//------------------------------// // Reach the For All Too Familiar Flowers // Story: The Perfect Pony // by TheSadisticJudge //------------------------------// Cobalt Fabric => Reach for the All Too Familiar Flowers. You are taken aback, however, by the existence of these flowers. How did they get here? Where did they come from? Has somebody so vile and so malicious to prank you breaking and entering your shop—your home by putting two dead flowers on your coffee table as you were unconscious in the alleyway? How dare they! You reach for the flowers only to find them non-existent and you stumble over your coffee table and land on your old, worn out sofa. The old, worn out sofa has the scent of you – but not exactly you – and dried tears… and crayons? You can recognize your own scent but it didn’t exactly smell like you, it smelled… different, like sniffing crayons when you are baking cookies—that complicated of a smell. The dried tears bit rattled you a little bit, nothing can rattle you but this scent stunned you. You have not been crying, at all. You don’t know why some prankster would come into your home, plant dead flowers, and then cry on your sofa. You pick yourself up off the old, worn out sofa and catch a glimpse of a small figure running out of the corner of your eye. You whip around in the direction, horn glowing brightly, and ready to instantly vaporize this intruder— You catch nothing but dust clump in the shape of a bunny being blown away from the vent. You cautiously stroll over to the thermostat and turn it off, your nerves were keeping you on edge. Your home, your humble abode, felt like a ghost town. It gave you the heebie-jeebies just standing in one place for too long, and you keep walking as if you were pacing back and forth. In fact, you were pacing. Back and forth. Nervously. The clock strikes twelve o’clock PM. Reader => Egress ‘Faux’ Reality. You are no longer The Perfect Pony and are your own entity in a void that The Author has created to suspend your synthetic involvement. Suspension of Disbelief is broken along with your artificial immersion. Reader => Ingress ‘Rejected’ Reality. You have ented the ‘rejected’ reality, whether or not this reality is the ‘real’ reality is irrelevant at this point because the difference between the two are mere words and the definition of perception, along with the reliability of narrators and characters’ psyche. Now Reader => Be The Daughter You are now The Daughter. If you are a male, now you are now a female, The Daughter in this faux existence. If you were female, then you stay a female—The Daughter in this faux existence. If you refuse to classify yourself as either male or female, which there is nothing wrong with doing, you are now female—The Daughter in this faux existence. Today is your birthday, and you are very excited to spend the day with your wonderful, smart, and beautiful mother in this very new town! You look up and glance at your surroundings for the sake of context, which is a flawless argument to look around your room like you were tripping on bath salts. The room is very well lit and bright; the window is open to welcome the radiant rays of the early morning sun to reflect off of your neon pink painted walls. Your carpet is shag, colored a bright shade of baby blue cyan. On your ceiling, there are glow-in-the-dark stars stickered up there. They run off of magic, your mother’s magic. Unfortunately for you and your artistic eyes, the rest of the house doesn’t look like this no matter the amount of times you protest this crime against fashion! As Mum is unconcerned with a little style to the shop, you are very religious to the lifestyle of expression! That’s okay, you tell yourself, more creativity to yourself! Your mother is very tired, you noticed from her rather droopy and irritated facial expression (and the fact she hasn’t wished you a happy birthday). You infer that she is exhausted from moving from Canterlot to your new home in Ponyville. The sound of her slaving away downstairs with the spindle concerns you about her physical health, she told you that everyone needs to sleep, but every time you bring it up she will dismiss your very concerned daughterly advice. She is such a hard worker, even if it might eventually kill her! You are currently in your room, coloring the pictures of your perfect creation, your Pony Lisa (You have no idea what a ‘Pony Lisa’ is, but that’s what your Mum called your last drawing of Princess Celestia!), your hardest drawing yet! You have drawn what you believe is to be the perfect pony, using none other than the Princess herself as a reference! You beam at your drawing, the excitement of showing Mum this is almost breathtakingly exhilarating! Mum is always so proud of your raw artistic talent, and she have pinned every one of your creations on the fridge door! You were sad that your drawings had to be put away when Mum packed up the apartment in Birmingmare, but Mum told you a clean slate is always great to have! Mum