This story is a sequel to Serotonin

Sunset Shimmer has a coping mechanism, and Twilight Sparkle wants to talk about it.

This is going to be a disaster.

Thanks to Scampy for being an excellent prereader and source of inspiration.

This story is a sequel to Day Zero

Wallflower knows she doesn't deserve all the patience, understanding and compassion Sunset gives her. If only Sunset understood that too.

One in the morning is a time when you visit the people you need the most. Sunset Shimmer is that to Wallflower Blush, as Wallflower is to Sunset.

It rains hard in Canterlot, and cold.

This was done over the space of about three hours of compulsive writing. After a twelve hour shift. Give it a little grace. Written for Scampy.
Cover art also by Scampy.
Featured on 08/15/2020 for some reason

Prequel to this story is First Day Of My Life
Find the collected works for the SunFlower Saga here.

When Sunset and Wallflower first started dating, Wallflower asked that they take it slow. A few months later, Sunset really just wants to kiss her already.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈
Part of the Pride and Positivity Event!

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Bless up for pride, y'all \o/

After pictures from her phone get posted online, that human five confront Sunset with the information. After discovering that she and the others had very different ideas about how to confront her, Rainbow Dash finds herself defending Sunset from the rest of her friends.

Rainbow siding with Sunset didn't change all that much. Sunset was still successfully framed, Sunset still lost most of her friends, Sunset will still go back to being the most hated student at CHS, but she won't have to face any of it alone, and that will make all the difference in the world.

Meta stuff follows.

Let's talk about combinatorics.

There is one way for none of the five to remain on Sunset's side, there are five ways for one of them them to side with Sunset, there are ten ways for two of them to do so, there are ten ways for three of them to do so, there are five ways for four of them to do so, and there is one way for all of them to do so. Out of these thirty two possible configurations, almost every Anon-a-Miss story sticks to the first one.

I did a tally once upon a time and what I found was that 96.9% of possibilities were almost never explored, and 87.5% were never explored at all (no "almost" necessary.) These figures get rather more abysmal if you're looking at who did or didn't side with Sunset from the start. The rare stories that have one or more of the five side with Sunset tend to have the initial confrontation go down pretty much canonically, and then have someone have a change of heart later on.

So, in the interest of stuff, here's a thing where Sunset has someone on her side from the very start. Most of the first chapter was released two months early on my Patreon page, for subscribers only, as you might imagine.

After reports of magical happenings, Daring Do comes to Canterlot in her A.K. Yearling persona. Having become estranged from her friends, Sunset Shimmer has plenty of time on her hands and is more than willing to spend it with her favorite author. The fact that it's been about a hundred moons since the last time she had a chance to geek out about magic is just a bonus.

The two talk about magic, life, the universe, and everything.

This is very low on my list of priorites, given how many other stories I have that are in need of an update, so don't start reading unless you're ok with infrequent and sporadic updates.

I made the cover art; it took an absurdly long time.

How do you tell a child that she will never be enough?

Proofing and revising help from Pascoite. The cover image is a piece by Silfoe that has been edited by me. Featured on Equestria Daily and selected as one of the Celestia Day picks for 2020! Contribute to the TVTropes page! Spoiler-filled review by The Red Parade of the My Little Reviews & Feedback group! Ghost Mike gave this a 'Pretty Good' in his spoiler-heavy review that you can find here. Buy this story!

Sunset Shimmer is in her apartment, alone, because it’s for the best. That’s why it’s good that she didn’t go to that party. It’s good that no-one knows what she does to herself.

But it’s fine. She knows what she’s doing.

She knows that she deserves this.

Once upon a time my name was Celestabellebethabelle,[1] and I lived on earth[2]. I was ⹁you see, once a human like you,[3] but (as you might imagine) I went to a convention. "Which convention?" I hear you ask.[4] Anime Boston. Knowing me,[5] you'd have thought it was Arisia, but it was Anime Boston. Things never work out quite the way you'd expect.[6]

So, try as I might ⹁with magnetsˌ superconductorsˌ liquid nitrogenˌ and so forth, I could not get the floating ball in my Tsukasa[7] staff to actually ⹁you know, float. Now, I could have just used a wire or ⹁I shudder to think, a metal rod, but that's entirely missing the point.

So I had the rest of my outfit, right? I mean, you know this story even if you've tried not hear it;[8] you know all about how my outfit was awesome. Those green stones inset in the hat? Malachite.[9] Nailed it. Where applicable[10] I used the actual skin of actual animals because suede is awesome my outfit had to perfect, ya know?

Get to the convention ⹁I'm all alone, and Jen A. Blue doesn't do panels anymore so the thing that originally made me decide I had to come to Anime Boston[11] isn't even there anymore. I have no idea what to do. Been trying for years to get here, finally arrive after the thing I was coming for is gone.

