Sunset had been letting out a stream of giddy giggles the whole time she was walking to Twilight’s home, and by the time she let herself in she’d broken out into the sort of blisteringly beatific beam that could only be brought about by the quietly blissful magic of tenderly lesbian huggles—which were like these tiny, really quite cutesily dainty packages of package-less pancake-esque floppy joy. So basically pancakes that were made of hugs instead of batter. And sort of collided at a leisurely pace instead instead of being consumed in graphic manner.
Something like that. Sunset’s spirits were high, one way or another, and in a roundabout, proverbially metaphorical way, one could say, if one were so inclined to use a potentially unsavory figure of speech, that she was too.
So, as one could probably imagine, she was nothing short of delighted when she stepped into Twilight Sparkle’s lab—which was a big brute of a room, stuffed full of metal guts and clangy odds and ends like a gorilla made of very passionate clocks but a room—eager to take part in whatever collaborative project the glass-on-face-wearing girl had prepared for the two of them. It was probably going to involve dynamite. Or some cool, like, liquidy metal sort of stuff that was like what you’d get if you took water and like made it metal.
Which brought to mind images of long-haired water thrashing about on a stage, backlit by flaring flames, banging out the sweetest of sweet… whatever you called guitar noises, Sunset thought like riffs or something were a thing, maybe?
Twilight came skipping up to her and Sunset’s brain was all like okay cute girl go into cruise control—which meant they sort of awkwardly bumped into each other, but Sunset was suave and collected, and so she turned that stumbly battering into a stylishly sexy hug like a boss.
“Hey, Twilight,” Sunset said.
“Hi, Sunset,” Twilight said.
Their favorite words had shifted recently, the spots formerly occupied by “cool” and “floccinaucinihilipilification” overturned.
“So, what do you have planned for today, Twilight?” Sunset said once their hug had ended.
Twilight did a sort of excited avant-garde tap dance and struck a pose she probably thought was dramatic and sciency. “Sunset, we might be able to have that picnic on the moon we’ve always wanted in a few weeks!”
Sunset felt her eyes light up with palpable joy as she did her best to mimic Twilight’s dance. “You really think so, Twilight?”
“I do think so, Sunset!” Twilight darted over to a spot by a big vat of bubbling pinkish fluid that periodically gave off great twirling gouts of flamboyantly-colored fire. “You see, Sunset, I’ve been devising a wonderful fluid that I think has the potential to revolutionize the way people see space travel!”
Sunset eyed the vat closely and pondered the implications.
“… Twilight, did you make fire gay?” Sunset asked sincerely.
Twilight started to open her mouth as if to answer that profoundly enlightened question… and then closed it after a moment of gaping silence.
“… So anyway, Sunset,” Twilight said as if nothing had happened, slipping a noodly bendy-twig of a limb around Sunset’s sublimely nubile waist. “Don’t we have such amazing chemistry going on here?”
“Twilight,” Sunset said in a tender, loving whisper, leaning in to bestow upon her bespectacled lover a bountiful gift of nuzzles. “I think this is a wonderful display of technical skill.”
“Sunset,” Twilight said, letting her arm droop in a gesture that might have turned into a cheeky rump-swat if the person making it wasn’t such a wretchedly uncoordinated pile of cocks. “I don’t know how to put it, but I just feel so… creative when I’m around you. Like I have all these ideas that I just know nobody’s ever thought of before and I have to get them out there.”
At the succulent intertwining of their voices, a faffing robot inhaled its faff and spat out a slow babbling brook of gently swaying music, which triggered an auditory cue built into the lights that dimmed them to pitch-blackness, because nothing said mood lighting like the sort of ravenous black you could only stumble around blindly groping in.
… Twilight was far from a romantic expert, but Sunset accepted that side of her graciously.
“Twilight,” Sunset said, with a gesture she hoped was a friendly pat on the cheek or something but could just have been something wildly inappropriate and scandalous. “Don’t we have the most amazing theme?” she asked, choosing as always to look on the positives.
“We do,” Twilight murmured, and her head went limp and flump and her forehead bashed painfully into Sunset’s tit. “But you know what we really need?”
