Adagio sat at a small round table outside of a bakery in Canterlot, eyes closed and fingers tapping furiously to an unheard tempo. Her expression only betraying her intense focus on the notes of her violent symphony.
“Dagi!” came the shrill cry of Adagio’s sister right in her ears. “Your break is up, Mr. Joe wants you to come back in and help on register.” Adagio hadn’t heard her sister come outside, she had been so focused on her song.
The final keys of the invisible keyboard were struck as Adagio opened her eyes. “Okay, Sonata…” she sighed, “are you on break or were you just sent to fetch me?” she asked as she stood up discarding a cup and napkin that had held her coffee and bagel at the start of her break.
“I can’t take a break yet,” Sonata, responded. “Mr. Joe said I need to make several more batches of glazed sandwiches and start on muffins and cupcakes before he can move back and take over for me. He expects a busy lunch rush.” As Sonata finished she turned and pranced back to work. Even without their siren magic Adagio still had an air of command about her, and Sonata still looked to her for guidance.
After the Battle of the Bands, the three sirens-turned-human panicked, without their pendants they would no longer be able to feed on negative emotional energy. They thought they would starve, and while not entirely helpless they had no identification, which meant they couldn’t technically work. With no way to pay rent and no magic to manipulate the landlord they started to panic.
The sirens had soon learned that even if they couldn’t feed of negative energy, they could in fact eat regular food to ease their hunger. They were not entirely sure, but figured with that revelation that they were just regular humans without their pendants. Even though they could eat food they still didn’t have money.
Fortunately they wandered into Mr. Joe’s place, it was a donut shop then, he had since expanded to compete with that bakery across town by CHS. Joe had overheard the girls arguing about losing their home, and offered them a job, to help. They all accepted and started to work immediately, as they couldn’t pay for what they had eaten that night.
Adagio had started out working counter while Sonata and Aria washed dishes. It had been about a month since then and Joe had made Sonata learn how to prepare almost everything they made, but she wasn’t allowed to decorate the cakes after the icing incident, and Adagio was his new shift manager. The previous one had quit the week before the girls had shown up, something about needing to practice piano. Aria was still washing dishes, since she had the least hours of the three she often took care of their house, cleaning and organizing the messes the girls made, and taking out the trash.
Joe had taken the girls to see a friend of his at an office supply store to get some identification, Adagio could not be a manager without this and he couldn’t approve any overtime for Sonata either. After that was taken care of he started to train Adagio in other parts of the shop, besides the front, to make management easier.
Adagio had made her way back into the shop. Once clocked in she put on her apron and visor, she didn’t like what the hat did to her hair.
“Hey, Joe I am back. Do you have the morning leftovers moved into the discount basket?” she yelled into the back. The shop was empty at the moment, though in twenty minutes or so it would be crawling with business people on break and some of the Crystal Prep students grabbing lunch off campus.
“Dagi, Welcome back! I haven’t done that yet, can you take care of it for me? I had to jump in back to help Sonata get ahead for the rush,” came a male voice from the back. Joe didn’t sound much older than the girls but he definitely looked the part as he came out from the back. His tall slender build made him look like a professional basketball player. His neatly trimmed goatee stood out as you could see his hair under the hat and the colors did not match, the goatee dark while his hair was sandy. His green eyes stood out against his skin that was several shades lighter than his hair almost yellow, but not quite.
As Adagio transferred the older confections to the discount baskets, she started to hum a tune, the fast paced tempo was just a small part of a larger song, but Adagio only cared about that small piece of the song.
Joe looked over at her as she worked away while humming the same few seconds of a song to herself, “I get pieces of songs stuck in my head too,” he smirked at her.
She paused, looking up at him, “What?” she asked, a slight blush on her cheeks that went overlooked. She had just added the last of the morning leftovers to the discount baskets, as he had commented. She focused on his face trying to figure out what he meant.
“I mean you have been humming the same few measures of music over and over again, I figured you had a piece of a song stuck in your head. Though I haven’t heard anything like that on the radio recently. I guess it could be pop, I don’t listen to pop music, and you girls probably listen to pop, except maybe Aria,” he rattled on oblivious to Adagio’s flustered expression as she realized what she had been humming. A certain autumn evening flashed through Adagio’s mind.
Adagio winced. She set the donuts that she had been sorting down and took a breath. As she calmed down she regained her composure. “S-sorry if I am being distracting,” she stammered. “I didn’t realize I had been humming. I will keep it down while I bring out the pastries for the display.” She turned and rushed into the back.
