Chapter 1: An Informal Discussion of Ontology
"The world," declaimed the Great and Powerful Trixie to her admiring audience, "is composed of illusions."
Her admiring audience hung on her every word. Trixie had them enthralled by her intelligence and eloquence. This was less of a feat than it sounded, as said admiring audience consisted of two sophomore girls, who in their own small ways considered themselves exactly the same sort of misunderstood geniuses as did Trixie herself.
***
Lavender Lace was awed by the decisiveness with which Trixie stated her opinions. The gangly purple-skinned blonde had always felt herself a misfit. As a child, she'd been the one member of her paternal family to not be obsessed with fashion, nor was she particularly interested in her maternal family's long and boring military tradition. Lavender was good at sports, but neither as agile nor nearly as strong as her older cousin Cloud Kicker, who put her to shame in that department. Besides, she didn't really care about sports -- soccer and basketball were fun, that was all. Not something upon which to focus her life.
What Lavender really loved to do was read, and to write. She hoped to become a writer, what she wanted to write were love stories, and at fifteen she was completely undeterred by her own near-complete lack of personal experience in her chosen field. Last summer she had made the mistake of discussing the topic with Cloud, whom she knew also loved books and whom she also knew to be a bit more experienced, and been utterly horrified at her cousin's rather enthusiastic discussion of the possibilities -- complete with diagrams and a use of some of Lavender's stuffed animals that made it impossible for Lavender to ever fully respect those toys again.
This both taught Lavender the difference between the concepts of "love" and "lust," and that there were some subjects one never wanted to bring up around Cloud Kicker. But it brought her no nearer to finding a kindred spirit.
Trixie made the real world seem a romance. Not a love story -- Trixie wasn't really interested in anything so "trivial," as she put it -- but a "romance" in the older sense of fantasy, as if at any moment some gate might open and angels or elves or demons spill through to overrun normal mundane reality. Trixie believed there were deep, dark mysteries out there, and when Lavender was with her, Lavender believed in them too.
***
"Wait, how would that work?" asked Fuschia Blush. "The whole world being an illusion. I mean, we're really real, right?"
Trixie shot her a dirty look. Lavender knew that Trixie didn't like to be interrupted when she was expounding her ideas. Though Fuschia had a point, and this gave Lavender an idea.
"Maybe people are real but the world isn't quite so real?" Lavender suggested. "Like we're all watching a TV show?"
Trixie smiled at Lavender. "Trixie approves of your reasoning," she said, elaborately sweeping her hand toward her, palm up, as if introducing her to the world. "Indeed, people -- some people -- are more real than others. They are archetypes, manifestations of universal truths, or reflections of such manifestations, repeated again and again as if in a Hall of Mirrors."
***
Lavender basked in the warmth of Trixie's approval. Sometimes she liked to think of herself as more real than most of the world -- it made her feel better when she seemed naive or silly or awkward, which was increasingly more and more of the time. Lavender saw the world with a kind of emotional glow to it, and some of the people in it glowed brighter. Increasingly, certain boys, though she utterly lacked the courage to let them know how she felt about them. She knew they would laugh at her, and then tell everyone else, and then everyone would laugh at her, which was a prospect too terrifying even to contemplate.
Trixie was the first girl Lavender had ever met who glowed that way, and Trixie glowed brightly. Lavender had already thought of the obvious, but she'd never had any dreams about kissing her, as she had about the boys she'd seen glowing. Indeed, the idea of kissing Trixie not only struck her as weird, but she knew Trixie would probably find it weird as well.
Trixie seemed entirely uninterested in mundane romance: when she's asked Trixie if she liked any boys, Trixie had chuckled scornfully and said: "Trixie has no time for boys." Which she didn't -- Trixie was beautiful, and she'd been asked out more than once, but she'd always refused. Lavender had never asked her if she was into girls -- it would have been very offensive a thing to ask her if it wasn't true -- but she'd never seen Trixie show any interest in girls either.
