The young woman who’d knocked on her door was not her girlfriend, but a magical princess from another dimension who happened to look a great deal like her, and who emphatically did not want to be kissed. Princess Twilight had to spend several awkward moments reassuring Sunset that it was okay, that mistakes happened.
“I didn’t know you were on Earth,” Sunset said. “Did you write and I missed it?”
“Um, no. It was a surprise trip. I came to talk to you and, I thought. What I had to say was better said in-person than in writing.” She found a chair and sat, legs straight in front of her, fingers interlaced in her lap. Her low shoulders and straight-ahead stare forewarned of much, that she did not anticipate an easy or pleasant conversation. “I really think it would be good if you and Celestia reconciled.”
A small pause hung between them, and when Sunset spoke next, her apologetic and embarrassed tone was gone. Her words had an edge, sharp like a knife pressed into a surface that has not quite yielded. “We are reconciled. Reconciliation means to be friendly after a time of being hostile or apart. We are no longer hostile. She said I can visit Equestria any time. I’m grateful to her for that. If she ever needs my help, I’m here.”
“Right.” Twilight lifted and lowered her hands together, the motion all in the wrist, fingers still interlaced. “But you aren’t friends.”
“We were never friends, in the same sense you aren’t friends with your mother. You can be friendly, but the age and culture gap is a lot.”
“Celestia isn’t your mom,” Twilight said, and no sooner had the words left her mouth than she knew they were the wrong thing to say. She sat up sharp in her chair, hurriedly unlacing her fingers, waving a hand through the air as though to grab the words, to pull them back before they could be heard. “She isn’t your mother I mean. I mean, no. That-”
“It’s fine,” Sunset said. She leaned far back in her own chair turning her head up to the shadowed ceiling. A sharp breath escaped her, a hiss through her nose. “She isn’t my mother. But even if she was my mom -- adoptive or biological -- it wouldn't change how I feel about her.”
“Why?” Twilight asked.
The answer was simple: “I think my life is richer for not having her in it.”
Sunset aced geometry without studying. Such mathematics was part of a young unicorn’s magical curriculum, and the human notation was not greatly different. The teacher, Chalk Pants, thought she was a prodigy, and asked if she had any interest in signing up for the AP Pre-Calculus courses.
“What’s calculus?” Sunset asked. And because Chalk Pants knew she was a somewhat sheltered girl who had been homeschooled all her life, and because he’d heard of the incident in history class that Sunset hoped everyone had forgotten, he did not ask her how she could possibly not know. Instead, he picked up a piece of chalk, and during what was supposed to be his break and her study period, began to explain.
For an hour, Chalk Pants had the most uncanny sensation that he was talking to a great scholar from the distant past, as Sunset listened with rapt attention and then bombarded him with questions, questions that referenced mathematical techniques more suited to the history of mathematics than its modern practice. She knew how to square a circle by hand, she knew shorthand for finite approximations, she was familiar with the use of a slide rule, and lookup tables for common calculations.
And yet, at the end of the hour, he felt as though she understood. That in the course of an hour, he had taught a student calculus, and she understood better than others would after an entire year in class.
“Are you planning to study mathematics in college?” He rubbed the top of his balding head, dizzy with what had unfolded.
And Sunset asked: “What’s ‘college’?”
For a few long moments, Twilight didn’t answer. Sunset could see her perturbed expression, the sudden lines in her face. She could imagine Twilight’s instinctive snap of, “Why!?” even as the princess before her displayed the self control not to blurt out her first thought. And yet, the silence weighed on her, the accusation becoming real in the imagining.
“W-”
“Can I just say I don’t like her?” Sunset looked away, unable to meet Twilight’s gaze. She let out a sigh that was meant to be a nicker, momentarily forgetting her throat was no longer the correct shape. “There are lots of ponies in the world who are perfectly nice but whom you don’t like. I can’t say Celestia is a wonderful pony, but I just don’t want to be around her?”
“You can say that,” Twilight answered, tone steady, “if it’s true. Is that really the only reason?”
It was the right question, and the long silence after signaled as much. It took Sunset time to formulate her reply, and when she did speak again, her tone was softened: “No. It’s not the only reason.”
“You want to talk about what else you’re feeling?”
“Not really.” But her awkward laugh made it clear to them both she knew she had to, and she sat forward to show her submission to the question. “But… fine. This is going to seem like a non-sequitur, but I promise it’s not. I don’t think I ever told you, but I was frightened of humans. For a long time. Months. Getting over it was kind of a big deal for me.”
