Barbara Dusk and Elusive.

Dusk

Eight am, the exterior of PV sees the break of dawn. A tall six foot figure is standing out in front of a cylindrical structure, not at all unlike the place she lives. KO. There are no ponies about the immediate area, and the bipedal figure's blue and white plaid dress is flowing in a strange wind, which was odd, considering the early time of morning. No sets of wings are flapping to generate that wind. A jute sack full of papers of one sort or the next weigh them down, and slightly throw the girl off kilter.

She's glad there aren't any ponies around. It keeps her from thinking about potential disapproving stares. The only disapproval she wants, should she get any is the disapproval of the staff is the publishers' office. By the names of Faust and Larson, she will get this thing through, or she will play this card she has kept out of sight. Right under her long flowy dress.

Cut to the chase, she steps in and flicks the door the split instant it unlocks; She is no stranger to these glass double doors, nor is she unfamiliar with the word 'no' coming from the manager and assistant. She can take it. But she's not coming without a backup plan. If the inherent content of her novel did not sell them, she would flash something of hers she had not. Something on her body she had kept secret for years from all but her clotfriend and bat mad brother. And if push came to shove, she'd draw the tool none but her blood knew about.

Sounds of heavy thudding fall to the floor, and the sole residents of this place come from down the stairs. They flick the switch on the wall, and are immediately met with the last image they want to see when they start their day off.

They are greeted with what seems like a reptilian figure, a flat torso without indication of disturbance, a lizard's muzzle, scaly texture, tail, large batlike wings on her back, not in plain sight, and visible hands and feet with short, but very edged claws at the ends of each finger and toe. They are all too familiar with her strong, but hopeless desires, and they want no part of it. But they know she has dreams, and they do not want to crush her spirits. Putting on a professional face, the shorter one asks: "Hello Miss Dusk. May we do anything for you?"
She knows darn well what.

"There's no need for that," comes the curt response. "You two have known me long enough to know precisely what this hot-blooded reptile not only wants, but feel she needs. Wait a minute..."

Barbara Dusk looks intently at two faces she should know by heart, but the shorter one in back between the two doesn't look like how she is accustomed to. The one who did not speak yet looks exactly how she knows he should: A tall, bipedal creature who runs the place and owns the deed, his doglike face staring patiently at the young girl on the ground floor. The other... more or less the same?

As if reading her mind, the second, shorter, humanoid creature with its dog face and poodle hair looks down upon itself and something clicks in its mind. "Oh, of course. I'll be back in a jiffy."

Arms swinging, she bolts up the stairs and vanishes for a minute or two, and another figure with a quadrupedal stature comes down providing the young authoress exactly whats she's used to seeing: A beautiful (By her standards) hybrid looking creature with the features of both a horse and a beetle. She looked how Barbara thought she should look, and did most of the time she saw her. Her most prominent feature at a glance is her general lack of any hair whatever, but a thick layer of pitch black chitin that glistens like shiny steel. Her eyes are shaped like a regular mammal at a glance, until you'd look close enough to see the multi faceted surfaces like a gem. The rest of her head's overall shape is equine, but has several other insectlike features. The most creepy thing would be the dome shaped back, seemingly like a casing covering a regular mammal shaped torso, as could be seen from beneath. Or it would be, if not for the legs, which resemble cheese grates in the overall shape of equine legs, arguably the least insectoid feature, yet the creepiest to the less open minded. While ponies typically have to swallow it, it's not a problem for most non ponies, which would explain why she is working here, desensitize the equine populace to emotion feeding beings like her. So fitting she is given her chance by a guy who knows what it's like, yet has leeway afforded other "Exotic" beings that differ from horses.

"And for the record, you may both call me Barbara, no need for needless distancing."

"Alright, Barb. How may we help you?" says D-dog Missuer Cooper.

Five sturdy fingers slide through the strap and hand over what looks like a thick tome. Cooper's thick hand grasps the volume, and rub it against his leathery skin. He'd never seen anything this thick since he went into business. It takes no more than a quick scan to confirm nothing is apparent but some indications of plot, yet more ramblings than anything. Nothing unusual coming from her, and he knows it. He won't crack her case, but nothing is stopping his more empathetic bug friend.

