Preparation
Several hours after their return from the park and Cheerilee’s departure from the house, Diamond and her friends were interrupted by the sound of knocking from the door and ran into the hallway to greet the new arrival. Looking through the frosted glass of the window set into the door, they could see the unmistakeable amber eyes, grey coat and butter-yellow mane of Ditzy Doo, and Diamond wasted no time in sliding across the latch and opening the door for her.
The moment the way was fully clear, Dinky energetically tackled her mother into an enthusiastic hug, nuzzling into her foreleg with a big, silly grin on her face. Diamond and Auburn looked on with amusement written on their faces; while Copperwing let out a small giggle at the sight, a much lighter and more fillyish sound than her usual barking laugh.
“Hello to you, too, Dinky,” chuckled Ditzy, gently ruffling her daughter’s mane as she looked around at the gathered trio of friends still stood in the doorway. She gazed somewhat confusedly at Copperwing – since only Auburn went to school with Dinky, she had never met the pegasus’s elder sister before today – but nevertheless offered her an equally pleasant smile.
“Hello, Ms Doo,” Diamond greeted in unison with Auburn; Copperwing looking somewhat uncomfortably off to the side, unsure whether she should introduce herself.
“Hello, you two… I take it your friend here is Auburn’s sister?-“ Copperwing nodded cautiously, “-Nice to meet you, I’m Dinky’s mum, but you can call me Ditzy Doo.”
“Copperwing… nice to meet you, too, uh… Ditzy”
At this moment, Filthy Rich arrived and said his own hellos, smiling amiably at the pegasus mare on his doorstep.
“Hello, Ditzy. Here for Dinky, I assume?”
“Yes, I am… Oh, and before I forget, I delivered your package safely to Canterlot: Ms. Fleur De Lis was very happy to receive it, and she sends her regards.”
“Thank you very much, Ditzy; I’ll be sure to put a good word in for you next time I visit the Post Office, it’s the least I can do. The last time I sent a package to her, the courier left it until the very end of the month and then had the nerve to break it by accident and blame it on a changeling, so your swift delivery is certainly refreshing.”
“Wow, you really weren't joking about your bad experiences with the other Posties, though I’m not too surprised… sometimes I worry about the way things are headed: the entry standards have really dropped, not to mention some of the veterans have been getting lazy. They call me clumsy, but I don’t see them delivering two ponies’ loads because their partner’s off sick… They seem to have it synchronised so that each member of a pair mysteriously falls ill at the same time... I can’t not notice how often that happens – or how often I end up with their work.”
Blushing as she realised quite how off topic her micro-rant had taken her, Ditzy grinned sheepishly and apologised to her impromptu audience.
“It’s fine,” reassured Rich, “We all get a little tired of our workplace problems from time to time, and I’d say you’re more than justified in being angry about yours.”
Ditzy puffed out again, no longer feeling the need to draw herself self-consciously into a smaller shape, and grinned back at Rich, releasing her daughter from her one-hoofed embrace as she did so. “Thanks, Rich, it’s nice that somepony sees my point for once. Anyway, Dinky and I have to get back soon to pack for our trip to visit her aunt and uncle in Trotsdam, so thanks for looking after her today, and this is goodbye until we're back... Say bye, sweetie.”
“Bye!” Dinky chirped, on cue, waving at her friends and grinning before following her mother away from Diamond’s house and out into the setting sun. Rich, Diamond, Copperwing and Auburn stood together in the doorway for a moment, watching them go, before they turned one by one back into the house.
*
Dinner that evening came in the form of generous portions of vegetable lasagne, sided with boiled vegetables; and the smell brought the three fillies downstairs from Diamond’s room and into their seats at the table at a speed which even Rainbow Dash would be proud of, all before the chef had even finished serving the food.
Rich watched his daughter tuck in with an amused smirk, Diamond devouring her meal as if there was no tomorrow and in doing so managing to splatter herself with a not-inconsiderable amount of food. Whenever she was eating out, the filly would have perfect manners and eat her food slowly, carefully and delicately; but when she was home, all that ‘posh-filly stuff’, as she liked to call it, went sailing out through the window, catapulted by her lackadaisically whirling fork.