Aside from her interest in Fuschia and herself, and that was clearly not sexual.
Fuschia had once wondered if Trixie was "asexual." Lavender hadn't known what the word meant, and Fuschia had explained that asexual people aren't attracted to anybody, male or female. As they got to know Trixie better, though, Fuschia noticed that Trixie tended to talk a lot about this older magician who was teaching her the more advanced details of the art, a man named Piercing Gaze. Trixie had shown them a photo of him once, and Lavender found him impressive -- a tall, broad-shouldered and handsome gray-skinned gentleman of a vaguely Eastern Europan aspect, with intelligent, intense dark-brown eyes and only a slight silvering at the ends of his neat black hair betraying his age.
"She's into him," Fuschia told Lavender once. "And really serious about it, too."
"What, you think she's ...?" Lavender couldn't finish the sentence, she was so shocked at the suggestion. And this despite the fact that this conversation came months after Cloud Kicker's impromptu demonstration with the stuffed animals.
"Maybe, maybe not," replied Fuschia. "Trixie doesn't like being touched, have you noticed? And she has really high standards for that sort of thing -- you've heard her go on about all the sluts at school."
Lavender nodded. One of the targets of Trixie's oppobrium had been Lavender's own cousin Cloud Kicker. This gave Lavender an uneasy feeling -- she found the way Cloud ran around to be embarrassing, but Cloud was her first cousin. Lavender had said nothing when Trixie criticized Cloud, and had felt vaguely disloyal for her silence.
"So if she really is sleeping with a man twice her age, then she's being one huge hypocrite," continued Fuschia. "Which would be kind of funny, don't you think?"
"I dunno," mumbled Lavender, looking at her own feet. She didn't like to think of Trixie as a hypocrite. Oh, she knew that Trixie boasted a lot -- it was impossible to talk to Trixie for more than a minute without becoming aware of this aspect of her personality -- but from what she'd seen so far, Trixie's boasting was based on a core of real competence and character. Trixie wasn't a phony -- she really believed in herself, and she made Lavender believe in herself as well.
Besides, if Trixie really were in love with a mysterious older man, that would be rather romantic. Not something base and tawdry, but larger-than-life, just as Trixie was herself. A Grand Passion.
"It could just be a crush," mused Fuschia, slowly stroking her own chin. "But if it is a crush, it's a deep one."
"You could ask her," suggested Lavender, looking up at her friend.
"Hah!" laughed Fuschia. "Trixie would bite my head off! And if she did answer the question, there's no way I could believe what she said. If she loves him, she might boast that he was her boyfriend, or deny her feelings entirely. If she doesn't, she still might do either, just to get a rise out of us!"
"I suppose," said Lavender. She also didn't like to think of Trixie lying to them, but she couldn't deny that it was possible. Trixie's romantic approach to reality also led to a certain disregard for the truth at times. Lavender had caught her lying more than once to other people. Lavender thought it was funny when Trixie lied to other people, but it wouldn't be funny if Trixie was lying to them. And Lavender preferred not to focus on the nastier aspects of the real world, including when people she liked chose to be mean or do things that were wrong.
Motivation. That was what she needed to understand to write believable characters. Lavender had the drive to write romance, but she didn't always understand why people did certain things, especially when they were in love. And when she did understand it, she didn't always like the answers, and she didn't want to think about answers she didn't like. She knew this about herself, but knowing it and changing it were two different matters.
Fuschia understood people. Her Mark -- which she wore on a charm around her neck, and which like everybody's Mark came to them in a significant dream right around puberty -- was an embarrassed looking face. Her Talent -- which like everybody's was linked to her Mark -- was to understand people, especially those aspects of people which they would prefer not to be understood.
This made her Lavender's fellow misfit.
