Discoveries made. Regrets had. Lessons unlearned.
"Blech," Button Mash said, looking in the icebox. "My mom only left us healthy food."
"We should order a pizza," Scootaloo said. "With extra cheese and double jalapeños."
"Well, I don't have any money," Apple Bloom said. Sweetie Belle shook her head no.
They all looked at Diamond Tiara. "I'm poor now," she said. "Remember how Mom took everything Dad ever worked for to Las Pegasus? Remember that whole big thing with the police and reporters and the coroner? I'm sure you remember that."
Then they looked at Silver Spoon.
"My mom is between stallions right now," Silver explained. "Gold digging is a feast-and-famine profession."
Rumble shrugged his wings. "I'm starving."
The seven of them fumed silently, frowning, thinking.
Sweetie Belle's stomach growled. "I'm hungry," she said, "but not hungry enough to eat healthy food."
Scootaloo yanked up a couch cushion and started scrounging through the folds. "Let's find spare change."
The others joined in, ransacking the living room's couch and recliners. They moved the furniture, looking underneath.
They found a bit and thirty-five centibits.
"What's a pizza cost?" Sweetie Belle asked
"At least six bits fifty," Diamond Tiara replied. "Seven, if we want extra cheese."
They moved to the kitchen, checking every drawer. Apple Bloom laid down on her side and used a broom to probe under the stove. She found no coins, but did find a desiccated mouse carcass in a mousetrap.
"Explains the smell last month," Button said, his beanie propeller spinning slowly. "Mom tried to blame grandma's curried brussel sprouts."
After tearing apart the entire kitchen, their total increased to a bit, eighty-five.
Next, the guest room: nothing. Not even a penny.
They found two whole bits hidden in a box of bandages in the hallway bathroom.
"Still not enough for a pizza," Rumble grumped.
"As hungry as we're getting," Button said, "we'll need two pizzas."
"Seven bits times two is seventy-seven!" Sweetie cried. "We'll never get that much!"
The others blinked at her. "She's a dictionary," Apple Bloom whispered sotto voce. "Not a calculator."
Next was Button's mom's bedroom.
Although they didn't realize it, they had just crossed a Grifficon.
Rumble checked under the bed. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon checked between the mattress and the box springs. ("I found fifteen cents!" Diamond announced.) Sweetie Belle checked in the master bathroom and medicine cabinet. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo rummaged through Button's mom's dresser.
Button, rummaging through his mom's bedside stand, opened a drawer, dug through some socks, and started sobbing.
The others looked at him.
Button howled in anguish and pulled his hooves out of the drawer as if he'd stuck them in a hydra trap.
"What's wrong with ya?" Apple Bloom asked.
Button dropped to his rump and held his forehooves away from his body, like they were covered in acid and he didn't want to risk dripping it on himself. "I– I– I– I touched— touched— touched—"
He scooted backwards on his butt, away from the still-open drawer.
"Sweetie Belle!" shouted Apple Bloom. "Come use your levitation to figure out what's wrong with Button."
Sweetie pranced into the bedroom, stepped around Button's sobbing, shaking, snot-dripping form, and rummaged through the sock drawer with her forehooves.
Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
"Oh," Sweetie said, freezing in place. "Oh."
Button howled louder.
Sweetie pulled it out from under the socks and dropped it in the bed.
"Oh," said Silver Spoon.
Apple Bloom and Diamond Tiara took a step backwards.
Rumble's and Scootaloo's wings went straight up in what was—almost surely—shock, not some other emotion.
"D-d-d-don't look at it!" Button blubbered.
It was huge. And smooth. And black. And anatomically correct.
"So," Diamond Tiara said, tapping her chin with a hoof. "Now we've met Button's dad."
Sweetie shot a glance at Button, then at the object on the bed. "Stepdad. No resemblance."
"Ah, for Celestia's sake," Rumble said, covering his eyes with his wings.
"What?" Apple Bloom asked.
"Look at the brand name," Rumble whispered. "Stamped on the base."
"'The Thunderlane,'" Silver Spoon read.
"I'd hate to be you right now," Apple Bloom said to Rumble.
"At least I'm not him," Rumble replied, pointing at Button, sitting on his butt and sobbing like he'd been tear-gassed by the Los Alicornios police department. His beanie propeller spun like a centrifuge refining weapons-grade poison joke extract.
Button held his forelegs straight up. "Can somepony please bring me some hoof sanitizer? And then some cyanide?"
"I didn't know they could be that big," Diamond Tiara said. "The one I found in my mom's bedroom wasn't anything like that size."
"Why were you going through your mom's stuff?" Scootaloo asked.
"Planting drugs," Diamond replied. "Right before I called the cops."
Apple Bloom frowned. "I don't remember your mom getting arrested for drugs."
"The cops just took them and left. Turns out, Mayor Mare has a 'problem' and the cops know who signs their paychecks." Diamond fumed. "You would not believe what Maud charged me for them, and pffft! Gone!"
"Maud's a drug dealer?" asked Rumble.
Diamond raised an eyebrow. "Do you see the Royal Rocktology Survey supporting any freelancers?"
"Where does Maud get drugs?" Rumble asked. "Manehattan?"
"She grows meth crystals," Diamond said.
Button's howling slowed into burbling sobbing sobbing burbles.
Scootaloo jumped onto the bed and held up her forhooves, judging the object's size. "If I hollowed it out and filled it with solid rocket fuel, its center of thrust would be really close to my center of mass, and that would fix the dynamic instability from the unbalanced torques I got with external boosters..."
"No!" the others all shouted.
Scootaloo flicked her wings and scowled.
Button scrambled up off the floor and grabbed the object, holding it vertically like a silicone punji stick. It swayed left and right, left and right, left and right at its natural frequency, physics being a harsh mistress, after all. "See? See? It's not a- a- a- a-... it's it's it's it's a metronome! Mom must be learning to play an instrument. Four-four time, adagio." He started humming in time with the swaying: "Hmm-HMMM. Hmm-HMMM. Hmm-HMMM!"
Left and right, left and right, left and right it swayed, metronomically precise.
Sweetie Belle leaned toward the thing. "Man, that thing must touch the bottom of your mom's lungs."
Button's howling returned, but he still held the item like a king brandishing a sword, posing for a portrait painter. Except if the sword was the Queen Mother's sword, and silicone, and huge.
"Dude," Rumble said. "Stop touching it."
"Snails always has money," Silver Spoon said, "from playing Buckball. He'd pay us seven bits—"
"Seventy-seven," Sweetie insisted.
"—seventy-seven bits to see this thing," Silver Spoon concluded.
"Snips controls his money," Rumble said, "and Snips wouldn't be interested in anything... uh..." Rumble flicked his wings and frowned, looking for the words.
"Anything having to do with a mare?" Diamond suggested.
Rumble nodded his head and touched his nose.
Button moved to return the object to the drawer. "We gotta put everything back how it was! Mom can never know!"
"Hol' up!" Apple Bloom said. "Sweetie, check the drawer for money, first."
Sweetie levitated up the folded socks and leaned forward. Her aura spluttered out and she scrambled backwards, face turning ashy gray, and knocked Button over, making him drop the large black mass of silicone, which bopped Rumble between the eyes and sent him sprawling, stunned, eyes crossed and ears splayed.
"What's wrong?" Apple Bloom asked. "Did you find any bits?"
"The other one..." Sweetie whispered.
Button sobbed louder.
"What 'other one?'" Silver Spoon asked, pushing her glasses up her nose.
Sweetie pointed. "The other one in the drawer... it's even bigger."