So I wonder and I wander and I find a disreputable looking person selling just the sort of thing I want to illicitly buy. By which ⹁of course, I mean that wave master staff with the red ball actually suspended in mid-air. I've waited my whole life for this moment,[12] and it's only going to cost me three human soulsˌ twenty three minutes of my brain being used as a computer processorˌ and . . . I know that humor says I should add a third ludicrous thing, but I'm out of ideas. The staff is ⹁however, named "Ludicrous".[13]

The price (the real one) was decent, I really wanted it, money changed hands, and then . . . you know, right? Call me, "Megan Willams,"[14] because I'm a human in Equestria. I think ⹁but am not sure, I'm in the gap between Rainbow Rocks and The Cutie Map. Go figure.

As mentioned, I know about displaced stories. You really can't not. I haven't read them, but I'm pretty sure I don't like them. Now I'm living one.

So . . . that's what's up with me. Woo.

[1] Ok: No, it wasn't. Humor is basically the only thing that keeps me sane at this point, though. Let me have this.

[2] The one where humans don't have poly-chromatic skin and hair colors.

[3] Several points to make here. In no particular order:
⊙ By this I mean I was once ⦑a human like you⦒ not, "Like you, I was once a human."
⊙ This assumes that you are a human; if you are not, then I was once a human unlike you.
⊙ Furthermore, what was like you ⹁assuming you are human, about me was our shared humanity. We probably did have other things in common, but I do not know what they are. It should in no way be inferred that I was any more like you than any other human.

[4] Full disclosure: No, I don't. Not even a little. If you are attempting to communicate with me in an auditory kind of way, try harder.

[5] Which you don't. Unless you do. If you do, I'm actually kind of weirded out by the fact you're reading this. Unless reading this will assist you in building a portal from where I was to where I am ⹁thus allowing me to return, please stop in the name of privacy and/or not weirding people out.

[6] Except when they do.

[7] Main character from .hack//Sign. He was getting trapped in an MMO back before it was cool. If it is cool now. Even if it isn't cool now, I suppose it counts as being before it was cool provided that it wasn't being cool before or during his tenure trapped within The World.[15] Is it true that he did it before it was cool? No idea. Cool and I have never been on speaking terms.

[8] This ⹁I know, from experience.

[9] I don't always use rocks as wardrobe accessories, but ⹁when I do, I prefer Cu₂(CO₃)(OH)₂. Stay thirsty my friends.

[10] So . . . not that much, really.

[11] Get my My Little Pony and Fullmetal Alchemist analysis from the same person? Sign me up. But you can't ⹁at least not without a time machine, because: see above. Took too fucking long to get my act together. Another in a long series of regrets.

[12] This isn't even hyperbole; it's just an outright lie.

[13] I'm not even making it up. It's not named that in the series ⹁and I'm a "Series only" kind of girl, but when looking something or other up I learned that it's a level 99 silver staff named "Ludicrous". So, there is that.

[14] She was the human main character of an animated TV series called "My Little Pony". You may have heard of it. She beat such luminaries as Tirek, Grogar, and the Smooze. Let it be known. She beat Tirek in her first appearance, because only suckers wait till the last episode of of season 4.[16] The book "Who Was Megan" is in the Fall of Sunset Shimmer in the dark magic section of Canterlot library, and ⹁in the same story, when Sunset first emerges into the human world, a flyer on the ground says that submissions to the CHS yearbook are to be brought to her or her siblings.[17] Look it up.

[15] You have to remember that this was a Japanese thing, so having it be called "The World" in English is like if we had an online game called "世界" or "せかい" or "sekai". It sounds a little bit less uninspired that way, doesn't it?

[16] I've never seen the G1 series and movies, so take that as you will. Tradition calls for taking salt with it. Also, Twilight Sparkle is not ⹁to my knowledge, a sucker.

[17] Nepotism much?

After being framed for something she didn't do, Sunset Shimmer is is bullied, shunned, and alone. She meets three people who will almost certainly be bullied, shunned, and isolated because of something they didn't do.

Their names are Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk. They are human teenagers who don't know magic is real, this is their first time in Canterlot, and they're transferring to CHS. They have no idea what they're getting into.

At another time, Sunset might have been the one person who could convince the student body that these three were not the Dazzlings. Right now, no one will listen to her.

The four of them have each other, but being associated with Sunset marks Adagio, Aria, and Sonata as suspected cyberbullies, and being associated with them marks Sunset as an evil monster (again.)

No idea what you should expect regarding updates.

It's like this: I realized that, if I set out to write the beginning of this, I probably could. Given that my depression has been generally stopping me from writing anything, it took that opening and started writing. I wrote for five and a half hours straight. That sort of thing isn't likely to happen twice, not until my depression is under better control at least. Also, I have no plan.

Updating doesn't require a marathon writing session (or a plan), though, so it could be that I'll have an update soon. Or it could be that I stall out and it's stuck sitting where it is for ages before I manage to update.

Why This Exists OR Credit Is Given

At some point after Cojo5536 suggested that Sunset meet the human Dazzlings in a forum post, I mentioned that River Road once commented on how much Dazzling Doubles by icecreammac resembles an AaM fic and referred to Cojo's idea as "crossing the streams".

(I haven't read _Dazzling Doubles_ myself.)

After about three hours of that marinating in my head, I decided to start writing. Mostly, as noted above, because times when I can write tend to be rare.

For those who might wonder, the cover art is my own creation based on a screen capture from Rainbow Rocks,