A giant mass of roiling shadows was chasing me down a narrow corridor. I reached a dead end. I turned around, cowering as the shadows loomed above me. The last thing I saw before closing my eyes was a pair of poisonous green eyes, laughing as the shadows lunged forward-
Then the bass dropped and I woke up.
“Aaaaaaarrrrgh”
Thankfully my scream couldn’t be heard over the blaring music coming from next door.
“Nooooooooooooooooo...” I put my pillow over my head, trying to block it out, but it was useless.
“And here I was thinking that having a free period first meant that I could sleep in.”
I checked my timetable for the day, it was funny; I’d only been here for a week and it already felt as if I’d been here for years. I groaned when I realized that I had Practical Magic after my free: the reason I was so tired in the first place was that I’d been up most of the night practicing that bloody come-to-life spell. While it had been fun making my possessions declare war on each other, by the time I actually went to bed it was after 3AM, and even then I couldn’t resist making my alarm clock breakdance for a bit.
I levitated my glasses over to my face, accidentally poking myself in the eyes in the process.
“Son of a biscuit” I muttered to myself, rubbing my watering eyes. My Prac Magic teacher, whose name I’d found out was Star Burst, had told me that the best way to get better at magic was to use it as often as possible, this completely contradicted what my father had told me my entire life.
I was about five when I first tried experimenting with magic. I’d just realized how much fun it was to make random things float around the room and my mother was watching on and laughing. She stopped laughing when she heard my father coming home though, and quickly tried to get me to go to my room. I didn’t want to go though, because I was really excited about my magic and wanted to show my father what I could do. He walked into the room and I ran up to him, eager to see how impressed he’d be.
“What’s all this?” he asked, with an annoyed expression on his face,
“Look what I can do dad!” I said excitedly, and then levitated his hat off his head and over to the table.
There was an icy silence.
“...Is that it?” my father asked coldly.
“Gale,” my mother said pleadingly, he silenced her with a glare.
“Comet, go to your room.” Said my father, pushing me towards my bedroom door. I thought about refusing, but the look on his face told me it wouldn’t be a good idea. My father slammed the door behind me, but that didn’t stop me from hearing the argument.
Star Burst surprised us all when he teleported into class that day. That surprise quickly changed to excitement when the class realized what that meant. Star Burst smiled.
“As you may have guessed, the next topic we’ll be working on is teleportation.”
The class cheered loudly,
“BUT,” the class froze “before that we’ll have to do some THEORY WORK!”
The class groaned.
“The notes-“ there was a flash of light and writing appeared on the board “-are on the board; copy them into your books and then do questions 1-10 on page 114 of your textbooks. Get to it!”
“So Comet, how did you go with the come-to-life spell?” Star Burst asked me.
I happily told him of all the things I had managed to make my things do.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” he told me, when I was halfway through a blow-by-blow account of the epic duel I had orchestrated between my red and blue pens.
“It sounds like you’ve really gotten the hang of that spell. I have to admit, I’m impressed.”
It was funny how quickly Drama had become my favourite class. I know it sounds cheesy, but it was the one place at school where I didn’t feel inferior to all the other ponies. Everyone was at the same level in Drama, and it was the only class where I felt like I could talk to other ponies. This didn’t always end well though, as my lack of conversation skills quickly became apparent. Eventually the topics would dry up and I would resort to asking stupidly formal questions, which led nowhere:
“...So what subjects are you doing?”
“Uh, blah, blah and also blah.”
“Cool...so are you enjoying them?”
“Yep.”
Rinse and repeat.
One instance in particular I got so desperate for a topic that I ended up asking one filly which room she was in.
“246” she replied, I nodded absentmindedly.
Then it hit me.
“YOU!” I exclaimed, rounding on her, she looked worried.
“You’re the one who woke me up this morning when I was trying. To. Sleep. IN.”
She looked so absolutely terrified of me that my anger melted away, replaced with an irrepressible urge to laugh at the expression on her face. I let out a tiny laugh, and suddenly she was laughing with me. A few moments later we were both rolling around on the floor with tears of laughter streaming down our faces. And whenever we started to recover, she would pull the same face again and we would dissolve into gales of laughter once again.
Finally we managed to compose ourselves, and I helped the filly up.
“My name’s Vinyl Scratch,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes, “but you can just call me Vinyl, all my friends do”
“Comet Crash” I replied, she offered her hoof and I shook it, wondering if she meant what she said.
If so, I’d just made my first ever friend.