As she steps behind the desk where Cooper lays the covers, she pulls out a wooden plaque with the nameChince Bee Noth from a drawer and slaps it onto a desk. Finally, she speaks again: "Listen, dearest, we know what not being given a chance is like. We know what feeling like we've made a break is like. The sudden and unprecedented feeling of optimism. But sometimes, you have to follow a set of principles, and face facts. Ponies do not want end-of-the-world scenarios. Nor rehashes of stories that weren't very good to begin with."

"Maybe you should get some rest, and out of Sparks' dull, dreary office--"
"I did that" Barbara states and cuts in. "Sorry to bite your head off, Mister Cooper, but I have heard this one more than enough."

"We are sorry, too," claims Chince. "We really want you to succeed, but you know small businesses cannot run high risks of failure, and lose money. It's not some major household name publisher. Besides, you own secretarial work liek no one either of us have ever seen. You can record facts with accuracy neither of ua had ever previously dreamed of. What more can you ask for?"

"Yeah, besides," Cooper adds, as he leans on the desk, "nothing is compelling you to go into being a novelist."

It's time to play her card!
Grabbing the hem of her dress, Barbara makes her point: "Then I suggest you tell it to this!", immediately lifting her dress so high, the ends exceed the wings on her back, and reveal more than her creamy underbelly. She turns to a profile and reveals her left hip, which has a typewriter shaped mark on it, with the word "author" written beneath it.

This symbol had never been seen by any ponies outside of Elusive and Sparks, and it still technically hasn't.

Both go rigid at the sight of the strange symbol on her hip, Cooper a bit later, as his eyes do not immediately look beneath her torso.

"Where'd that symbol come from?!" asks Chince. This causes Cooper to suddenly peek at the Symbol on Barb's hip, and his eyes slightly widen, before immediately returning to normal. "That'd be nothing more than a tattoo, dearest. Nothing to write home about."

She thinks for a moment, then nods her head in agreement. How could it be anything else? Yet neither of them had ever seen her au naturale before, so for all they knew, it could even be a birthmark, or even a permanent scar. Yet... what kind of cut or bruise has such perfect shape...? Nah.

Unfortunately, she senses the aspiring author's sincerity, and conviction. If nothing else, she certainly believes that mark is compelling her to write. Yet she has spent the better part of her life writing, hadn't she? It would be no wonder she would be daft enough to mark herself in this manner and attempt to expand her horizon. Boredom could not really push her to this, could it? The clear excitement cannot be denied. You would not need the power to read and feed on emotion of others to tell it. Her boss and roommate feels the same. Who says...

In an instant, she suddenly finds herself wondering what she'd just been thinking, but cannot for the life of her figure it out. Cooper also is experiencing a shock, and it radiates off of him so much that she has to back away from the excess. In front of them, Their potential client holds a gem, which does not look like anything unusual. She places the diamond or whatever crystal away in her sack and turns away without another word. In their moment of stupor, Barbara had taken the book back and bolted out, nearly knocking over a random mare who currently is staring at the distraught secretary.

Five minutes later, and Chince Bee Noth can still taste the bitter disappointment in the air left behind by Miss Dusk, and is so desperately trying to rinse it out with this next client's enthusiasm. It takes both that and Cooper's massaging fingers together to make her ignore the lingering bitterness as it fades so slowly.

Outside, a breeze blows more gently than before, and several small clouds roll by. One such has two chicks riding on it, both laughing away. The older looking one of the two looks down, to which Barb only smiles widely as she can. She could not ride on a cloud or sit on it like it was solid, but oh how often does she wish to and envy those who can.

The walk home goes uneventful as possible, and she arrives at another cylindrical structure, this one two stories in height rather than three. A closed, do not disturb sign hangs about the front door, but she enters anyway. She lives here, so what?

As she enters, she grabs a nail out of the plaster wall, and chews it into plain ore, then ingests it. The walk has not made her tired, but this crippling feeling of inadequacy is killing poor Dusk. She had sworn to curb her gouging whenever she gets upset, but she's had it. She played the card she'd concealed for so long, and it has failed her. She does not wish to hold it against them, and reminds herself she's known the Coopers, or soon to be Coopers, for the better part of the last five years. 'I love them, but they have not reciprocated it. Icannot begrudge those who want to make ends meet, yet I feel so useless'.