While Joe didn’t notice her blush, he did notice how quick she dodged the conversation. Wondering if he hit a nerve, he slid over to the discount basket and snagged a donut from that morning. Upon taking a bite he immediately ran to the trashcan and spit out what could not have ever been a donut with a loud, “Bleh!” After getting something to drink to wash away the deceivingly spicy pastry he ran to the kitchen, “better let me back here, one of Sonata’s made it into the batch up front. I need to check to make sure she is not getting her experiments mixed in again.”
“We should'a known better than to give YOU a chance,” the venom in the orange girl's words unmasked. “Sure 'nuff soon as you weasel your way in, you immediately try to break us up again.”
“But Applejack, I didn’t do it, I am not Anon-A-Miss,” the amber girl pleaded. Her hair was a mess, her flowing red and gold locks tangled, her eyes puffy and red. Her clothes looked wrinkled as if she hadn’t done laundry recently. Her leather jacket hung off her hiding how thin she had become over recent months, but the girl in front of her, Applejack, didn’t see all of this. She could only see the bacon haired girl as a snake. They brought her in, took care of her, protected her, and now after all they had done she was ready to turn around and bite them.
Another girl with porcelain white skin and fabulous purple hair spoke up, “Sunset, darling, you can not possibly think us this foolish. You said it yourself, that your phone has not left you, and the photos on the MyStable could not have come from anywhere else. We want to believe you, we really do, but the evidence to the otherwise is staggering.”
Sunset didn’t know what to do here, her friends were all gathered and telling her they wanted nothing more to do with her. Just as she had started to fit in at the school, just as people began to forget all the years she had terrorized the school, just as she had become happy, someone came in and began to cause chaos by leaking other students secrets on the social network site MyStable. The first secret was Applejack’s childhood nickname, piggly wiggly, that she had told her friends at a sleepover, the school ridiculed her, making pig noises at the girl. The group had brushed it off but after another sleepover some pictures that had been taken on Sunset’s phone had been leaked on the site. Pictures of her friends from the next sleepover wearing outfits from Rarity’s faux pas closet. They were outfits that the porcelain girl had regretted making. They had held a joke fashion show that Sunset had taken pictures of, the same pictures that the whole of the school was laughing at the next day. After those incidents the girls had put space between themselves and Sunset. After the first two incidents other students had their secrets leaked on the MyStable page and that had sealed the deal, the whole school had turned on her.
Leading up to now where they unceremoniously abandoned the girl in the hallway. Telling her they knew she was guilty and that they never should have given her a chance to be their friend after the fall formal.
“Girls, it wasn’t me.” Sunset was in tears, she had worked so hard to be a better person in the last few months, and this Anon-A-Miss had swept in and ruined it all. All her work, protecting the school during the Battle of the Bands, all the community service, and rebuilding the damage she had caused the school, none of it mattered. Her friends were turning on her, the whole of the school wanted her to pay for leaking their secrets on top of still holding her accountable as the villain that dominated the school at any means, no one would talk to her, and even the teachers showed no sympathy. “I-”
“NO! Sunset you don’t get to sit here and lie to us,” a yellow girl interrupted Sunset’s pleas. Her face stern, she was quaking as she held her ground against her former bully. “With everything you have done, you expect us to sit her and let you manipulate and abuse us? We won’t have anything more to do with your lies.”
“Yeah, you meanie secret stealer!” a pink, poofy girl added in.
Sunset collapsed to her knees, despite not actually being Anon-A-Miss she felt lower than even the fall formal. Her friends words cut deep. Her tears were freely flowing now as four sets of footsteps echoed down the hall away from her. Even Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie were deceived by the ruse. No one would believe her if even those two would not give her a chance. Sunset didn’t know what to do. She just sat there, confused and-
“Don’t try to fake it. If something was wrong, why didn’t you talk to us? This is just a scheme to break the rest of us up. You did it before, but it won’t work this time.” A blue skinned girl with polychromatic hair looked down on Sunset. “Look if you really didn’t do it then why not find a way to prove it?” the girl whispered in Sunsets ear, “I'm not certain it’s you, and if you prove it then the other girls will come around.” Standing up she turned around, “You won’t hurt us again Sunset Shimmer.” With that the girl turned and jogged to catch up with the other girls.