He wondered momentarily whether her distaste for ‘posh’ actions stemmed somewhat from her nightmarish relationship with Silver Spoon: with the noble-filly’s obsession with upper-class supremacism and general nastiness, it would certainly not surprise him if Diamond associated such malicious behaviour with the rest of the traits stereotypically borne by the upper classes.
The thought made his ears droop a little: it would be a real shame for the best of the high life to be forever tainted in his daughter’s eyes by her personal experiences with the worst. Resolving to do something about it later, he shut the thought away in the back of his mind and turned his attention back to Diamond and her friends.
The fillies had almost finished their food whilst he’d been lost in thought, and Diamond had already pushed aside her empty bowl and was now leaning back lazily in her chair, listening to Auburn talk about one specific incident which had taken place during their school trip earlier that week, an excursion Rich had only heard in passing from his daughter, who had barely known Dinky and Auburn at that point.
“Anyway,” the usually taciturn filly was saying, “Dinky thought it would be a great idea to test out her magic by carrying Twist’s birthday cake over to the table on her own, whilst also carrying a full plate of food on her back. I tried telling her ‘no’, but when that filly has her mind set on an idea there is no stopping her.”
“Ooooh,” said Diamond, rubbing her hooves together gleefully and grinning, “I think I know how this ends.”
Copperwing, too, interjected her view on the matter with a smirk on her face and sarcasm on her words: “With a foalproof plan like that, what could possibly go wrong?”
Rich found himself leaning forwards in unison with the others, Auburn’s slow, drawling speech drawing him in despite the lack of any spectacular aspects within it. Curiosity burned within him as he waited for the filly to continue her tale, and he felt a rush of foalish joy when she grinned around at them and finally did just that.
“As you may have guessed, it did not end well: for Dinky, Twist or the cake. She got most of the way there before her magic ran out, but then she dropped the cake right onto her own horn, doing a very good job of blinding herself and sending her stumbling off to her doom. Somehow she managed to get over to Twist’s table and trip herself up on the poor filly’s chair, and both of them ended up on the floor, covered in Dinky’s food and Twist’s cake, and tangled up in each other’s hooves.
“Twist was understandably annoyed about all this, to say the least, but she was keeping a lid on it pretty well until Pipsqueak joked that, seeing as how they were so comfortable wrapped in each other’s hooves, they would make a good couple. I have yet to see anypony move as fast as Twist did then - I'm pretty sure she outstripped Rainbow Dash for speed - and Pip mustn’t have either, because he ended up with a punch to the face before he even realised Twist was heading for him. He went down like a sack of potatoes, wailing like a baby and it all happened so fast that it shocked everypony silent… silent, that is, until Dinky decided this would be a good time to get up and apologise. Big mistake.”
The table was engulfed by an uproarious burst of laughter; an amalgamation of Copperwing’s loud laugh, Rich’s restrained chuckle and Diamond’s fillyish giggles, with Auburn herself taking deep breaths to try and calm herself down enough to finish her story. Wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, the pegasus inhaled and exhaled slowly, before eventually judging that she’d be able to continue and sitting up straight in her chair in an attempt to regain some semblance of professionalism.
“So, get this: Dinky tapped Twist on the shoulder and started to say ‘I’m sorry’, but Twist picked up Peachy Pie’s whole plate of food in her hoof and slapped Dinky in the face with it before she could finish saying it! It was crazy - Sunny Daze tried to tell her off for taking Peachy’s food, but Twist just took hers too and smeared it down Dinky’s other side. Before the teacher could do anything, Twist just stormed out and Dinky had to clear up all the mess herself… well, I stuck behind to help her, but everypony else ran off to see what Twist was doing. Apparently she tried to wash the cake off by diving in the fountain, although she insists she slipped: no matter she did, she ended up getting a royal telling-off – on her birthday, no less – and she’s hated Dinky’s guts since.”