is so smart; you think to yourself as you pick up the pink crayon. Although you know you have a lot to improve on, when it comes to your artistic lifestyle, you can’t wait to please Mum with your newest drawing, hot off the oven that is your doodling pad! Finishing it is the hard part, you don’t know what Celestia actually looks like so you had to do some imprecision to get exactly what you want. Ah, at last, your magnum opus is complete and ready to show Mum so she may put it on the fridge for you and the air to see! Perhaps she might put your drawing in the shop, so other people may view your masterpiece and be amazed by the amount of effort you have inserted into this love baby your brain, this doodle pad, and crayons have made! Wait! You notice a crucial flaw to your artwork! You forgot to name the piece! You shouldn’t use your real name, your privacy is to be respected, but you want to be known so you use the next best thing: An alias! The Daughter => Enter Penname >Strange Tamer 69 This is not your penname. You are amused by the amount of immature creative humor that went into this surprisingly (now) insulting name, which is no creativity and all immature humor; you instead focus on actually giving your correct and valid penname that is not an immature explicit denotation of the word ‘strange’ and not in any way insulting to yourself. >Vivid Palette Your penname is Vivid Palette and you are nine years old, turning ten years old today! You have been living with Mum in such small cramped apartment buildings all your life and now that you’re beautifully hardworking mother have saved up to buy this house. You know that this is also a fabric making shop, because your mother seems to only be doing that instead of watching you create your epic characters! You hold your art piece in between your lips, careful not to slobber over the page, and you turn the shiny brass doorknob to your door and push open the door. You race out of your room and past the living room, your little wings fluttering all while doing so, until you reach the stairs where you halt your racing to calmly walk down the stairs. You trot briskly past the storage room, which is empty, to duck underneath the velvety red curtains. You are now behind the spindle, where your mother currently isn’t. You are too short to see over the counter so you circle it to reach the main part of the small little shop. There’s your mother, carrying boiled wool and cotton by the boxes in suspension with her magic. You are fascinated with this wizardry that Mum possessed, as you are merely a Pegasus, but your mother will be amazed even more when you show her your latest creation! Your wings flutter like a dog’s tail as you near close to her, you are literally frothing excitement through your expressions. As soon as you think you’re within Mum’s vision, you sit on your haunches and present the picture. You are absolutely, positively, one hundred and twenty percent sure that will be amazed at your hard work and drop literally everything she is doing to be amazed with your artwork and you! You hold your artwork between your hooves, gripping each side of the picture, and grinned expectantly; you were patiently waiting for her response She trudges right past you. Nnnnhhh, you are a little annoyed at Mum for ignoring you right now as you present your best work yet! Maybe she didn’t notice this sheer awesomeness that resides in your picture, but then there’s no way she couldn’t have! Maybe she just didn’t see you, you ARE a rather short filly. You are not going to let this prevent you from being showered in praises again! You are filled with determination as you bite down on your (masterfully crafted) work and quickly dart in front of Mum, where she cannot avoid (or be ignorant of) such divine art any longer! Mum looks down at you with an exasperated look, it almost drops you off of your confident metaphorical pedestal. Almost. “Look, Mum, look!” You beam at your mother but Mum does not look amused, or even looking at your drawing at all. “Cool,” Mum says as she dismisses you by enveloping you with her ticklish magical aura and scooting you to the side, she then shambles past you. She slowly heaves the boxes down next to the spindle as she takes a seat next to it. “Go play, upstairs preferably. Mommy is very busy.” She didn’t even look at it and you are very unsatisfied with the results of You grit your teeth in annoyance, you will not be cheated out of your hard work this easily! More importantly, you will please mother and raise her spirits with this masterpiece, even if it kills you! Insistently, you flutter your wings as you take a seat next to her chair. This action of insistence causes her right ear to twitch and flicker a bit. “.̸.̷.̸.̶.