Fuschia was an innocent-looking little thing -- short and not very well-developed for fifteen -- with smooth deep-pink skin and long reddish-purple hair the color of her name. Her eyes were blue and seemingly-guileless. To look at her, one would believe that she had not ever thought or seen anything evil since the day she was born.
This was all seeming. Fuschia was one of the least innocent girls Lavender knew. She was innocent enough in the sexual sense of the term -- Fuschia had dated a bit but was almost as physically-inexperienced as Lavender herself. In the more important sense of being aware of the falseness of others, however, she was wiser than many adults. Sometimes she said things that Lavender was pretty sure would have shocked Cloud Kicker.
Her talent was thus nearly the direct opposite of that which normally ran in her family, who tended to be beauticians and cosmetologists. Oh, Fuschia was skilled at applying makeup -- there was no way she could avoid such skill, given her family -- and she did so both regularly and with an art that amazed Lavender (who usually avoided much use of makeup, since when she did it herself she looked like a clown). But Fuschia was special in that she could see through a beautiful disguise to the person within.
Which was not always enjoyable for Fuschia, from what Lavender had heard.
Lavender had met Fuschia on the first day of her first freshman class in high school. It had been some sort of aptitude test -- Canterlot High School was big on those, which wasn't really surprising as it was supposed to be a high school for the best and brightest kids in the whole Republic of North Terranova. They'd all gotten in through aptitude tests in junior high, so it was kind of annoying that they had to do the whole thing all over again.
Fuschia had shown her how to give the answers the test designers wanted to hear.
"Wait," Lavender had said. "Wouldn't that be cheating? And wouldn't it mess up our educations?"
"The tests are just something the authorities make them do," Fuschia explained. "Didn't you see the way Principal Celestia looked at us at our interview? She's already decided things about us."
"How do you know that?" Lavender had asked.
"I always know things like that," Fuschia proclaimed. "Trust me."
Lavender had. And she'd gone on trusting her. And so they'd become best friends. And were to this day.
Fuschia didn't glow, though. She was honest and loyal (to Lavender), generally good, and she was one of the smartest girls Lavender knew. But she didn't glow.
Trixie glowed. Almost blindingly, when she performed, but a little even when she was only performing for her friends.
***
Right now Trixie was elaborating on her concept of reality.
"The world, as the Wise and Insightful Trixie has already stated, is essentially an illusion. It is we, by acknowledging the illusion, who make it real. Because everyone believes that water is wet and fire burns, it does. The weight of popular opinion makes it so, and so water will wet us and fire burn us, even if we do not want it to.
"But a really strong will and fine mind can change things. We can change things in appearance through skill -- such is the essence of the ancient and honorable art of Illusion which the Adroit and Clever Trixie practices upon the stage. But if we are even stronger, we can change things in reality. This is the basis of true magic -- something not even Trixie can yet accomplish, but she hopes to learn to do so in time!"
***
Lavender was not so certain about this. She'd never seen any real magic. She didn't know how most of Trixie's illusions worked, save for the most elementary ones -- that was the sort of thing magicians kept secret even from their friends. But she was sure from the fact that Trixie was denying that she had real powers that they were just stage illusions -- even Lavender was realistic enough about Trixie to be aware that she couldn't have avoided boasting about something like that, had she been able to accomplish such feats.
True, there had been those strange events at the Fall Formal. Lavender and Fuschia hadn't gone -- nobody had asked them, and they scorned it anyway as "sleazy" (Lavender's opinion) and "phony" (Fuschia's). But Trixie had been there, and she'd claimed that really weird things had happened -- that Sunset Shimmer and two of her friends had turned into gargoyle-demons and put the whole school under mind control, and that Rainbow Dash's friends, including that odd visiting student, had turned into horse-eared, horse-tailed angels and stopped them.