The laughter resurged at this conclusion, and this time Auburn joined in heartily, the room eventually descending into a comfortable quiet after a long few minutes of pure, unadulterated mirth at Dinky’s unfortunate day at the Everfree lodge, setting the good mood for the rest of the evening.
*
After a few more hours of playing games and messing about, Diamond and her friends decided that it was probably a good time to start setting up her room for the sleepover and formulated a plan to prepare the small space for its soon-to-be tripled inhabitants. Firstly, they would need sleeping bags and pillows for Auburn and Copperwing; secondly party games and other such devices with which to entertain themselves until it was sufficiently past midnight would need to be gathered; and lastly no sleepover would be truly complete without copious amounts of unhealthy snacks.They set about the tasks in the order Auburn had arbitrarily decided on, and scuttled off excitedly across the hallway into the spare room in search of sleeping bags.
“The bags should be in here somewhere… exactly where is a mystery, though, so we’d better start looking if we want to find them before morning,” said Diamond, looking somewhat overwhelmed at the sight of the wall of miscellaneous objects she now faced, any part of which could contain the items they were searching for but could just as likely be completely irrelevant – unhelpful, even – to their quest.
Auburn headed for the leftmost pile of clutter, whereas Copperwing took the right and Diamond the middle; and together the fillies dug their way through mountains of assorted tat in their unending mission to secure comfortable bedding for the sisters. Diamond found old newspapers, broken toys and yellowed letters; frayed scarves, moth-eaten hats and dog-eared paperback books; but not one sign of the sleeping bags she’d set out for. Giving up, she almost abandoned the pile completely; but as she turned to leave it, something shimmered softly from inside one of the small boxes she’d set aside as being too small to house a sleeping bag, and she opened the box with cautious curiosity.
“Huh…” she said, intrigued, as the box’s contents were revealed to her: glossy-covered magazines, each of which had mares in strange poses on its cover, and the word ‘Plot’ – presumably the magazine’s title – emblazoned on the front of each.
Curiosity piqued, she pulled the topmost issue out and examined it more closely: the earth pony mare on the cover seemed to be wearing some form of tight-fitting black dress and an unusual item of clothing which covered her filly-parts – a job which, Diamond noted, could quite easily have been done by her tail, had the mare not had it raised into the air like a flag – along with a set of shiny, tight-looking black stockings whose purpose the filly could not discern. Auburn, drawn by her quiet exclamation of interest, sidled up beside her and leaned in to examine the magazine with her.
“Weird – I’ve never seen a magazine like that before – what’s she doing?” She asked, to which Diamond could only shrug.
“I dunno, why would somepony need so much clothing, anyway?”
Auburn scratched her head with a hoof, trying to puzzle things out. “Maybe she’s a model?”
“Yeah, maybe…” Diamond agreed, some of her confusion slipping away, “What d’you think that black thing in her mouth is?” She pointed at the thin black rod gripped between the mare’s teeth, moving her face in closer to try and discern its purpose, a motion Auburn likewise mirrored, frowning in concentration.
“I have no idea: maybe it’s part of her outfit? Like an accessory or something?”
Their short discussion had temporarily prevented them from opening the magazine and seeing the images inside, but as Copperwing caught onto what they were talking about, the conversation drew to a close, forcing the elder pegasus to move quickly to preserve her friends’ innocence.
“Hey, perhaps we’ll find out what it is inside?” Suggested Diamond, and the rapidly approaching Copperwing saw no other option she could take which would stop her fast enough but to slap Diamond's hoof – hard – as the filly moved to open the magazine. Diamond cried out in pain and outrage, turning angrily to Copper, who took the opportunity to snatch the filthy item from her hooves and shove it back inside the box it had come from, before pulling the box’s lid closed and promptly sitting on it.
“Copperwing, what the hay? What did you do that for?!”