Sunset bit back a wince of pain and tried hard to think through the sting. “… What do we need?”
“Sunset,” Twilight said, “we need impact.”
Sunset contemplated that word.
“… What are you talking about, Twilight?” Sunset asked.
“I don’t know, Sunset,” Twilight said. “But it sounds important, don’t you think, Sunset? Whatever we do together, Sunset, I just—I want it to mean something, you know? What we do, I want it to matter to someone, Sunset.”
Sunset nodded silently.
“You’re right, Twilight” she said at last.
They did a kissy thing and it was pretty ace and then they also pressed their lips to each others and that was pretty okay too.
“Sunset, could I ask you a favor before we build an implausibly-advanced rocket with this unnecessarily frolicking vat of goo and have a picnic on the moon?”
“Sure, Twilight, what do you need?”
“Oh, nothing much, Sunset—I just need you to run down to a grocery store and get me a cucumber; I think that’ll increase my odds of this experiment being lucrative.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll be back in a little while, Twilight.”
Sunset gave a merry wave before pushing off into the bleakly Twilight-less wasteland known to many deplorables as the outside world, and set off across the street, distracting herself by dreaming of what beautiful future might be in store for her that day.
Sunset turned around, and there was a bus. It was a great, big, majestic yellow thing mounted atop four rapidly-twirling wheels that carried it along the asphalt plain with velocity unrivaled by any of the… no other buses at all—Sunset checked twice, and nope, not a single bus apart from this one—around her.
Now, the thing about buses—well, there were lots of things about buses. Quite a few, Sunset was sure. But a few of the more salient ones: they tended to be big, and bulky, and actually, when you looked at them from an adequately abstracted perspective, they were pretty damn impressive. The amount of engineering that went into making such a thing was the sort of endeavor that had to be progressively worked on over a span of hundreds of years before anything even resembling a modern bus had begun to take shape on the world. That was pretty goshdarn swag. What a fine thing that bus was.
But the list of bus-qualities did not stop there. Far from it, really. Buses were, again, rather big. Quite massive, too. And, especially in the case of this one, which didn’t look to have any brakes applied so far, were actually capable of reaching pretty impressive speeds.
And of course, as any idiot knew, big things and fast things lead to a lot of impact. Big and fast things, well.
Get out of the way, basically.
And the more Sunset contemplated the nature and qualities of buses, the more she understood a fundamental, quite spectacularly significant truth of the universe: you would have to be the most braindead, scab-sucking, heart-poxed bucket of wormy knobs to stand in front of a speeding bus and not promptly hurl yourself to the side in a desperate attempt to not get absolutely squishcaked by the hulking monstrosity of engineering barreling down upon you.
And it was quite possible that, had Sunset not spent so much time contemplating that truth, she could have avoided the bus, but alas.
She did not.
What a time to be alive. The brickheaded pigeons on the power lines were chortling smugly, their normally empty birdbrained heads stuffed full with the satisfaction of having proved themselves someone’s intellectual superior. The sky overhead was cloudless and clear and beautiful, the very image of normalcy and serenity, and some dipshit twatsponge let herself be hit by a bus.
This what the sort of thing that legends were made of. Not the sort of ancient legends spoken around campfires with reverent tones and creepy sacrifices of incense and incest and incest-scented incense, but rather the sort of joky urban legends that you’d ramble at your mates about when you were all drunk half-blind. Ten years down the line, people would not say, “This is the street where hallowed Sunset, brave martyr and savior of whatever-the-squimpy-hell-this-world-is-called faced down the tyrannical Bus-Beast of Twilightsburg Street.” They would say, “Hey, did you hear about the gormless twitbiscuit who challenged a bus to a staring contest and bet her life that the bus was a wimpy ‘lil bitch who wasn’t tough enough for that neighborhood?” And then everybody would chuckle and guffaw and take a few fat swigs of their ale/mead/beer/whatever and they’d all say, “No, no, don’t be a testicle, nobody’s that stupid, ya lying sack of beans.” And then the first fellow would be all, like, “Oy, who you calling a testicle, ya swine-faced monkey-shagging dog-pissing puddle of rancid sputum?” And then it’s like punch punch punch oh god the pain whoops that fellow’s out the window oh dear god in heaven the bartender’s going to be pissed at us whoops whoops better break it up but first let’s break the chair leg up this squirming cheesefilth’s perky little…
Ahem.
