TShe Rings Loudly for an Audience Of One
Equestria Girls
Romance
Dark
Drama
Applebloom meets a girl in the hospital who is way too pretty to be there with her.
Suicide / Self Harm
Gore
Alt. Universe
CMCs
Applejack (EqG)
Pinkie Pie (EqG)
Rarity (EqG)
Duskwingmoth · 17k words · 85 16 · 1.2k views

stumbles in with milk and cigarettes Hey Kids, Momma's Back From the Corner Store · 2:55pm Jun 1st, 2023

Habby Pride, everypony~

I feel like I should uh... address my year-long silence on here. Because wOw, I really said "check back soon" and peaced out.

To keep a long story short, a years-long original project I was working on broke my spirit with the impossible workload I put upon myself. Do you think I, a disabled, unemployed tranny with brain problems in a garage have the time afforded to me to get 30,000+ sprites done -- all by myself -- before I lose housing/my partners? I don't.

So I shelved the thing I had poured my heart and soul into writing and designing for years, and as one might expect, I was a busted shell of myself for a good while. I tried for a bit to rework it into a smaller version of itself, but my pride wouldn't let me. And without something original to chew on, I lost the drive to work on anything else, including fanfiction.

That of course, does not fully account for why I've not written anything on here in nearly 60 weeks, I suppose. I have been writing! Just... nothing MLP-related. And I don't feel I have enough to share yet, either, beyond a couple family, one friend, and my partners.

(Maybe I should tho... none of them have been the valuable proofreaders I had hoped for...)

Part of that is simply a deep-seeded confidence problem, and another part is social anxiety. Why am I not in any writing Discord servers? Same reason I'm in basically no other servers: I'm nervous about being observed. Quite the conundrum for a creator desperately starving for attention.

All the while, one of my stories on here is quietly doin' numbers and a pit in my stomach grows wider and wider. I should be doing something to capitalize on this. I should be trying to make something happen here, at least. C'mon, Dusk, you came up with this cool idea for a subversive adventure story with pirates and multiverse theory and identity stuff and everything! Somebody would like it; you like it! Why aren't you writing that instead of your sopping wet autistic vampire beast nobody will care about???

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ADHD, especially unmedicated, makes it very difficult for me to develop a healthy work-life balance. That's it. That's the one legitimate excuse I have.

Beyond that, I should be brave. I should talk more to people and stop assuming they're closed off to me socially. It'd probably help a lot. And I should stop feeling like a fraud. The verdict is in: Audience of One is something people like! And I farted that out in like a month with no prior planning. I'm an adequate writer (at least beyond music anyway), and I don't need every project to be the biggest thing I can possibly conceive. In fact, that's highly detrimental to my output. You'd think I'd learn after almost ten years.

I don't know. I had hoped writing a blogpost would help me sort out these complicated feelings, and it hasn't really worked. Uhhhh...

I'm on Tumblr? If you care about Tumblr, I guess. I have a minor hit post on there. I'm mortified that a couple thousand people have heard my voice. I'm no longer on Twitter, and some of my funny yuks I made on there will forever go unappreciated. Can't doomscroll on that anymore, that's progress.

I guess if you're in Portland, Oregon this month for whatever reason, I'll also be there as often as I can get away with, alongside my partners. I have a McDonald's Pinkie Pie and a one-armed Red-Eyes Black Dragon keychain on my purse, and a cute rainbow cats mask my grandmother made. You can take the opportunity to corner me and tell me you want to see more of my work I guess. I'll probably be going to Powell's tomorrow to get more books I forget to read.

And uh... Idk. Here's some stuff I wrote for The Star Sailor like a year ago. Just so somebody sees it in case I never find the drive to work on it ever again.