̸,” warned Mum, “Go upstairs, now, I am very busy…” “But I made you a drawing!” You insisted, accidentally cutting off Mum – which only further ignited a flame that your Mum’s purplish-magenta eyes held in indignation and probable fury. You try to explain the importance of this picture of this picture and its priority over your mother’s slave labor. “You see, it’s my masterpiece! My hardest work yet! My Pony Lisa, it’s—” You were interrupted by your incensed mother. “You have to be kidding me!” Mum stood up from her spindle chair, towering over you in a threatening way. “Do you have any idea of how much money we owe to those rich flank-hole posers in Canterlot to afford a shop like this!? Do you have any thought outside of your little bubble!?” You back away, bumping over a pile of spun red wool. Your eyes widening like saucers, you have never seen this side of Mum and you don’t like it one bit. You feel your ears flip down and press flatly to your skull. “I am up to HERE in this mess, and every single time I finally have enough – THEY RAISE THE INTEREST RATES!” Your mother lights up her horn and aggressively takes your paper away from your hooves before you have a chance to defend your precious. “I can’t afford a lawyer, so I have to work this out by myself! “No—Mum…” “NO!? – you want to waste the precious time I have, the time I can be using to do my job and dig us out of this hole, with pictures of flowers and suns – like this bloody thing?!” Your drawing, along with your emotions, is now crumbled within the magical grips of your mother’s blue-grey aura. Mum then throws it in your chest. You stumble onto your haunches as you didn’t catch it, the paper’s been thrown with a bit of force behind it. “I can’t afford supper for me tonight, because of your constant begging for attention! Since you want to waste my time trying to pay for your dessert – there won’t be any dessert for you for a month. Go upstairs!” But that’s not fair! You weren’t trying to take food or bits out of her mouth! You just wanted to show her a drawing! You try to argue the severity of the punishment but that notion is struck down with physical contact of the back of Mum’s left hoof to your cheek. It wasn’t hard, not enough force to harm or leave a mark, but it was enough to sting to sufficiently tell you to shut your mouth. As soon as your mother realized what she had done, you are already trotting into the back. Reader => Be The Mother. You are now The Mother. You are writing a letter to Ponyville’s representative to see about having help reducing some of your debts to the banks. You need to write your name on the letter. The Mother => Enter Name >Cobalt Fabric Your name is Cobalt Fabric and you are a hard working pony trying to provide for you and your daughter. Being a single mother is very hard work and you must work even harder to keep yourself and your daughter’s finances afloat. Before you can float, you must first stop sinking to the bottom of your debts to the bank and those rich pompous jerks who prey on small business owners such as yourself. All in all, you are stressed to kingdom come and back. You don’t think you’ve slept or ate anything in two – or more – days. This has deteriorated your mental health and has made you more receptacle to acting out of character. This neglect has benefited your financial situation a little bit, one of your many invest… no… loan sharks has been paid, interest and all, but the rest of the loaners keep hiking up their interest rates each week you work to pay such interest! You owe more in interest rates than you do the original amount borrowed! The debt keeps rising the more you spend time working to pay off the bloody debt! You have lashed out your daughter for wasting your precious time to show you her childish drawing of chicken scratch in the shape of an alicorn with an impossible, eye bleeding color scheme. In the heat of the moment, you crushed her drawing in your magical vice grip and sent her on her way, she was punished for wasting your time and back-talking. You did not mean to strike her, it just happened like reflex. Besides, what could be so bloody great in this piece in regards to all of the suns and flowers she drew for you? What made this so important that she prioritized it above, all else, you working to keep the roof over her ungrateful head and food in that stomach? You pick up the piece and unscramble it, the creases made it almost impossible to look at comfortably. You turn it around to see writing, her writing. A letter directed at you. It was also dated with a familiar date. That date is today. Eight, now nine, years ago, today, you found a starving filly weeping in the streets of Canterlot. It’s her birthday. Reader => Be The Daughter. You are now The Daughter, who is sulking her way upstairs without your magnum opus and your metaphorical heart. that was your masterpiece in your grasp and now it's rubbish on the floor of the shop for literally none to see. You ascend the stairs, dragging your hooves all the way upstairs. You feel scorned, disgraced, but more importantly: you feel disappointed in yourself for taking up Mum’s time. You are guilty because you’re at fault for Mum being stressed out. Your face, especially the upper