Copperwing looked at her apologetically, tightening her grip on the box beneath her in anticipation of an attempt to recover the magazine by Diamond; and tried to answer in such a way as to remove all ideas of looking for the publications from the minds of her friend and her sister without actually revealing the things she was so desperately trying to keep secret from them.
“Trust me, that magazine isn’t what you think it is. You do not want to read those sorts of magazine… not until you’re much older than you are, anyway. Once you look in one of these things, there’s no going back… Ever heard the phrase ‘what has been seen cannot be unseen’? These magazines are a perfect example of that, and I speak from experience when I say that you don’t want the sort of pictures inside those things stuck in your head…”
Diamond retracted the hoof she’d half-extended, having intended to simply push her friend off the box and gain access to the magazines by force, and frowned in thought, examining Copperwing. The pegasus looked quite frankly haunted, pale except for the light touch of an ashamed blush across her cheeks and guilt swimming in her eyes, all of which did a very good job of persuading Diamond to believe what she said. Nevertheless, Diamond was a stubborn filly, and she still had her doubts.
“What sort of pictures are they? Surely they can’t be so bad?”
“They really are,” rebutted Copper, trying to come up with some white lies quickly enough to convince her friend, “They’re absolutely disgusting. Lots of blood and sick and stuff… they wear those costumes so that when they get covered in things, not all of it stays on and they can get covered in more of it. Take it from me, this is not what you want to be reading.”
Whilst her excuse was somewhat overkill, and slightly illogical, it did an admirable job of putting the other fillies off the concept of reading ‘Plot’ anytime soon, with Auburn actually dry-retching into her hoof and Diamond looking decidedly disturbed. Using their silence as a window of opportunity, Copper stood up and grasped the box in her hooves, flying it over to the highest shelf, which was blocked by foothills of tat along the floor which placed it securely as far out of reach as she could get it.
Whilst she was up there, she spotted the end of something reasonably large and rounded poking out of a pile of miscellanea roughly halfway into the room and, energised by hope, pulled it out along with its even more thoroughly covered twin. A sudden urge to flee from the pornographic publications so nearby filled her and she flapped her wings in preparation for a speedy exit: she had found the bags, now it was time to get out of there!
Tossing the smaller sleeping bag to her sister, Copperwing flew quickly from the room and forced the others to follow her back to Diamond’s bedroom. When her companions arrived, she was already hard at work setting up her sleeping bag in an attempt to force the tantalising glimpses of the inner pages she’d obtained when snatching the book from her mind. Trying desperately to force down her throbbing, half-raised wings, she cursed herself for ever stumbling on her father’s magazines and sent a silent prayer to the princesses that Diamond and Auburn would not be so unlucky as to do the same.
*
The search for party games crashed and burnt before it even left the ground: the only board game in the house was an incomplete chess set, and the fillies had significant trouble coming up with games they could play with only three ponies, two of whom were sisters. Giving up on the doomed venture, the trio settled instead on the task of accumulating a hoard of fattening snack items and planned their heist with no shortage of conspiratorial grins and secretive whispers, checking it over once; twice; thrice before acting on it.
Sneaking light-hoofedly down the padded carpet of the staircase, the three fillies dropped to the ground and began crawling their way across the tiled floor of the dining room, on an intercept course to the cupboard in which Diamond’s father kept all the things she wasn’t allowed to have unless she’d been exceptionally good, with intent to steal as much of it as they could carry and gorge themselves with the resulting hoard.
Each member of the team of stash-robbers had their own personal task to attend to, something which Auburn had thought a good idea: Diamond was wearing her saddlebags, which had been emptied entirely of their previous contents, acting as courier for their yield; Auburn, ever-observant, was on lookout duty; while Copperwing, being the tallest and also blessed with the ability to fly, was in charge of actually stealing the food.