Keep it queer, keep it liberatory.~

Pain – excruciating and indescribable. Each individual part of her body spaghettified into the far distance, wire-thin, and strummed like a lute by invisible griffin claws. Bones corkscrewed around tendon and muscle, the spiral constricting ever tighter with no sense of slowing down. Her teeth all revolting all at once against her gums, growing for malms and malms in random directions, through her cheek, back into her esophagus, and into her barrel. Every thump of her frantic confused heart sending lances of overheated blood through her veins at 100 yalms per second.
But above all else, as her ears froze and her hooves melted, was the pounding migraine directly flooding her prefrontal cortex. Drumming and drumming and drumming itself with a ferocious wrath, squeezing all of her other thoughts into an inaccessible, unrecognizable paste. And she screamed and whimpered, and no sound came out, but it ran her throat raw and her ears rang and her lungs tore themselves apart as they shriveled into hyper-compressed, blackened husks, no larger than a cherry pit.
Twily…
Agony was put to shame by this nightmare, one not assuaged by the knowledge that it wasn’t really happening. Twilight couldn’t find time to think between her body contorting anew in odd, disgusting, horrific ways, all chosen to cause her as much suffering as possible.
Twilight!
There was no mercy, there was no reprieve, and no sign it would ever end…
“Twilight!!”
And then she jolted awake, to blinding light and the sound of her own screaming.
“Twilight, it’s okay!”
A voice. Who’s voice? Shining’s voice. He had jostled his sister out of her personal torture chamber and back into the waking world, into her bedsheets drenched in sweat and saliva. Into numbness, as the pain drained away suddenly, and left a faint fuzz muting all Twilight’s senses in its wake.
“It’s alright.” Shining was around her now, the sensation of his embrace so dim and distant. “It was just another nightmare.”
It took a few minutes before she could see anything more than soft unfocused blobs or feel things properly again. Less time than that to register that her breathing and heartbeat were settling, and for her mind to be present.
How droll this was, went her first proper thought. A nightmare, again. Twilight was thoroughly used to this process. Waking disoriented out of terror had happened so many times it wasn’t worth mentioning in her mind, even with them having become especially harrowing lately. It was just the start of her morning routine.
Maybe it was easy for her to get used to because her brother was always vigilant; always there when she woke.
Perhaps it was because it left her so literally numb.
Possibly both.
Shining looked at her. “You okay?”
Twilight’s throat was still a wreck from screaming in her sleep. She nodded.
He sighed in relief. “Guess we can cross off the Jaderoot, huh?”
She shrugged. One more possible treatment ticked off the list. It was beginning to seem rather impossible to find any relief from this condition. When a method made the nightmares less common, they became worse. When they made them less taxing, they became nightly. And some simply left Twilight drowsy through the day, a walking dead mare. The search for a cure of any sort had been long, and fruitless. None of the dozens of remedies the whole of Archive’s brightest minds had looked into worked, and their collective ingenuity was without equal in all the Solaris.
It had gotten to the point that her parents had compiled and published an extensive, exhaustive scientific study about the effects and effectiveness of these various sleeping aids, with Twilight as a consistent negative outlier to use as reference. Canterhorn had even paid them retroactive funding for the entire thing.
Not how she’d wanted to make her academic debut, all things considered.
Shining released his sister and made to stand up. “Darn it. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel with these.” He, at least, was solely concerned with finding some solution.
“water,” Twilight croaked.
“Right.” He darted off to the washroom sink. And then doubled back when he realized he had no glass, giving Twilight a goofy grin.
She managed a weak smile in return before he left her alone with her thoughts and her slick salty coat.
Nothing for it but to get the day started. She shook off the lingering burrs of malaise and stretched, stiff muscles crying weakly at the effort. Her damp bedsheets were carelessly tossed aside as she stepped off the bed.
Before leaving the alcove she stole a glance out the window. Archive had just had its rain schedule cleared, so the Rainbow Scar was clearly visible in the late morning sky.
To think, it had already been a year since that comet ripped the heavens open and left its mark. A sight to behold on its own, the scar was a bright, rippling aurora in all the colors that never faded, no matter the time or weather. Pegasi might not have been able to reach far enough to actually study it, but they had confirmed, after a long expedition across the upper layer of clouds, that it was visible at all times, from anywhere on the port side of Canterhorn.
Obviously it had to be magic, and its place at the aetheric border left it vexingly out of reach, having tantalized scholars for a full three-hundred-sixty-five days now. Here it was, potential proof of life beyond their star! Or potential proof of divine action, finally silencing nonbelievers! And nopony could come close to touching it.
For a little purple earth pony teenager, it was just something nice to look at.
She clambered down the steps to the main floor of her room. C’mon Twilight. Today’s a day to get hyped! You’re 14! You can finally go on your journey!
Indeed, her birthday had rolled around once again. The one that finally loosened the reins on her, and allowed – encouraged, even – that she step out of Archive with her own four hooves. And Twilight had already planned her entire trip years ago. Off to Canterhorn to see the white city for herself. As daughter of the head chroniclers, she was able to schedule an audience with the court mages. She’d pick their brains for days, and see what could be put into practice with what she could carry with her.
Then off to New Manehattan to study the cosmopolitan lifestyle, she thought, as a purple hoof deftly grabbed a fresh towel. Twilight would see if it was to her tastes at all. Maybe learn what made their entertainment industry so booming from the ponies on the inside? In the meantime, meet up with one of her parents’ colleagues in the field to study the long-term effects of the Margins on marine life.
Rearing up on her hindlegs, Twilight aggressively tried to dry off the salty sweat, contemplating even still whether she should obtain permits for studying Rainbow Falls or Foal Mountain. Either one presented fascinating archaeological quandaries that Archive hadn’t had the bits to pursue for many years, and if nopony was going to shore them up, she’d just go in herself. Risk, shmisk; there was ancient knowledge waiting to be unearthed, and if an earth pony was good for anything, it was digging in the dirt.
Heavy approaching hoofsteps outside let her know that Shining was making his way back as she tossed the now-smelly rag into the nearby hamper. The stallion entered with a full glass, floating in his arcane grip to Twilight’s hoof. Like a well-serviced machine, this ritual practiced thousands of times – even her big brother’s hurried forgetfulness never failed.
Before she got to any of that, she still had a birthday to get through.