“Oh,” Twilight tilted her head to one side and reviewed her knowledge of Sunset’s past. The bully she remembered pushing kids into lockers hardly struck her as frightened. “They seem nice.”
“They seem nice, yeah,” Sunset agreed, her previously tense tone sprinkled with light cheer, the enjoyment of a statement that is technically correct. “But they’re not like ponies, deep down. Not at all. We have different psychology, different world views. Ponies are more alike to griffons and dragons than they are to humans.”
“Okay,” Twilight said, allowing a brief silence to hang to mark that she was willing to indulge this a bit further. “What are humans like then?”
“There’s a quote I heard once. A rational creature adapts themselves to the world,” Sunset replied, a small smile coming to her face, though it was laced in irony. “While an irrational creature demands the entire world change to accommodate them. And by that definition, humans are deeply, deeply irrational.”
“They seem okay to me.”
“Yeah but like…” Sunset waved a hand. “You live on the edge of the Everfree Forest. Timberwolf attacks are a problem from time to time, right? Foals get chased or even bitten. What do the ponies of Ponyville do to stop it?”
“We build wolf-fences, wards, other deterrents.”
“Right,” Sunset said. “Humans don’t do that.”
“So what do they do?” Twilight asked, a small frown appearing on her face.
“Exterminate the wolves.”
Humans were, by pony standards at least, compulsively legalistic and fastidious record keepers. In Equestria, a single forged document and a passable disguise would be all a pony would need to go incognito. On Earth, Sunset needed a social security number, a birth certificate, a passport, a residence, and legal guardians. She needed a chain of custody for all those records, and a hospital that would attest they had issued her that birth certificate. And if she claimed to have parents, those parents needed records too, records which claimed her as their daughter.
Her usual contact said the whole thing would cost her $300,000, cash. She agreed, and the next time she visited him, she asked how it was going.
“I’m pretty angry with you is how it’s going. What the fuck are you thinking ordering duplicates? Do you know how easy that is for the feds to spot?”
She demanded to know what he meant, and when he turned his computer monitor around, she was staring at her own face. Sunset Shimmer, born 2008. She had a birth certificate, parents, a social security number, everything.
She was listed as a missing person.
“Well, that… seems extreme,” Twilight said, uncomfortably waving a hand. “Look, if what you’re getting at is that humans are more comfortable with violence than ponies, I already know. I did study their history a little the last time I was here. They have a lot of wars.”
“There’s a genocide going on right now, did you know that? A small one, I guess.” Sunset shrugged, though her posture portrayed unease. There was a tightening of the shoulders with her motion, and urge to stare at the floor she had to consciously fight. “Somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 people have died so far, and your counterpart, my girlfriend, she doesn’t care. Like she acknowledges it’s sad, but it doesn’t make her feel anything.”
And for a time Twilight was silent, her expression deeply uncomfortable. The numbers washed over her, rancid in their character, like a tide full of dead fish. “I didn’t hear anything about that.”
“A lot of humans don’t care,” she said, with a tightness in her voice. “But I’m not dating a lot of humans. Just the one. So she’s the one I get the front-row seat with. Where I get to look at a human up close, when they hear thousands of people have died, see videos of tanks crashing through homes and airstrikes blowing limbs off children, and all they say is turn it off. Because she’s not political, and doesn’t want to get involved.”
Sunset clapped her hands over her knees: “It’s not that she means any harm. She’s just, in a lot of ways, deeply selfish. In the way nearly all humans are. Getting involved would upset her life plans, so she doesn't want to.”
“Then why are you dating her?”
“I think I love her,” Sunset says. “And I love Earth. I love this place, and I want to stay. Since I did promise I’d eventually come around to a point.”
Sunset used the Canterlot High portal to return to Equestria many times. At first, it was to spy on Celestia, to plan her glorious return, and to steal things she could use to sustain herself in the human world.
Eventually, she stopped planning her glorious return. Then, she stopped spying on Celestia.
Then she stopped going at all.
“Celestia isn’t demanding you come back to Equestria. She—”
“I know. I know.” Sunset raised a hand. “Twilight, is it good to be content?”
“What?” Twilight frowned. “Yes? That feels rhetorical.”
“If I was content, what need would there be to grow as a person?” Sunset asked. “Why would I bust my ass on college applications if -- wait, scratch, you don’t know what that is. Why would I study, if I already knew everything? Why would I make the world something other than what it is, if it’s already perfect?”
