When it came to both rest and preset waking times, her body normally cooperated with her desires. Fleur could curl up for a fifteen-minute nap and open her eyes just about at the exact end of those fifteen minutes, as refreshed as -- well, realistically, fifteen minutes didn't do much and it took an hour or so for any real benefits to set in. But there were times when fifteen minutes was all which was available, and so she'd mastered the skill of sleeping for just about as long as the clock allowed. To that extent, with the exception of those times when she was truly exhausted, Fleur's body was under her control.
Her nightscape was not.
She'd had dreams throughout most of the night. Fleur suspected she dreamed more than other ponies: she'd had ample opportunity to lie next to sleepers in their beds and watch their closed eyelids for the telltale movement which said the transport into the nightscape had truly begun, and it never seemed to be enough to fully match the amount of time she personally spent there. Sometimes it almost felt as if for just about any moment she was asleep at all, she would be within Princess Luna's lands -- and that particular durance, while it always came to an end, had times when it was something much less than kind.
Fleur had dreamed throughout the night and with her life shattered, those dreams had rendered the nightscape into reflections of the memories she'd pushed away during the day.
She typically remembered her dreams, in vivid detail. (She wasn't sure that was entirely normal, but didn't really have anypony she could talk to about it, and the few she'd discussed it with before were poor subjects for such comparisons.) And so she remembered everything she'd been through again upon emerging -- then spent her first few waking breaths in once again pushing it all away.
It was only when she felt truly centered in the now that she risked a look up towards the dusty windows of the mill.
Still dark outside. There was too much dust to make out stars, but she could get an approximation of the sky's true shade: Moon would be nearing the end of its descent, with Sun not all that far away. She should have enough time to clean herself and find breakfast before making her way back to the cottage, and the first part of that began as soon as the thought reached her, horn igniting at that low, attention-fearful level, her field beginning to groom the dirt out of her barrel's coat. (It was normally difficult for unicorns to use their fields on any part of their body they couldn't directly see, but Fleur had certain skills in addition to talent, normal workings, and her personal trick: styling her own tail without twisting, turning, and some rather awkward mirrors was just about automatic.)
She couldn't make out all that much more of the mill than she'd been able to see before settling down within its fresh defenses to sleep -- but there were a few details which could be registered by a less tired mind, and the first to fully gain her attention was the ramp: a steady climb from the dirty ground floor up to a door. It embarrassed her somewhat, having overlooked that on the previous night, especially since it would have been an extra door between her and the rest of the world. Having been tired was an excuse, yes, but not one she could truly sell to herself, let alone any others who might have questioned it.
A few minutes were risked, and she made her way up the still-solid ramp, peered through the door's filthy inset pane as best she could. Her first, best guess was office. Probably where any supervisor had set up shop, occasionally yelling down orders from the top of the ramp to the underlings below. She could make out the rather surprising shadows of what seemed to be abandoned furniture: a desk and bench at the very least, possibly a file cabinet nearby. Breaking in would confirm everything and allow further searching, but she only had a few minutes to risk. Maybe if she was able to come back before sunset --
-- she stopped, examined the thought more closely.
No. This was an emergency stop. A timber wolf in the area, along with a few others which it was trying to find. I took shelter until morning. That's it.
The abandoned mill, looked at from a certain, very familiar point of view, had much to recommend it. The structure was still solid, and it had proven easy to set up initial defenses within. There was now an extra layer of security available: at least one extra door, plus a ramp which could potentially be collapsed at need after a little setup work. It had been abandoned for long enough that nopony would expect it to be used. One occupant had more than enough space available for just about anything, and others could be added to the shelter for a very long time before any degree of true crowding would set in, although the struggles to see who was entitled to the best spots would start long before that. But...
...that's not me any more.
The majority of her assets had been frozen. Even with her standard salary still (eventually) coming in, she had to watch her spending as she always did, especially with nopony currently buying her anything in an attempt to win her favor and not even a single strand of the web rebuilt. She had no current way of creating security. But she could pay for rent.
...probably less than ten seconds to get into the office, plus thirty more to make sure anypony who followed her might need at least five minutes...
She turned away from the door. She had been kicked out of Canterlot. Her life had been deliberately, carefully, and cruelly broken. But she was not at the point where she was going to begin living inside a corpse.