part of your right cheek, is strained as they hold back the waterworks. Your chest is heavy, your heart is crushed, and your confidence is pretty much gone. You think nasty, negative thoughts about the picture and all the other pictures you have drawn. You are selfish for wanting to take up mother’s time like that, all for the sake of validation and praise! Selfish, selfish, selfish! How dare you become so spoiled, intoxicated in such pride, have you lost all the cents in your pocket or do you need them knocked into you?! You reach the living room and leap onto the sofa, pressing your face into the old, worn out sofa. You wet the sofa with your face, you didn’t even feel the on-barrage of salty and burning tears that stains your face and matted up the fur on your face. Continuously face-hogging and soaking the seat with your bodily salt eye water for ten whole minutes, you run out of tears to constantly leak out of your face holes. You get off the couch to walk to your room, you feel numb and voided in the head, yet so many thoughts gurgle itself in your head. The Daughter => Ingress into Your Room and Vent Through Art. You enter your room and you sit on the floor, you pick up your sketchbook and decide the best place to express yourself is to draw properly on the study in the corner of your bed until your hoof falls right off the joint. The Daughter => Evince your Inner Struggle and Misunderstanding by Mum by Using Music. You are not the sufficient age to feel like Mum doesn’t understand that this is the real you, nor are you the correct age to blast Panic!cal Romance as loud as your nonexistent speakers will allow you too. That, and you don’t even know what Panic!cal Romance is. You sit at your study and place your sketchbook on the study, you disregard the crayons for pencils. You don’t feel colorful right about now, nor do you feel like you can express yourself sufficiently using mere stupid colors. Mum don’t deserve color. The clock strikes twelve o’clock PM. Reader => Egress Rejected Reality and Forget Any of it Happened. You are no longer The Daughter and now you exist within the blurred line of irrelevant perspectives. What is and isn’t real life is undisguisable between these two realities and pondering the meaning of either is pointless and will lead to more headaches than answers. What is a fantasy when reality is either nonexistent or tantamount to fantasy, is the fantasy rendered meaningless? Fantasy is not all too different from reality. No matter how convivial, quixotic, and alluring it is. Something that is considered to be nonsensical and unworkable is identic to the pragmatic and reasonable. Let that soak in, dear Reader, that your understanding of ‘real’ may or may not be ‘fake’ and you’ll never know the difference between the two. You can think of the fragile idea of what reality really is sort of like a deity, a god if you will. You can believe that a monotheistic deity or that polytheistic deities exist, the religion is truly irrelevant. Either you believe in it or you don’t or you just don’t know, either way, you cannot find out and the truth is there will never be any way to know. Dreams are realities and there is no way to disprove this infallible thought because none of us can know what I am currently seeing is the same thing as the person next to me is seeing just as I can’t know what you are currently seeing is perceived as the same thing the person next to you sees. Perspectives are irrelevant because even the most intelligent species has a large margin of error, because we only determine what is real and what is fake by what we see on a consistent basis. Here’s another shocker: you are going to die. No, I do not mean that you are going to perish in the story – that’s impossible as you are not a character – but you will die just as I will and the rest of all that lives. Every motion eventually slows, everything that is hot will eventually become cold, and everything that lives will inevitably die. There is no realistic means of immortality and the romance behind such a reachy feat is an oversaturated nonsense. Try to imagine, no longer existing and the world carries on without you. What will you see? Blackness? Whiteness? Both answers are impossible as there is no you to recognize such colors or process the information in your deceased brain, so what will there be? You may never really know, to know the unknowable. Our brains are hardwired to come up with logical and reasonable solutions that will eventually comfort and ease our minds with the answer. But, there is no answer that logically explains what happens when Death eventually does come to take you from this world. Does this render life meaningless, as death is slowly approaching all of us at breakneck speed, or does this render death meaningless as life is spent doing all you can to avoid such? Even if you die, you are part of the world as you decompose and become nutrients for the ground to soak up. Death is beneficial to society and