Bricks

by ThePower

Chapter 1

I watched the clouds above shift over the night sky, obscuring the beauty of the stars that sprinkled the sky like sparks. My official job description was to sit at my telescope and observe the stars and the various phenomena associated with them. How was I supposed to do that with clouds everywhere?

Asking anypony on the weather teams, especially Rainbow Dash, to clear the sky wasn’t an option. They wouldn’t listen to me. I suspected that it had something to do with me refusing to speak to the mayor about my house. She’s had a problem with me because my house looks out of place in comparison to all of the other wooden structures that stand next to it. It’s like somepony took a chunk of Fillydelphia and dropped it right in the middle of Ponyville. It was built with a plurality of solid, candy-colored bricks, each either a pure red or green, and each layered one on top of the other in an alternating fashion; as such, it readily stands out amongst its neighbors. It’s gaudy, it’s eye-catching, and it’s absolutely Fillydelphian in every way.

I trotted up to my home with a smile on my face. My neighbors were absolutely livid that I chose to keep the house after my father’s death.

The mayor’s tried several times, with subtlety befitting one of her position, to get me to move, or to at least remodel the house, but this house is special. My father built this house, brick by brick, and created what was surely a masterpiece, a work of art that called back to his stomping grounds in West Fillydelphia where he was born and raised. Any sort of tampering with his work would be unthinkable. It’s a part of his legacy, a remnant of a bygone era where he was king of the contractors and lord of the architects.

It’s also unthinkable that I’m missing what was sure to be a beautiful night. I hurried through the darkness of my home and raced up the stairs to the roof, my back weighed with what felt like reams of paper, all of it encompassing the full measure of my work.

Luna’s return revitalized my research, what with the chaos that Nightmare Moon caused celestially. The irony was sweet, but the extra workload wasn’t. Nightmare Moon’s sudden appearance, after a period of a thousand years, had sent the stars into disarray. That offered a pony like me whole strings of opportunities to study the movements of each celestial body, and an opportunity to score a nice fat research grant. After all, I’m sure Luna would’ve liked to hear that the very things she brought out at night were moving and shifting radically out of place.

Of course, I couldn’t collect those bits until I finished a good portion my research, and I couldn’t finish my research until I was allowed a good view of the stars.

Perhaps now you can understand my predicament with Rainbow Dash and the weather teams.

Still, the stars aren’t the only sight to be seen at night. I walked up to the telescope on the far corner of my roof and sighed. I wouldn’t get any work done, but I’d try to at least enjoy myself. Through the lens, I could make out parts of the moon not yet veiled by the clouds. In the distance were landmarks that towered over the horizon, like the mountains. The towers of the royal palace in Canterlot burst through the backdrop of snow capped mountains, almost shimmering as gentle strokes of moonlight pierced through the clouds and parted the darkness around the city.

I shifted the telescope far to the left. The Everfree Forest looked as imposing as ever, and at night it took an almost ethereal form. Almost.

I used to swear that something powerful was growing in the forest. I’ve since retracted that in favor of the theory that it’s the forest itself that is growing, both in power and in size. That place is the stuff of nightmares.

My musings about the Everfree Forest were interrupted when I felt my horn tingle. Moments later I heard something crash and break downstairs. That meant that my break-in detection spell was working. Somepony was in my house, in the middle of the night, uninvited.

The nerve of some ponies...

Fear wasn’t exactly one of the first things that came to me. The intruder was harmless, for the most part, and I knew exactly what he wanted.

“Stacks!” I yelled through the darkness. No response came forth.

Stacks is the most stubborn foal I’ve ever had the pleasure of being friends with. He’s twice my size, twice as smart, and twice as rich. We play card games, board games, and drinking games all the time. He goes about his work in the day, I go about mine in the night. We are the best of friends.

Of course, our friendship didn’t stop him from breaking into my house in the middle of the night looking for a place to sleep off the insane amounts of alcohol in his system. Letting him in my house whenever he got a little tipsy was a courtesy that I extended to him, but only because I feared that he might forget where his own home was. My house is conveniently located across the street from one of the local watering holes, making it easy for him to find.

The things I do for friendship.

“Stacks, I know you’re here!”

“Ugh, y’don’t haffa yell, Shunny.” he slurred from behind the couch. I rolled my eyes and circled around to get a better look at him. My eyes are well accustomed to the dark, allowing me to see things almost as well as I can during the day; the benefit of years prowling the dark for the perfect stargazing sites.

Stacks was sprawled out on the floor, clutching a keg of mead like it was his most prized possession; his only possession, even. His shaggy green mane was even rattier and shaggier than usual, and his pale yellow coat was covered in discolored spots. Some looked like hickeys, others like bruises. He didn’t seem to be in much pain, though alcohol can serve as an effective painkiller in the right quantities.

My eyes easily traced his path of destruction back to a broken window near the back door. “Was the front door too hard to find? I mean, it’s not even locked.”

“...It was dark.”

“Dark enough that you couldn’t find the entire front side of the house?”

“...I’m drunk.”

I shook my head with a sigh. “You’re paying for that window.”

“S’long as you don’t kick me out.” he mumbled with a wave of his hoof. Yeah, best of friends.

I moved over the back door to survey the damage my intoxicated friend had inflicted on my home. Stacks had broken through cleanly. The glass had been shattered, fragmented, but most of it simply dropped to the floor. I doubted any glass shards had actually pierced Stacks’ skin.

Regardless, I resolved to check him in the morning, just to make sure he was alright.