So when she eventually came back to see what was on the other side of that door, she would make certain to arrive during the day.
(Not too close to noon, of course. An animal caretaker probably had some traffic heading out to the cottage around noon.)
Getting food before Sun-raising in an unfamiliar settled zone, at least for the variety Fleur intended to pay for because that also wasn't her any more, was a matter of logical thought and careful sniffing.
The invention of trains had turned Ponyville into something fairly new. The settled zone predated the rails, and a portion of Canterlot had always been available for distant view -- but the fact remained that town and city were just about exactly one gallop apart. Travel between the two by hoof was practical, but not fast: hours were required to make the journey. (Wings cut strongly into that, but most of what population she'd seen during her initial survey had been earth ponies.) But with the train -- as she understood it from some of those whose flanks she'd been paid to trot alongside, Ponyville was becoming a commuter town. For those willing to give up a portion of their day to travel, it was possible to work in the capital while living outside it, where the costs might be somewhat cheaper. Of course, that still required mandatory time spent on the train for every workday, time which wasn't being used for much of anything else -- but it did extend the employment options of the locals, although some Canterlot residents had begun to mutter about rural outsiders taking their jobs, especially the ones they'd never even thought to apply for and never could have been bothered with doing at all.
Commuting, especially to reach those Canterlot jobs which began their shifts just about at the moment Sun appeared, required an early departure from Ponyville. Early-departing ponies needed to eat, and it wasn't everypony who could force themselves to start rummaging through their kitchens while Moon was on the descent. Some couldn't even force their stomachs to uptake at that hour. But for those who only suffered from the former condition, food needed to be had, and so commuting had created a number of natural fallout businesses. Newspapers published a little earlier, giving ponies something to read on the train (at least for those very few leaving Canterlot: she'd never seen a paper originating from Ponyville). Wake-up juice carts rolled out under starlight to dispense their product for ponies who would be barely capable of identifying it until they'd finished consuming the second mug. And there were little restaurants around the train stations in both cities, serving to those both arriving and departing, generally kicking over anything which was quick, cheap, could be consumed on the gallop, and wouldn't have the taste fully register until about halfway through digestion -- at which point, the pony would probably wind up tasting it twice.
Life as an escort had left Fleur well-acquainted with some of the businesses which normally operated within Princess Luna's hours, and she'd been aware of the rest well before that. So she knew that to find food before Sun-raising, all she had to do was follow the majority of whatever pony traffic was up at this hour, because that herd flow would be heading towards the train. And in the event that she was coming in from an angle where nopony else was traveling, a few sniffs of the air might just pick up on a lucky current, which in this case meant just about anything that wasn't coming off Mr. Flankington's.
Her snout began testing the atmosphere as soon as she came over the bridge, back into Ponyville proper, along with rotating her ears, listening for the telltale sounds of wheels and steamstack. For the latter, she didn't come up with anything initially, and with the former... a very few of the border homes had windows lit, and she could see -- rather more than she'd expected, actually. For in Canterlot, for the most part, a lit window would have had that illumination weakened by shielding curtains, and the life within homes and apartments would have been expressed as furtive shifting shadows creating darker patches within the false shield of light. Ponyville residents seemed to favor leaving their curtains gathered in rolls at the sides of their windows, giving her quick glimpses into the pre-morning, bleary-eyed life of the town. Workers getting ready for their shifts. Commuters forcing themselves to wake up enough to at least think about trying for the train. Open windows allowed her to both see and smell meals being prepared and placed into rather small saddlebags --
-- she looked away from that, just in time to see what was probably the first of the local commuters departing, a pony so tired that when his gaze naturally fell upon Fleur at the moment he left his home, his puzzle responded with the sort of piece shift which might be found when viewing a particularly lifelike statue. There was an obstacle, it was an attractive one, and he was almost certain he would be able to avoid it: that was it. Fleur quickly shifted her own position in time to avoid what would have been a truly unintentional jostle, and then quietly followed the stallion at a distance, still rotating her ears and listening for other approaches on more than a single sense. Hopefully he was heading for the train.