the world just as living is. Death is as important as life. If you are alive, it was inevitable that you were once not. If somebody is dead, it was inevitable that you were once not. Almost so that the difference and similarities between the two starts blurring a little bit. I promise you, dear reader, that these two topics of fantasy, reality, life, and death are important to understanding why there is two ‘realities’ in play when regarding Cobalt Fabric and The Perfect Pony. Recognize that I have separated them in the previous statement, I have separated The Mother and The Perfect Pony using one or two lines of text. The Mother is Cobalt Fabric Cobalt Fabric is The Mother Cobalt Fabric is The Perfect Pony The Perfect Pony is Cobalt Fabric What is the difference between Cobalt Fabric and The Perfect Pony? Is it that one is real and the other is a mere fantasy? What about The Mother and The Perfect Pony, Cobalt Fabric surely cannot be both at the same time? Here’s a better question, what is the difference between the reasonable real and the quixotic fantasy to those with a questionable psyche? The creation of realities and those twisted enough to perceive them are always different. Even in the sanest person, they always will see two flowers differently. One may be beautiful and the other is a weltered mess, but the difference between the two lies within the perception. Not one person sees the same world as the person next to you – they are lying if they say otherwise, because not one person thinks exactly the same way as you. Reader => Ingress in ‘Faux’ Reality You have entered the ‘faux’ reality, whether or not this reality is the ‘fake’ reality is irrelevant at this point because the difference between the two are mere words and the definition of perception, along with the reliability of narrators and/or/nor characters’ psyche. The reason these reality is labeled is because the lines of scrimmage don’t exist between these two means of perception. In fact, calling these two things ‘reality’ is incorrect on its own and calling one of them ‘fake’ and the other ‘real’ or ‘rejected’ is all for the means of context. In the world of a madman, there is no context nor is there the lines of scrimmage that is the separation of dreams and realities. As said previously, dreams are realities. Life and death are counter-actives of its own ironic twists. Reader => Retcon the Events So Far and Be The Perfect Pony. You are now the most perfect pony in existence. If you are a male, now you are now a female, the most perfect pony in existence. If you were female, then you stay a female—the most perfect pony in existence. If you refuse to classify yourself as either male or female, which there is nothing wrong with doing, you are now female—the most perfect pony in existence. You are loved by most, everything and everyone notices your existence as a cherished member of society. What is the name of this modest, cherished member of society – The Perfect Pony? The Perfect Pony => Enter Name > Cobalt Fabric Your name is Cobalt Fabric and your primary job is to make sheets of fabric from cotton and wool from shaved sheep and goats to sell to your best of business partners, and possible friend, Rarity. You're an absolute expert at this, although you’d have to admit there has been many accidents in the past but you learned from them, those blasted mistakes! Although you are the not best at making sheets of fabric, you are experience in the ancient earth pony arts of mining. Hence the 'Cobalt' in your name. You far from the richest person in Equestria, from your unlucky trips to and from the mines! There are no stolen goods in your possession, you're a decent Samaritan! Loved by some and noticed by all – a great model for all to aspire to be! Flawed, yes, but graceful in everything you do and accomplish. Even the Element of Magic herself has praised you for your accomplishments, you are jealous of her ability to bend the weaves of magic for you are a unicorn just like her... No, that's not correct. You're an alicorn... right? You don't know. But you do know. How can you not know?! You're The Perfect Pony for Goddess sake! But a part of you doubts. No, a part of you does not doubt! You are conflicted. You can never be conflicted because you are The Perfect Pony You are not The Perfect Pony You are The Perfect Pony You cannot be The Perfect Pony You ARE The Perfect Pony How can you be the The Perfect Pony and doubt yourself so much! You, The Perfect Pony, doesn't doubt yourself! The Perfect Pony => Express your Conflictions There is nothing to be conflicted about, because you are The Perfect Pony The Perfect Pony => Be Assured. You are already assured because you are The Perfect Pony The Perfect Pony => Wake Up You are not asleep. The Perfect Pony => Wake Up You were never asleep. The Perfect Pony => Wake Up You can't be asleep. The Perfect Pony => Wake Up You are not asleep! The Perfect Pony => Be The Perfect Pony You don't know what The Perfect Pony is.