So anyway, back to Sunset.
There she was. She’d been standing on the asphalt a few moments ago, but now her feet were off the ground. Her delicate little girl-tootsies had taken flight, and she was in the most horrific sort of pain. It was like she’d been punched in the face half a dozen times, then thrown facefirst into a blender that was stuffed into a meatgrinder packed up in a woodchipper and then all the little face-chunks left over had been stirred up with a pile of moldy grapes and used to spell the word “pain” in great big all-caps on the wall of her bedroom.
She wasn’t very good at coming up with metaphors at the moment. Being smacked in the face by a bus had a tendency to deprive one of one’s more advanced cognitive functions like wording and thinkery and such.
So in essence, Sunset in that moment was sort of reduced to a limp, airborne vegetable. She flew through the air, limbs splayed outwards and all her extremities doing little but flailing about in haphazard fashion.
And that actually might not have been all that bad. While she was more than a bit dazed and would probably need a good couple hours before she regained consciousness, she might have survived. It would not have been the oddest event in history.
Alas, she had the questionably-impressive grace necessary to land right on her skull. If she’d been trying to do that, it would’ve been somewhat impressive. Her cranium thumped right down onto the hard ground and, well, imagine an egg loaded into a hilariously-oversized revolver and shot through a ceiling fan.
Basically that.
And then the bus, which had kept up its speed, actually ran into her again in that split-second between her landing right on her skull and her toppling over. So she went hurtling into the air again.
Now, thing is, though, Twilight had far too many sciency resources, far too much spare time, and far too few morals. It was possible—nay, likely—that she, even at this advanced display of dumbass-bus-thwack-taking mastery, she would have been able to cobble something together and get Sunset back on her feet. Maybe she’d jury-rig a new skull out of old nails, a couple tins of spam and a few stray dogs she was reasonably sure nobody would miss too badly.
For a moment, things actually weren’t looking so bad. Sunset was flying through the air, sure, but she’d done that loads of times. It was almost a habit at that point, really.
But oh bugger oh goodness oh golly gee there just so happened to be a telephone pole in the way. Aww, shucks, what rotten luck.
So Sunset got a spineful of splinters. And some of these splinters weren’t so out of the ordinary, just your typical spindly, devilish chaps out to have a laugh by wriggling into some hapless fellow’s soft, vulnerable skin and sniggering to themselves. But a few of these splinters were not that. These were what you’d get if you had the splinter equivalent of a sumo wrestler doing a swan dive from a rooftop onto a patch of skin.
And there were a good fourteen of these things, and they all went right into Sunset’s spine. Terrible shame, that. She was such a promising young youth. Such a kind, gentle maiden. Alas, woe was her and she was woe.
Now, by this point, the telephone pole had had a pretty fat, chunky wad of wood-bits ripped right of its slender woody frame, and the poor darling just couldn’t handle the stress of it. It cracked under the pressure and disappointed all its telephone pole peers by toppling over.
And when that poor, strapping young telephone pole—which had only wanted to do its best, darn it—fell over, it just so happened… to not land on Sunset at all, because despite her stupidity the pitiful girl deserved a break now and then.
She did still get another bang on the bum when the telephone pole knocked off a traffic light and it plummeted down right onto Sunset’s rump.
That, at long last, appeared to be the end of it. No more would Sunset’s spectacular stupidity doom her to pain after pain after pain. No more would she chuckle sweetly at Twilight’s feeble attempts at romance. Never again would she and glasses-adorned companion awkwardly canoe down the frothing river of bone-gnashing rocks that was teenage romance. Not one more time would Twilight whisper bitter somethings into Sunset’s ear, and nor would Sunset ever clutch her beloved Twilight’s hand in her own and squeeze it like it was a plushie.
Mostly because Sunset was so very dead.