Trixie had repeated the tale to a lot of people, and been laughed at by them. Lavender and Fuschia had become Trixie's friends right afterward, because they were two of the only ones to believe the tale. (One of the other ones was Lyra Heartstrings, but she was close to certifiable anyway, having long claimed to really be a horse somehow transformed into a human being. Even her best friend Sweetie Drops would merely get angry when questioned on this topic).
Lavender really wanted it to be true. A world that contained gargoyle-demons and horse-angels would be so much richer and more interesting than a world without such beings. (The fact that it would also be terrifyingly more dangerous did not enter Lavender's head; she was intelligent enough, but like most fifteen-year-olds knew herself to be immortal). And if it were true, then she and her friends were obvious candidates for Magical Girldom (she was a huge fan of Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Rūna, and similar Neighponese animes).
However, many things Lavender really wanted to be true were not true, and she knew it. She was not an internationally-famous author. She was not beautiful. And spiritual combats resulting in gigantic rainbow-colored explosions of light were not part of the reality which had, against her protests, always surrounded Lavender Lace.
Fuschia's opinion was, of course, cynical, as she had expressed to Lavender in an earlier conversation.
"Trixie really believes she saw all that Sailor Luna stuff." (Fuschia refused to call it by its original Neighponese name, and found the coincidence of names with that of the school's Vice-Principal utterly hilarious). "But then Trixie is a rather odd girl, as I'm sure you've noticed."
"You're odd," replied Lavender, grumpily.
"True," said Fuschia, "which is why you love me."
As this was, in fact, true, there was nothing Lavender could say to counter this point.
"Anyway," continued Fuschia, "what makes more sense is that Sunset and her two little clowns spiked the punch. Everyone took a trip to crazy-land, and later decided that crazy-land was full of psychedelic horse-angels and gargoyle-devils. The gargoyle-devil is standard mythology, and Megan knows there's enough horse statues and pictures around this school for anyone to start seeing horse-angels. Which, come to think of it, The Megan was supposed to have been Herself, which goes to show. Mythology." She nodded her head in satisfaction, at having worked out a puzzle.
"What about the front door?" asked Lavender. One of the odder things about the Fall Formal had been that the school's front door, and a good part of the surrounding structure, had been torn right off. "And that huge hole in the ground? That wasn't done by spiked punch."
"So Sunset used some fireworks." Fuschia waved her hand in dismissal. "Easy enough to get around here, if you've noticed from seeing Trixie's stash."
"Fireworks?" said Lavender. "Fuschia, that pit was ten feet deep. And the facade was solid brickwork. That would take dynamite, or even nitro to do!"
"So Sunset used high explosives," countered Fuschia. "You can get those too, if you have the right connections. And Sunset Shimmer used to be very good at getting people to do what she wanted. The real wonder is that she wasn't expelled for it. Or even thrown into jail!"
"I think her family's important," speculated Lavender, staring dreamily into space. "Maybe she's secretly the rebellious daughter of some Europan aristocrat. Or her parents are spies working for the Night Watch on some sort of deep-cover super-secret mission. And they're old friends of Principal Celestia and she's promised to look out for Sunset, so she can't just let her go to jail. But they don't know that Sunset is actually working for the enemy!" She smiled happily at the thought.
"Or she's just an obnoxious rich bitch who thought she could get away with anything, and got lucky this time," suggested Fuschia more prosaically. "But not lucky enough to avoid getting blamed for trying to wreck the dance, and wrecking the front of the school. And now nobody likes her because they see what a nasty person she was all along."
"Rainbow's friends seem to like her," pointed out Lavender. She frowned slightly. "Which is weird, because they're the ones who she was supposedly fighting. I guess sometimes defeat really does mean friendship!"
***
Back in the present, Fuschia had asked the pertinent question regarding Trixie's quest.
"So," she said, "how are you going to go about learning true magic?"