Delicately, Copper flapped her wings just enough to raise her up onto the counter and tilted herself forwards in order to land on it. The work surface being slipperier than she’d anticipated, she slid backwards after trying to negate her forward velocity with another flap of her wings; and for a desperate, heart-in-mouth moment, she hung on the edge of the counter; knowing that if she slipped off, there would be no avoiding a noisy collision with one of the nearby objects, her wings not quite fast enough to prevent her hitting something before she returned to the air.
She managed to cling on, however, and with a newly-racing heart and increased shortness of breath, she reached up to take the cookie jar atop the cupboard and emptied it into Diamond’s waiting saddlebags before returning it and sliding a little to one side to allow her easy access to the cupboard proper. Behind the first cupboard door she opened were several bottles of alcohol, mainly wine, and she closed it again in disappointment before prising open the next one and striking jackpot.
Within the small compartment was a veritable dragon’s hoard of sweets and unhealthy snacks: grinning, she crouched carefully on the counter and began passing items backwards to Diamond: chocolate bars, mints, bonbons, caramels, fudge, boiled sweets, gobstoppers, biscuits, anything and everything of interest inside the cabinet was removed and transferred swiftly into Diamond's saddlebags. Within a minute, the cupboard was bare and Copperwing dropped smugly from the work surface to land at her friend’s side: stealthily, both of them dropped once more into a crouch and began crawling away from the scene of the crime.
Auburn, responding to Copper's insistent whisper, ducked down out of sight and made her own way out of the kitchen, joining the other two behind the dining table as they hid from Diamond's father, who was currently descending the stairs, blissfully unaware of their sweet heist for the moment. The trio edged around the outside of the table to keep out of his sight and, once he was gone, sprinted full-pelt across the tiled floor, onto the carpeted stairs and all the way up to Diamond's room.
Diving in like fugitives on the run, the three fillies slammed the door to the room behind them and sank to the floor in relief and elation: Diamond unclipped her saddlebags with shaky hooves after a moment to catch her breath, and, after slipping out from under their heavy weight, opened them to reveal their impressive haul of confectionery.
Once they’d all mostly recovered from the upstairs sprint, Diamond looked around at her friends with a grin, clapped her hooves together enthusiastically and said:
“Well, fillies, now that we’ve got our stash… Let the games begin!”
*****
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I'm not going to get on your case about this one too hard, while the fandom does call her that she is officially named as Fleur Dis Lee, you can see for yourself on the series official wiki (she's also named Fleur Dis Lee in the app game, and an alicorn in the game for some reason).
I think you meant to say "no matter what she did"
I'm really enjoying this, something tells me that they'll somehow end up playing "Kingdoms" all night.
5320597
Personally, I prefer 'De Lis' to 'Dis Lee' as the ending, given that the name then makes sense and also matches her cutie mark, whereas 'Dis Lee' is utterly meaningless.
An author on another story said that the reason she's called 'Dis Lee' is probably because the name 'Fleur De Lis', being so omnipresent in culture, is not trademarkable, so Hasbro chose something similar which they could trademark. I haven't a clue if that's actually why she's called what she is, but it would make sense to me if it was.
Fleur is an alicorn in the mobile game because the in-game Fleur is supposed to be a changeling who (somehow) mistook her for an alicorn rather than a unicorn, probably due to her build. No idea how a changeling could so accurately replicate the finer details of her appearance without realising the major feature that she doesn't have any wings, but that's mobile games for you.
Yep, I did miss a word there; I rewrote the sentence a little, and must've forgotten to add it back in the second time. Will fix ASAP.
No 'Kingdoms, seeing as they don't have anything but changeling figurines, although I might consider bringing in some of the ideas for how to develop the game here instead. What better to spark the question of 'what would the game be like if he had less units?' than them already having a shortage of figures, after all? Really glad to hear you're enjoying the story, and I look forward to bringing you the next chapter.
5326720 Huh, I genuinely didn't know that pewter contained copper, but that information has just made something I had planned for later in the story even more plausible. Thanks for that, and for pointing out to other readers why the figures are grey.
Oh, and don't worry about the dice thing, no harm done there: the only reason I didn't reply was because, to be honest, that comment confused me a little.