She was going to need a full map of the town, and soon. Along with a visit to a rental agency, perhaps even the post office if she could chance trusting anypony to pack her possessions when she was this far away from the center of the web. Celestia had said she would understand if Fleur needed to leave Ponyville briefly for a good reason, and recovery of the items for which packing first had been forbidden felt like one -- but at the same time, it was only her second day. Letting the circlet tell the palace that she was heading out of town on Day Two might seem like something too close to an attempt at either fleeing or testing the device's bounds, no matter how legitimate her excuse was. Which would leave her looking for a furnished apartment, and that was a higher fee --
-- not that she had much in the way of furnishings waiting to be moved. Very little, actually. And so many of them would mean shipping costs --
-- her eyes and nose reported their findings, and the information was somewhat conflicting.
In sight, there was a long line of device-created glow far off on the left, just visible at the end of a long, straight cross-street, and she could see a number of ponies walking, trotting, staggering, and semi-hovering their way towards it. That had to be the train station. But her unknowing lead (a pony whom she was already regarding as a fool, paying so little attention to his immediate environment while under Moon) wasn't heading in that direction. He was shuffling towards the place which a number of others were converging on, a building which had its lights just turning on as Fleur watched --
-- at the same moment the smell hit her.
Of course. The bread rises with Celestia. Just about any bakery was expected to be open at the moment the Sun was brought over the horizon, with that expectation coming from ponies who, if they found it thwarted, would be all too ready to seek out an establishment which knew how to operate properly. A bakery within something regarded as a commuter town would need to begin operations a little earlier than that. And in this case, there were no redirected air currents to tell her the owners had no idea what they were doing, with the freely-wafting scents informing her she'd found an expert in the craft.
Still, she didn't risk feeling even the briefest amount of joy. The last food-based prospective joy had resulted in Mr. Flankington's.
Fleur quietly trotted along behind the stallion. She could feel pieces shifting nearby: she was starting to draw attention from some of the others who were heading towards the bakery. There weren't too many ponies yet, and quick attempts to examine her results found -- not much of anything interesting, really. No matter how many ponies might insist that their tastes were one-of-a-kind and so was the partner who could match them, truly unique results were hard to find. In this case, Fleur found herself being compared to pieces, matching a fair number, being discarded through comparison to others -- and for the most part, those pieces were boring. Hoof fetishes were just about everywhere: anything so common as to be in the possession of that bitch could hardly be seen as a rarity. Two ponies liked the shape of her horn, with one of those being equally fascinated by her hindquarters: that mare moved into position to get a better look. A hovering pegasus had a somewhat less common interest in what that mare regarded as a well-turned stallion fetlock, along with -- and this did get Fleur's attention -- having a hank of grown-out fur hanging over the back of them. Interesting, in a vague sort of way. She'd been sensing more of that lately, and was starting to wonder if it was coming into some sort of trend: even fetishes had their cycles, some of which ended in an upsurge of temporary fashion.
She prepared her excuses as some of those ponies got closer to her: the entire group was beginning to naturally cluster more tightly as they approached the bakery's still-shut doors -- but she knew a few were specifically using the collapsing pattern as a means of approach. There was a chance that some of the ponies were ones she could use, and those chances were escalated slightly through having them work in Canterlot -- but unless a miracle combination of connections, experience, and potential blackmail material trotted right up to her snout, she wasn't quite in the mood to start weaving just yet. Not before eating, after having missed dinner the previous night and bringing her belated breakfast back up. Her thoughts were starting to feel a little foggy, her reaction time beginning to slow: all familiar, all things she didn't want to be feeling again. If there was anything to be gathered at the bakery, she could begin to pull it in after she ate, and possibly after a falsely-shy smile got somepony to buy the food for her. But until then... she just wasn't feeling up to much of anything.
The bakery's front door opened to a chorus of relieved sighs, and she looked at the earth pony standing in the center of the entrance. Fleur kept looking for an extra second beyond the casual, simply because it was rare to find that much jawline on one stallion. And as for his puzzle... he liked his mares heavier than Fleur had ever remotely considered becoming, and had the special glow to the piece which indicated that his desire had found lasting fulfillment. One of the lucky ones.
"Good morning, everypony," he smiled. "Form a line, please. Yes, I know who was here first, Glory: please don't try to overfly the front again. Come in, come in -- we're trying out τσουρέκι --" he stopped, cleared his throat after the rough, half-failed attempt to pronounce an unfamiliar word in Minotaurus "-- tsoureki for the first time today, so everypony who wants some can have a small free sample, as we're honestly not sure how we did and we're not going to ask anypony to pay in order to form an opinion. Come in, come in --" and in a sudden burst of warning, "-- Glory..."