"Why," replied Trixie, "it shall come to the Great and Chosen Trixie when she is ready for such mystical insight!" She swept her arms upward, as if she was preparing to ascend to Heaven by flapping her arms. "Which shall no doubt be soon. I am close to learning all the secrets of mundane stage illusions, and I have dreams that tell me that there is something more for me -- I have seen a great Angel of Illusion, extending her rainbow wings to save a whole city from destruction! The dreams feel real, like one's Mark-Dream."
"How long ago did you have your Mark-Dream?" asked Lavender.
"It was three and a half years ago," Trixie said. "Trixie was auditioning on stage at my old school, Hooverton Junior Prep, and she knew that a major impressario was watching for future talent for his venue, the Baillantimore Caballarena. She put on the best performance of her life to that date, the best performance Hooverton has ever seen! As I finished, exhausted but happy, the great Piercing Gaze came up to me and looked into my eyes and told me that I could be great, that I could be his Golden Girl. And then I knew the course of my destiny. That night I dreamed of Piercing and I performing on the stage together, and I saw the wand and star and moon that I wear today. And I woke knowing that everything had changed -- that I was no longer a child, but had begun my womanhood."
Fuschia shot Lavender a look. Oh yeah, her eyes said clearly. She has a crush on Piercing.
Lavender still wasn't sure, but she did notice that Trixie had shifted from third to first person halfway through her little monologue, which was a sign of great emotional affect on her part. Obviously, she had a very high opinion of her mentor. And of herself.
"Do you think that we can be specially real, too?" asked Fuschia. "Like yourself?" Her eyes were wide and innocent, like that of a small child's -- which Lavender knew meant that Fuschia was playing with Trixie. Fuschia, watch out, Lavender tried to warn with her eyes. Trixie is going to hate you if she knows what you're doing.
But neither Fuschia nor Trixie were paying her any attention now.
Trixie's eyes widened in surprise, then briefly narrowed in annoyance at Fuschia's presumption. Then Trixie's features softened. Lavender did not fully understand the play of emotions she was seeing.
"Why, of course," said Trixie, in an unusually-gentle manner. "If you pay attention to the Wise and Knowing Trixie, you can learn to become more real, and learn the performance first of illusion and then of real magic. It takes many years of practice and hard work, though. Not everybody can do it. And nobody can do it as well as Trixie. Well, nobody other than a master magician such as the great Piercing Gaze, that is."
The bell rang. Trixie looked up to see the students moving through the halls.
Briefly, while Trixie's head was turned, Fuschia half-snorted into her hand, plainly laughing at Trixie. She recovered her composure before Trixie looked back.
"Alas, the Diligent and Studious Trixie has chemistry now," Trixie stated. "She shall reunite with her associates at a later date. Say fifth period, after gym, in the library?"
"Sure," said Fuschia.
Lavender nodded.
Trixie went striding off, as if she were a world-conquering heroine about to defeat a whole army of monsters from the Negaverse.
Fuschia laughed openly to Lavender.
"Oh, sweet Megan on a stick," she said. "Trixie is hilarious. She really believes all that nonsense. That there's real magic, that she's some kind of young enchantress, that her stage magician sugar daddy is going to teach her to become Glenda the Good Witch and save the freaking world!"
"You shouldn't laugh," said Lavender, frowning.
"What, don't tell me that you believe it, too?" asked Fuschia, waving her hands in frustration.
"I -- well -- no," admitted Lavender. "But that doesn't mean that it isn't beautiful."
"What, Trixie's insanity?"
"No -- her dreams," said Lavender slowly. "Trixie has beautiful dreams. She wants things to be bright and wonderful, like in a story, not dull and dirty like so much of reality. That's why I enjoy her company. Because of her dreams."
"Eh," said Fuschia. "I'll take reality over dreams every day of the week. Less pretty, but also less disappointing." She pulled out her cell phone and checked the time. "Come on, dreamer. We'll be late for Lit." She shouldered her pack and started moving.
Lavender shouldered her own, and the two young women went off to absorb the perhaps less interesting dreams of the literature curriculum.