//------------------------------// // Drugs are BAD // Story: Melodious Desideratum // by Desideratium //------------------------------// You sigh as you watch the klutzy pegasus fly off, wreaking havoc in her wake. Thanks to her, you have a heavy door and a spattering of shattered glass lying all over the floor. You toss your letter (and the muffin) in the general direction of the table, then light up your horn to clean up the mess. Using a complicated repairing spell, you magic the door back into the frame and re-bolt the hinges into the wall. At the same time, you levitate the bigger pieces of glass back to their original spot, fitting them into place like a jigsaw puzzle. The leftover fragments shoot into the leftover spaces, sealing up the larger cracks. A magic wipe follows, mending the minute details with a sound like metal against a chalkboard. Your ears flatten and you turn away, wincing. In a matter of seconds, the damage has been undone. The grey blur around your horn fades— its work is done. Your vision fogs slightly, and bright stars dance in front of your eyes. You lower your head and knead your watering eyes with a hoof. Harder spells like that always leave you a little disoriented and light-headed. You wait for your eyesight to return to full power, then turn to go back to the table where you had dropped the letter, and Derpy’s tasty gift. You had just had breakfast, but, at the moment, a muffin sounds really good to you. The wrapper soars across the room and alights on top of the mounting pile of clutter in the trash. Normally, this would annoy you beyond comprehension, but for some reason you’re suddenly exhausted and have no power to do anything about any inconveniences. Blinking hard, you stumble over to your couch and collapse. This sudden fatigue is interesting; powerful spells don’t usually beat on your skull like this, even though this was the biggest one you’ve pulled off in a while. Up too late, you rationalize. Your work schedule keeps you up and running until around 1 o’clock in the morning. You’ve adjusted your sleeping patterns to accommodate that, but you still often wake up feeling no more rested than you had when you went to bed. You cast your bleary eyes around the room, searching for your bookshelf. You locate it— because it’s in the same spot as it has been for as long as you can remember— and send a wave of magic over to locate your personal Bible: “1001 Useful Spells That Every Unicorn Should Know.” The thousand-plus-page tome is far older than you, and you had been extremely impressed to find such a treasure at the Ponyville library. It had actually been a subject of much interest to the librarian, Twilight Sparkle, for a bit of “light reading”, and you practically had to beg her to let you check it out. You open to your bookmark at the fifty-page mark, munching on your muffin. You scan past the spell you had learned yesterday (speeding up plant growth) and move onto the next: “a spell to stop something from eating everything”. You do a double-take. A few muffin crumbs and half a blueberry tumble down your chin and land on a yellowing page. “What?” you mutter to yourself, questioning the reality of this unusual entry in your holy book. But then again, when there are over a thousand spells, some of them are bound to be a little . . . aimless. “Never mind.” You turn the page—hopefully there won’t be anything overly useless there. You glance at the title on the top of the page: “Changing Colours of Objects”. You smile. Much better. ***** After the half hour it took you to learn the spell had passed, your apartment was a complete and utter seizure-inducing mess. You’d been having so much fun with the colour-change spell that you thought it a good idea to turn the colour of everything in the room to something eye-wateringly bright. Your fridge is electric blue; the tiling is alternating pink and lime green; your couch is magenta; the walls and ceiling have rainbow-coloured camouflage splotches; even your mane has gone from blue to blindingly bright turquoise. The whole room makes you feel like you’re on several different hallucinogenic drugs at the same time. You’re grinning from ear to ear. Well, that was fun. Your horn had just lit up again to start cleaning up, when there was another knock at the door. Great! You are immediately jolted into overdrive. “Who is it?” you call out, frantically firing magic all over the room, attempting to reverse some of the chaos you had wreaked on your apartment. “Eiffel!” replies a male voice. “What’s going on in there?” Eiffel is a good friend of yours and he’s used to coming over while some crazy experiment is in progress. You breathe out a sigh of relief and use your horn to open the door, while still restoring order with the rest of your mind power. Eiffel trots into the room, eyes wide from the sensory overload you had engineered. He’s a dark blue earth pony with sea-blue eyes and a spiky turquoise mane, that so happened to match yours at the moment. His cutie mark was a pair of taiko drums, for his talent in percussion. “Oh,” he says. “I see you’ve been busy.” You grin sheepishly. “Yeah. Got a little carried away.” You shoot a few more rays of light to the corners of the room, and your wallpaper turns back to its normal shade of grey. Eiffel looks at you seriously. “Are you doing something different with your mane? You must tell me, what’s your secret?” A grin breaks across his face. You look up to see a lock of orange and green hair falling in front of your face. You summon a mirror from the bathroom. While you had been trying to reverse your spellwork, you had inadvertently made your mane worse. It was now an ugly mix of pumpkin orange and lime green, and a few splotches of pink. “What are you talking about?” you reply. “My mane always looks like this!” “Funny. By the way, Lyra sent me to come find you. Something about a lunch date or something?” You jolt to your hooves. “What? What time is it?” “About one o’clock.” “Horseapples!” Your horn lights up to turn your mane back to its regular navy blue. “Thanks for finding me,” you say to Eiffel. “Lyra would have murdered me and fed me to the parasprites if I’d forgotten about it.” You rush out the door. Eiffel jumps outside just in time to avoid a smack on the flank from the front door. “No problem. Hate for you to miss your date.” “Noteworthy is coming too,” you protest. “It’s not a date.” “Makes no difference how many of you there are. This just makes it a double date.” Eiffel laughs. “Wouldn’t the other pony have to have a partner in order for it to be a double date?” You wrap a scarf around your neck to block the winter chill. “Details, details! Now get going!”