Fleur allowed the line to sort itself out, including her position in it -- which was rather far towards the back. Well, she still had time before reaching Fluttershy's on schedule would become a concern, and lacked the energy to either rush or seduce her way forward.
Slow wait in line. Slow chewing. Slow saturation of slowly-rebuilding energy through her slow-feeling body. That was the best way.
She got twelve hoofsteps, just enough for her body to be illuminated by the bakery's inner light. And then the comet hit her.
Fleur's reflexes were excellent, and that state was a hard-won one. When fully awake and alert, she could avoid any number of potential trouble spots, and dodge most of the rest. But she hadn't eaten, she was still at least a little disoriented from all that had come before and, when looking back at the memory from much further into the future, she was sure that in order to have avoided (or, most realistically, postponed) everything which came next, she would have needed to teleport.
She couldn't teleport. When it came to magical movement, Fleur's capabilities lay in a rather specific direction, and that compass didn't point into the between. Near-instantaneous relocation wasn't among her capabilities. She'd tried to self-teach herself the working, seeing the potential in it -- but nothing had ever come, perhaps because reality was reality and no matter how much anypony might want to abandon it, they couldn't.
So Fleur, who was tired, only picked up on the signs in retrospect. The abrupt backing up from the pony directly behind her, who had been trying to stay as close as possible in the first place: that one really liked hindquarters. The little surge forward from the mare in front, making room. Everypony in the area, in fact, had responded to the gasp that fully registered in Fleur's ears just a little too late by figuring out what she was going to need in the way of a personal blast radius and then clearing the space for it. They'd just barely been fast enough. And Fleur... wasn't.
She only worked all of it out afterwards, and after repeated, short-term reviews of the event. She wasn't capable of looking at that memory for too long. Among other things, it tended to make her motion-sick.
"HI!!"
And the mare was right in front of her. Then on her right. Behind her. On the left. Seemingly all in the same second, bounding from place to place in huge four-legged hops. At one point, she seemed to feel the circular pattern had become boring, and so changed it up through either vaulting Fleur's back or engaging in a very short-range series of flash-free teleports, which was probably thaumaturgically possible when the one doing it wasn't an earth pony.
It was hard to get a look at her, even in the bakery's light: she wouldn't stay still long enough. Fleur got the impression of curls in both mane and tail, a slightly overweight body which really shouldn't have been going that fast, along with brief glimpses of a face which was actually rather cute, made even more so by that extra rounding of the cheeks. But looking took second place to her automatic attempts to retreat from the assault, every last one of which got blocked by the bounding form. No matter where Fleur turned, that was where the earth pony was, at least for that second. There was only one of her and she was coming at Fleur from all sides. Which made the words into something like being bombarded by a circle of gramophones which had been turned up to their maximum volume, with the records spinning at too great a speed.
"Wow, you're pretty! I know I've never seen you before! I'd remember a pony that pretty, but I remember everypony, so I'd just remember you even more. You must be the prettiest mare in -- well, the prettiest unicorn. Because we've got a pegasus who's probably just about a match for you, if you like her type, and her type is... well, she's still figuring out exactly what she's going to do with it, I think. Carefully. But you can't miss her. Nopony ever does. Have you met her yet? Of course not, because you're new and you'd know who I was talking about, and I can see you don't! You haven't met much of anypony, have you? Except Fluttershy. And you haven't had a bath yet after meeting her -- it's okay, it's okay, I'm used to it, I don't think anypony else can tell you've been to the cottage on smell, and nopony's going to know before you reach a bath except that I just said that out loud so now everypony knows and please don't worry! You only smell a little like rabbit. Angry rabbit. Angry -- scared rabbit? Huh... anyway, HI!! Welcome to Ponyville! Because when you're new in town and don't know anypony here except for maybe Fluttershy -- did your pet get sick already? Oh, I hope your pet gets better. I can schedule a play date with Gummy! You'll like Gummy. Everypony does, except the ones who don't. So you really need a welcome, and that means I'm going to start putting one together right now! Don't worry: you'll meet everypony soon! And everypony will meet you! Which they'll really-really want to, because you're so pretty! Am I saying that you're pretty too much? Because I've only met the one other pony who's that pretty, so I've at least got to match the number of times I said it to her so nopony gets jealous. Let me think -- pretty-pretty-pretty, and there, it's a tie! So I'm going to get things ready now, okay? It'll take a little while. I may not be ready today. Or tonight. Actually, the time might kind of be a surprise. Also the location. And the guests, but that's because you don't hardly know anypony, so the whole world is a surprise, and surprises are the best!"