__________
I went to sleep that night, only to awake feeling like utter manure in the morning. This morning, in particular, was bright and ungodly and hot. The blood under my skin felt like it was boiling in the heat, and my tongue rolled around in my mouth like a ball of sandpaper.

Something sizzled in the background, and I briefly wondered if it was just sound of my eyes frying in the heat.

“Hey Sunny, you awake yet?” It was Stacks. He poked his head into the doorway of my bedroom and waved a hoof. “You okay Sunny?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” A lie, but a necessary one. I tried not to think back to the time Stacks had tried to nurse me out of a fever.

Too late.
Stacks, although a magnificent artist and a social mastermind, is by no means a doctor or a scientist. About a year ago I was stuck outside in the rain when I had traveled several miles outside of town to one of my favorite stargazing sites. I managed to catch a nasty fever during my trek back home. Bedridden, I had no idea what horrors awaited me.

Stacks had tried putting leaches on me to suck out the fever, covered the walls of my home with scented oils to drive away ‘evil fumes’, rubbed my back with special herbs that actually turned out to be poison ivy, soaked my clothes in peppermint oil, lit all of my rare and exotic plants on fire, ordered obscenely expensive wines under my name, and threw a party at without my permission to ‘help soothe the body with a happy environment’.

The horror, oh the horror.

“Glad to hear it, cause I’m making breakfast. You want in?”

“Depends.” I said warily. “What are you making?”

He grinned. “Fried kelp. It’s so legit, you don’t even know.”

I groaned. Stacks had this thing about eating healthy that was almost borderline obsessive. He made alcohol the only exception to his diet, which didn’t surprise me. Stacks loves his alcohol, and cutting off all ties with it would’ve crushed him.

“Can’t you just make normal food? Like a hay sandwich. Or a fruit salad. Or hell, just a salad!” I complained.

“I’m hurt, Sun Spot, I really am. I went out of my way to cook for you and this is how you treat me?” He asked, putting a hoof to his head in mock indignation. “Some friend you are.”

I smiled slowly. “Shut up.”

Stacks disappeared from the doorway as I jumped out of bed. With a nod of my horn I touched the room with my magic; a cleaning spell invoked with a thought’s command. The sun’s rays were still unbearably hot, but my eyes did seem to be getting used to the light.

“There’s some apples in the fridge if you’re hungry.” I heard Stacks yell from downstairs. “Oh, and I took the liberty of looking through your mail. You’ve got a letter from a secret admirer.”

I cursed internally and bolted for the kitchen. Stacks was on the floor, clutching his gut in an attempt to hold back the laughter that threatened to roar out of him.. On the counter lay an opened pink envelope and a folded piece of white paper. I barely caught the scent of lavender over the nauseous fumes of burning kelp.

“That letter wasn’t for you!” I yelled angrily. He snorted and shut off the stove, letting his fleshy green food sit on the pan to cool. I grabbed both the letter and the envelope with my teeth and stormed out of the room. I plopped down on the couch and opened the letter carefully, inspecting the handwriting up close. Delicate calligraphy filled the page, each line painstakingly written in perfect alignment with all the others. Not a letter was out of place, not a single drop of ink wasted.

“Somepony must’ve put a lot of effort into this.” I thought aloud.

I had given the paper only a cursory glance when Stacks came into the room with a plate of his disgusting kelp. He took a seat next to me and pointed at the letter. “You do know that Rarity wrote that, right?”

“Stacks!”

“Don’t you ‘Stacks’ me.” He took hoofful of kelp and shoved it into his mouth. One of the slimy green things hanged from his mouth as he spoke again. “Anypony with half a mind could’ve figured that out. I mean, I don’t know a pony out there who is as obsessive as her when it comes to being neat and tidy. And I don’t know many other ponies who even talk, or write, like her.”

“Yeah but you didn’t even give me the chance to figure it out for myself.”

He snorted again. “Like that even matters.”

I gave him a half-hearted glare before turning back to the letter. “It says here that she wants me to meet her in the...” My words trailed away as I sunk into disbelief. There was no way she could be serious. Not in a thousand years. “Oh no.”

Stacks stopped his manic chewing to give me a questioning look. I gulped. “She wants to meet up tomorrow night in the... the Everfree Forest.”

“...Ouch.”

“I know.”

No words came after. We remained silent, neither of us able to break away from the weight of my plight.

I wasn’t about to ask him whether or not I should go, because he’d probably respond with a corny one-liner like “Do what your heart tells you.”, which wouldn’t be helpful in the first place. I knew that I was going to go, I knew that I had to go.

“This is my chance to finally get the mare of my dreams, you know? ”

“Oh yeah! Weren’t you crushing on her for, like, two years?” He managed between laughs. “You sent her flowers every week last year until you found a whole dumpster filled with the ones you sent.”

“You don’t have to remind-” he cut me off with another round of laughs. “Haha, remember when you sent her a love note, and it came back to you stamped ‘return to sender’ on top?”

“You said you wouldn’t bring that back up!”

“Oh, right. I forgot. Sorry.” He smiled again. “Not.”

I wasn’t going to win an argument with him, so I left. I dropped the letter, grabbed my saddlebags, and left. There was business to attend to in town, business with the mayor. My research was damn important, and I wasn’t about to let some huffy bureaucrat delay it any longer by refusing to tell her teams to clear the skies at night.

Before I walked through the door, however, I saw Stacks turn back to his kelp with a certain animation that almost tricked me into believing that he actually liked that stuff. Almost.