“If the world was perfect, why would you need to change it?”
Sunset pointed. “And that’s why I don’t want to be around Celestia.”
But once again, Sunset saw that Twilight did not understand. “I don’t want to wait for a handout, Twilight,” she pressed. “I don’t want to stay in my lane, sit in the nice little spot that destiny has provided for me, and hope that one day the world will come along and shake things up in an interesting way. I want to be discontented, I want to work hard, I want to strive for great things. I want friction, and tension. I want to play games where it’s possible I lose. And when I lose, I want to get mad, and upset, and throw my controller, literally or metaphorically.”
“Celestia isn’t telling you you can’t do those things.”
“No,” Sunset said. “But she thinks they’re character flaws.”
“I don’t think she’s ever said that.”
“Oh? You play bridge with her sometimes, right? Her, Luna, and Cadence?” Sunset lifted her head to regard Twilight properly, staring her right in the eyes. With the force of conviction, she said: “The next time you lose, get mad and throw the deck of cards.”
The intensity of Sunset’s stare put Twilight on the spot. For a moment, her face goes still.
Unable to bring herself to refuse, she instead said: “That would be rude.”
After many years away from home, Sunset Shimmer came face to face with Princess Celestia.
She thought she did pretty well. She said all the things she was supposed to say, and she even meant most of them. There were things she didn’t mean, but she at least meant to mean them. All of the actions she apologized for were things she recognized as wicked and deserving of an apology, even if she did not quite feel “sorry.”
She said that Celestia was right. She said that running away to another dimension and trying to swear revenge on Equestria proved that she had not been mature enough for the power she sought, and that Celestia was right to deny it to her. She said that as a filly, she had needed the magic of friendship in her life, and it was only now that she had made friends that she understood what Celestia had been trying to teach her.
She stayed on script, and it all went so well -- until they got to the end, and Celestia asked her a question: “Sunset Shimmer, will you accept my friendship?”
And Sunset said: “No.”
“Is it okay if I’m self-indulgent for a moment?” Sunset asked, as though she hadn’t been already. But Twilight was generous, forgiving and permitting with a single nod.
“Two humans meet,” Sunset continued, “at the shore of a great river, where there is a boat that is only large enough for one. They exchange words, ideas, goods. Eventually, they exchange blows. One will proceed on their journey, but it will not be either of the two who arrived. The humans who arrived do not exist, for they have been changed by the meeting. This is the universe, deciding what it wishes to be.”
“Did you make that up?”
“It’s from Destiny, actually,” Sunset vaguely indicated the console with a free hand. Twilight didn’t notice, and asked if Destiny was some human philosophical or religious text. Blandly, Sunset agreed that it was. “But it’s a good quote, regardless.”
“So you like human conflict?”
“No,” Sunset replied, firmly. “I hope I’ve made it clear that I don’t. How unsettling I find it. How unequine they are sometimes. I hate human conflict. Sometimes, I hate humans. And I hate cars, and smog, and the pollution in the air and the oil in the water. I hate that when a forest is in a human's way, they cut it down and pave it over and slaughter the animals. I hate how everything is about money, and I hate how everyone is so anxious all the time.”
And yet, she continued: “But every human has the will to make the world something other than what it is. They have that little spark of entitlement, the power to be just a little bit angry that the world isn’t the way it is in their heads. Most of them use that power to make the world worse, to be assholes, and it brings them into constant conflict with each other. But they all have it. And I admire that. I think it’s beautiful.”
“You don’t think ponies have that power?”
“What do you want Equestria to be,” Sunset asked, “that Celestia hasn’t already made it?”
Twilight began to answer, but the enormity of the question settled upon her, and she shut her mouth without speaking. Long was the silence that hung between them, and Sunset did not rush the matter. She sat there in the dark, watching as the rain gradually stopped. The clouds blew away, and the room filled with afternoon light, distorted by water droplets and lines of grime.
Finally, Twilight said: “A place where you, Sunset, can be happy.”
Sunset stood in what was once Celestia’s throne room, but which was no longer. Twilight sat on the throne, and the room was bedecked with her colors. She’d turned into an alicorn, and Sunset has turned into a 27 year old. It did good things for her complexion, her teenage leather jacket swapped for something sharp and refined.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Sunset said. “Did you have any plans other than interior decoration?”
“Yeah,” Twilight said. “That’s why I called you, actually. I was thinking of…” She picked her words carefully. “Shaking things up a bit.”