And then there was a miracle, which came in the form of a pause.
Thoughtfully, "Do you like balloons?"
Fleur's talent lanced forward, mostly in self-defense. It just made things worse.
Her mind had already been reeling. Her senses had gone along with it. And now her deepest magic was trying to reconcile the presence of something very rare indeed, because no matter how bold some ponies claimed to be, no matter how many times they insisted they were up to anything, anything at all right up until the moment it actually started and they begged to be released from the yoke, Fleur had hardly ever found herself in the presence of a true trysexual.
In short, this was a mare whose basic approach to sex came down to 'That sounds like it could be fun! Let's try it!'
(Also, she liked being tickled. A lot.)
"Of course you like balloons," the mare said on what seemed to be only her fourth breath. "Everypony -- well, not everypony. Not when they pop, because they scare a few ponies that way. Or rub against each other and make those squeaks which make your tail go straight! But I'll have balloons for you which won't do that! Except I can't promise that first part because Pokey might come. Have you met Pokey? How about -- oh, it doesn't matter! You'll meet them all eventually, and more than a few of them once I get everything ready! Besides, you've met Fluttershy. That's important. And now you've met me, and you'll come inside and meet the Cakes and the twins, and that pony behind you who's trying to look at your butt a lot? That's Alora Light! -- oh... there she goes. I think I should go apologize for that. So I'm going to. Apologize. Right now. Before she flies too far away. Just remember, it's not her fault for liking butts. And you've got a really pretty -- oh no, now I've got to go make sure it's an even count again -- well, bye! I'll see you later! And do you know when? Neither do I! That's why it'll be a surprise!"
The pink comet streaked off to the west --
-- but only for a second. There was an abrupt rebound, one hundred and eighty precise degrees, rushing back through the bakery door, and then there was a small crashing sound --
-- almonds, mahlepi, and yeast-baked flour were pushed into her shock-opened mouth.
"You're too hungry to wait. Chew slow! It's new! And tell the Cakes what you think! Bye!"
Gone. The unicorn just barely holding ground in the center of the blast radius waited until she was almost sure of that, or as sure as she currently felt capable of being regarding anything after that had happened.
Fleur stood in place, or as much as she could while her body so badly wanted to reel, breathing. It seemed necessary, both for reorientation and to make sure all of the local oxygen hadn't been used up.
"...what just happened?" she asked the world, not fully remembering that the local portion had ponies in it.
They took pity on her. "Pinkie," a senior stallion said. "Didn't anypony warn you?"
"...yes," she managed, coming all too close to the tones of her charge. "...sort of..."
"It's okay," the stallion tried to comfort her. "You're never really ready for it. But you're probably halfway through now. It's usually just this and the party."
"Party." It was a word. She was just barely capable of saying it, and therefore it seemed to be worth repeating.
"Party," the stallion confirmed.
She was still reeling, especially internally. Trysexuals were exhausting, and seldom more so than on the day they first found out about yokes. And when you combined that trait with this pony --
"...what's -- 'probably'?"
"She might like you," the stallion replied. And then, with a grin which would only register as being about ninety percent threat to a recently comet-impacted mind, "And you know, you are pretty..."
It was a testament to the scent allure of the Cakes' skills that Fleur made it into the bakery. She didn't spot any twins. She did see some rather unusual baked specimens (or at least unusual for the locals) and managed to find her voice long enough to order a few of them, although she wasn't sure about her accent. And when she ate the results, something which would match the true if only somepony would give them a sample of the intended results, they stayed down. They gave her energy.
Some of that energy was used in checking the diminishing shadows as she made her way back out under Sun. Every patch of shade. Everything which might offer concealment, and hoping she could see through it before the worst happened.
For she'd met Pinkie. And at an unknown time which had been promised as a surprise, Pinkie would be coming back...