//------------------------------// // Minutes to Midnight // Story: A Ballad of Eeyup and Nope // by ambion //------------------------------// Big Macintosh stood on the front step. The library was ablaze with light despite the late hour. Voices within covered the silence like plush carpets. Soft, but indistinct. What had been a moment to collect his demeanor and breath had become hesitation. His resolve wavered. Surely, what did it matter if he put off this ill-fated confrontation until tomorrow? There had been more than enough for the stallion to deal with. A simple, straightforward bet, now spun out of recognition or control. The more he thought on it, the more his reluctance to go through with this last hurdle in the final hours grew. Was it boldness to keep pushing, or just foolhardy? And so Big Macintosh turned, an iceberg tumbling over and over in the currents of things even greater than itself, and left the library to the night and the whims of those within. He went home. The walk was longer than he recalled. Rainbow Dash and Applejack were surprised, but this was not their concern, and they knew it. They teased him gently once or twice, but let him be. Victory came not as a triumph, but as an inevitability. Congratulations came half heartedly, and those uttering them furrowed their brows, as if confused as to why they gave them. By noon of the second day in idleness, Big Macintosh abandoned his pretense of ‘freedom’ and wordlessly nosed his way back into the familiar grip of the harness. He returned to work with a fervour he did not care to think much about. Time passed. The day of his challenge slipped away from conscious thought. The story ended. The work remained. Big Macintosh stood on the front step. His hesitation buckled with each stern breath he took, ‘til it broke and scattered like dust in the wind. He had come, there would be no sense or satisfaction in backing out now. He clamped his jaw and made for the door. It opened just ahead of his touch, creaking in a manner he had never heard from it before. “We’ve been expecting you,” a voice croaked, then descended into laughter. Big Mac blinked his watering eyes against the sudden light, stepping half-blindly past the threshold. “Pinkie!” he heard a mare hiss in rebuke. “I cannot believe you actually went through with that awful greeting. And shut that door, you’re letting in a draft!” Pinkie Pie, no longer bothering to affect a spooky voice, giggled. With a harrumph and a swish of mane Rarity swept past them both. The door closed with a perfect absence of sound be it creak, croak or groan, with the exception of a forceful click as the latch caught. Head and tail held purposefully high, Rarity strode out across the floor. “Ever so sorry about her. There is a time and a place for silly antics and this is decidedly not it!” She shot the other mare a look that, quite to Big Mac’s surprise, actually subdued her. Pinkie calmed, and murmured an apology. Not to Big Mac, but to Rarity. For him she had a bittersweet smile, one too knowing and almost sad to seem at home on a face usually reserved for exuberance. The library was lit up with little lanterns, the sort mounted to the walls well beyond the reach of eager foals or careless visitors. The candles within cast a warm glow, the light did not so much banish the shadows that lined the shelves as gently tuck them back to sleep amidst the books for a while yet.“You been expecting me?” Rarity rane her hoof through her mane, a gesture that spoke more of habit and stress than showing off in his opinion, not that the stallion minded her unconscious display. “Somewhat, yes.” “I just knew you would,” Pinkie added suddenly. “So I came too, came first I mean, and told Rarity.” She had not moved from her spot, so that Big Macintosh looked first backwards then forwards and back again, unable to keep both mares in his line of sight. Rarity bristled. “And you told Twilight.” Pinkie nodded, just once. “She told Twilight,” she said weakly. Suddenly she was stamping all four hooves as if she danced on coals, tossing her bouncing mane this way and that. “Why did you tell Twilight?!” she hissed. She sighed and again ran a hoof through the long wavy mane, but it was not quite so perfectly refined as it had been before the little outburst. “Now she’s stressed out again, and I’m stressed trying to manage her stress, and she’s gone back down to that...thing again. After I have spent half the day prying her away from it! Oh Pinkie,” she whimpered and slumped like so much silk, “you test my patience like nopony else can.” Big Macintosh busied himself with trying to not feel embarrassed on Rarity’s behalf. On the other hoof, she seemed to have no issue with enacting all her drama in front of him. He supposed that meant good things about their budding friendship, that she felt comfortable with him. The mare leant back on a little reading chair, closing her eyes as she did so. “I suppose it will work out for the best, Pinkie. Somehow. It usually does with you, when you’re like this. Feelings and senses and all such things. If only it didn’t have to be so infuriatingly vague.” Her white hoof waved before the stallion, then settled across her eyes. “Poor Big Macintosh. You are caught up in this worse than either of us. We just have to try to manage Twilight. It’s you she’s got that infernal contraption below fixed on. Could you have expected any of this when you woke up this morning? Again, that too-knowing, piercing, almost sad look from Pinkie. It stilled his tongue. “I think he expected just to work,” she said. The pink pony pulled a brush from somewhere and, holding it gently in her mouth, worked it through