Sunset froze, the words from the normally blunt girl surprised her. If Rainbow Dash was giving her a chance then all Sunset needed to do was prove she wasn’t Anon-A-Miss. She still didn’t know what to do, but she now had an idea where to start. Sunset gathered herself, wiped her tears away, picked up her bag and stood up.
Only to be knocked back down with an aggressive shove.
Her eyes flew up as she scanned the crowd trying to figure out who knocked her down. It was near impossible the the crowds going to and from classes hid the would be perpetrator. Sunset dusted herself off and got back up. She only had a small bit of hope from Rainbow’s words, and everything was still pretty bleak. Pulling her jacket around herself she took off to her third class of the day.
Aria had vacuumed the floors, mopped the kitchen, dusted, and taken out the trash. Her days off were usually spent cleaning, or at least the mornings of those days. After all of that was out of the way, she usually headed to the store to pick up drinks and snacks, she liked shopping, it gave her time to get out like nothing was wrong. On her way out she checked the fridge and cabinets: They didn’t need drinks this week. Sonata had picked up some drink mix the previous week and kept mixing them pitchers of Joos-ade™, so they only needed snacks. Aria figured she would get herself a large container of trail mix, and Sonata would be happy with the stuff to make nachos. Adagio was a little harder to shop for since she never really seemed to like anything, Aria had tried getting her chips, crackers, rice cakes, pastries, cookies, even vegetables, but nothing seemed to impress Adagio.
The trip to the store would take a while, so she locked the door to their apartment as she left. The noon sun above causing the sidewalk to radiate heat, in contrast the chilly breeze kept her cool. These elements made for a comfortable day. She walked along in jeans and a hoodie, as she expected to be out for several hours and she knew it would cool off after the sun dropped below the horizon.
She was about a block from the store when her phone vibrated. At first she ignored it, but after her phone buzzed several more times in succession she decided to see what had set it off. In the notification bar the MyStable app marked twenty seven unread notifications, after opening the app she saw a picture of a school paper with a very low grade on it, shared by Anon-A-Miss. The other twenty six notifications were all comments, mostly aimed at the Rainboom front girl, Rainbow Dash, whose name was on the test. Aria had followed Anon-A-Miss in case there was something she could use from it against the Rainbooms, but with all of the account being publicly displayed it was all useless information. The comments about some of the CHS students did make her smile though, memories of the negativity they had conjured during the Battle of the Bands passing through her thoughts, she took pleasure in the cold feeling that came over her with the memory. Though she could no longer feed on that negativity, it made her feel powerful to know that the Dazzlings could cause that. Of course that was while they had their pendants, which they didn’t, since the Rainbooms shattered them.
Her mood now soured after the completion of that train of thought led her to put her phone away and finish her trip to the store, a scowl on her face. Between her arguments with Sonata and the sting from the Battle of the Bands, she was used to being upset.
She quickly made her way to the back of the store after grabbing a hand basket by the door. Tossing in a large bag of trail mix she proceeded over to the aisle with chips to get some restaurant tortilla chips for Sonata’s nachos, she paused to think if they had lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. She knew she had bought cheese last week, but wasn’t sure if they had the vegetables, she grabbed a bag of chips, and circled around to the next aisle. After browsing all the colorful boxes she settled on two bags of bacon crisps for Adagio. After that she left the snack food section of the store to go and get the vegetables for the nachos before checking out.
Aria ended up circling the store a couple times deciding if they needed anything else, with all of them working at Joe’s place they brought back enough to have actual meals from the leftovers everyday, so they didn’t really need much. Satisfied with her basket she checked out and left the store.
On her way back she stopped by Joe’s to get a drink, and let the other two girls know what she got them on her outing today. She dropped the vegetables in a fridge and put the bags in a shelf in back and sat at the outdoor table Adagio had used on her break, while drinking her FizziePop™ Twisted Berry flavor soda pop. She watched as the afternoon sky slowly changed from hues of blue and white to the evening reds and oranges, the cool afternoon breeze chilled, and streetlights started to light up. When she was ready to go she threw the glass bottle in the trash and turned to go back in for the groceries, but stopped when she caught sight of a familiar girl across the street.
Sunset Shimmer walked along looking quite dejected, a detail that Aria did not miss. Curious as to why the Rainboom was shuffling along seemingly oblivious to the world around her Aria decided to follow her.
As Aria followed Sunset, the early winter winds howled through the streets of Canterlot.