Chewing on a second nail and a metal nut, she ascends the stairs ready to relieve her stress on the shining light of her life.

As she enters the bedroom, her eyes are graced by none other than her beloved husband Elusive. He never was an early bird when it came to Saturdays. After producing cloaks and dresses all week, Friday evening and the better part of Sat was the day to crash. All he did was lay, lay, lay. He got up, not even for hay.

'Damnit. That Zeb really knows how to get into my head. Zeb so often speaks primarily in poetry, it's rubbing off. So does Brae.'

Shaking her head, trying to get her friends Brae and Zeb out of her head, she throws herself into the bed, landing squarely on Elusive's back and causing her a surprise.

A chuckle emits from him. "You were out trying again, were you, dear? I love your persistence." His neck is long and flexible as a swan's, and it twists so as to face her squarely. She immediately gives kind colt a peck in the face, then squeezes into the grasp of his curled forelimb. The feeling of Elusive's forelimb about her torso is like nothing else in the world. The nearest thing she ever got was the same thing from Sparks, and that wasn't the same. Barbara and her brother Sparks grew up together, and she spent the better part of her childhood working for him, keeping notes, books, and arranging and rearranging the house.

"Merci, Amour," she replies, eliciting a chuckle from him. While amour or amore, however you spell them, are terms of endearment, they happen to compose the middle name of one of their own closest friends. Specifically, the one ending in "E".

He nuzzles her like she'd never been nuzzled before, and she breaks the ice. "I showed them my symbol."

Elusive muzzle came away faster than a hoof being burned on a stove. "What?" Disbelief fills his head, and he suspects he heard wrong. Barbara confirms he has not. "I showed it to them, but they thought it a mere tattoo. I used my gem to erase the immediately recollection of it." "OH!"

He had her swore not to use that gem unless needed, now she has forced herself into a position to use it. "I swear not to do it again."
"It's water under the bridge, I suppose. There'd be nop- nobody else who saw them, yeah?"

"None." She giggles. Ever since the specie diversification act, Elusive has been making it a point to try to adhere to an altered vocab, specifically watching how he uses pronouns. No ponies outside Carousel Boutique ever made the slightest effort, nor took thought to do so. And recently, only Elusive's closest pals are even trying. And all of them are doing an even more lousy job at it.

*knock knock*

"I'll get it. You continue to rest, darling." Barbara leaps out of bed and bolts down the stairs to the door, and is instantly greeted with the sight of the three ponies nearest the two. A horse with an orange coat speaks up:"Hello, Barbara. Is Elusive up?"

Barb responds:"Yes, he is, AJ. But he's not leaving the house today. He spent the last five days working himself to the bone. He's not forsaking a good day's rest for even the ponies he's spent the last five years bonding with."

Another speaks up, Barbara's brother:"Pity. Cupcake has invited us all to the bakery. She says after a week of working ourselves to death, we all deserve a nice, big cake. Or a thick pie. She really wants us all there, including you and Elusive."

"Thanks, Sparks, but he's not coming out. And I am put out myself. Tell her we're glad she offered, though."

The third one speaks:"Oh, come on, Barb. Don't be such a party pooper. Do you really want to disappoint our good friend Cupcake? She doesn't make offers like this often."

"I wouldn't expect any different from you, Brit. You live with her. You wouldn't wish to disappoint her." Brit hangs her head.

Sparks then tells his sister about Brae and Zeb being there. Her eyes immediately light up as if on reflex. She tells them to wait there. She runs up the stairs to get Elusive. Zeb's tendency to speak in poetry doesn't mean she hates him. Quite the opposite. And Brae is even more fun, as well as fun loving.

"Elusive, Elusive! Cupcake is closing the Bakery to all but you, me, Brit, Sparks, Brae, Zeb, and AJ. Wanna come?"

On his hooves, Elusive tells her to stay here with her.

"You come with us. You know nothing about what you are missing out on. I think you can muster up enough energy for a nice pie, right?"

"Sure," he sighed. Barb can feel a fabric brush against her head, and ducks as a cloak flys through the air onto Elusive's back. In a flash, he's "decent", whatever the word means, and ready to get out. "Don't you think about writing anything. This is both our days' off."

'And he just put the thought back into my head,' thinks Barb.