the unicorn’s mane. It was not the expert treatment that would make Rarity’s hair the masterpiece she presented daily, but it was a friendly, pleasant touch of relief all the same. The unicorn stretched and purred almost audibly. Big Mac felt awkward on his hooves. He wanted to say Eeyup to those words, but part of him wanted to say Nope, and almost resentfully so. He shifted his weight from side to side, as he did when idle but not restively so. Maybe it was the mention of work, maybe it was being witness to something he’d never seen before, this thing that was almost intimate. Maybe it was the way those lambent blue eyes gripped him. There were questions in him bubbling up to the surface, but without the words to phrase them they were just feelings. Like Eeyup and Nope could be, in a way. “What ‘thing’ would that be, Miss Rarity?” He had come to resolve any and all issues with Twilight after all. Figuring out just what in the hay she’d gotten into her head and done was as fine a place to start in sorting out this mess as anything. “Did she told you about her ‘additional studies?’ The ones she has started for herself on ‘interpony relationships?’ ” Eeyup itched along his jawline. Eeyup, Twilight had. Eeyup, it had sounded as nonsensical to him coming straight from the horse’s mouth as it did coming from Rarity now. He bit back the forbidden word and grunted in the affirmative. “Well, she’s gone and done something quite...excessive with the concept.” “Don’t you mean ‘eccentric?’ ” Pinkie asked softly. Rarity curled up, sat, and turned to her. “Not at all. You are eccentric, Pinkie. Some ponies might daresay that I am eccentric.” Rarity sniffed disapprovingly to such a thought.  “Twilight...” she shook her head, forlorn. Her hooves came up and she gestured, but half-heartedly, as if she knew there was no real way to convey the breadth of the present madness. “There’s metal...and wheels.” “Mhmm.” Pinkie’s hooves had no such lack for making the attempt. They flailed about with manic intent. “Loads and loads and loads of tubing, going all over it this way and that, and levers and pumps and gears. Different coloured glass chambers of all different sizes, and gauges-” “And the dreadful little faces.” Rarity shuddered. “And the little faces,” Pinkie agreed, suddenly solemn. Big Macintosh glanced left and right. Closing his eyes he ran his tongue over his teeth and nibbled at his lip, a mildly embarrassing habit he had when in deep thought, though one he didn’t mind showing now. Twilight wouldn’t go far, especially with something made up of so many parts. It’d be heavy. He felt the warm, dry stillness of library air. He felt his weight on the floor. His eyes popped open. “In the basement?” “Yep. Mad scientists always go to the top of a tower or the bottom of a dungeon. I wonder if she needs lightning bolts—”  Rarity rolled her eyes. “It would be too heavy and too large to have built upstairs—” “But Rarity, lightning bolts! There’s proper proceedings for this sort of thing” Pinkie pleaded in an insistent, irritating way, tugging the brush through the unicorn’s mane firmly. Rarity sighed as her head was pulled this way and that. “It’s not even windy out, let alone raining. No, Pinkie, there will be no lightning. We are better off without it, thematically appropriate to the situation or not. It’s all beside the point, anyway. The machine is a ‘romantic relationship plotter and prophesier,’ as Twilight called it.” “It was just a couple of graphs and a flow chart last week,” Pinkie said. There was unmistakable awe in her voice. Rarity shooed the mare away, either satisfied with her hair treatment or resigned to the fact that it would take nothing less than full work to manage a proper restoration of it. “Yes, Twilight’s taken to this pet project of hers even more zealously than is her usual. I do worry about her, particularly because she insists everything is fine. I tell you in full confidence now, Mister Macintosh, that her mane is anything but fine. She just won’t listen to me. “Or me,” Pinkie added, bouncing to her hooves and readiness. She sagged a little. “Not that I’ve been around long,” added. “I’ve been busy today,” she proffered quickly to the stallion’s blinking inquisition. Big Mac was still chewing the inside of his lip. Quarter to midnight. That’s what the dignified old clock on the wall said. He was not a thick pony. Slow, perhaps, but only because he took his time reasoning and pondering. Quarter to midnight. He could believe in small coincidences, but not this one. He wondered what forces were at work, what he stood at the centre of this strangest of days. There was nothing for it, he decided. Onwards and upwards. Or in this case, downwards. “Where’s the stairs?” he rumbled. Rarity was smooth elegance as she moved to the spot “Just here. We’ll go with you.” She popped the basement door open with her magic, her mane full of barely managed snarls and knots, her eyes full of concern. He remembered, sifting through his memory for guidance or clues. Instead, he found only mares. Miss Rarity, sitting and talking pleasantries that were actually pleasant. Miss Pinkie by turns solemn and saccharine, always odd. Miss Cheerilee, Miss Rainbow Dash, Twilight. Twilight Sparkle. Her bright eyes, her nuzzled in close to him. Her sudden panic, her fiery explosion as she teleported away in an unexpected and unexplained fluster. Like the first sprout of an apple seed, Big Mac’s suspicion stepped up into the light. “Thank you, but no...” his nibbling became a bite, just firm enough to ward away ‘Nope.’ “I’ll go alone.” On that, he descended down into the gloom, and the darkness that straddles midnight itself.