‘Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep…’
Sunset Shimmer’s eyes drifted open and focused to the dim light of her new surroundings as she found herself staring at a ceiling that was unfamiliar just a bit ago, but now was one she had previously made an acquaintance with. She let out a soft groan and turned her head one way then the other, noting she had an IV line hooked up to her left arm, complete with a blood pack and fluids. Additionally, her already blood-stained shirt had been removed, as well as her leather jacket. Only a simple black bra offered her some form of upper-body modesty. Attached to her chest were a couple of wires feeding information to a monitor which beeped steadily and softly as a series of different colored lines sloped, spiked, and leveled off rhythmically.
“Oh, good! You’re awake,” a voice called out, a woman who, much like the ceiling, was stranger at the beginning of the day but quickly becoming a common fixture of Sunset’s latest issue.
“Yes, thanks,” Sunset said as she looked around the room a bit more and noted her blood-soaked shirt and coat hung up on a coat hanger. She took another moment to look down at her chest and arm. “IS this all really necessary?”
Nurse Redheart chuckled. “Well, you did lose quite a bit of blood! But don’t worry, I found most of it!”
Sunset looked up at the blood bag hanging above her in concern.
“Haha! Sorry! Little medical humor there. That bag is fresh.”
Sunset raised an eyebrow. “How fresh?”
“Don’t worry!” Redheart soothed. “I always have fresh blood on hand in case of motocross mishaps on the school’s track, or like… if there’s a roller derby home game!”
The beeping of the monitor suddenly went erratic for a moment then settled down as Sunset stared at Redheart. “Wait… what?! How could the school endorse an event where the chances of teenagers getting injured horribly is likely?! Possibly a given?!” Her face tightened. “Furthermore, how are you allowed to keep a supply of blood on hand, and like--” Sunset sat up slightly and motioned around her. “--have all this medical equipment?!”
Redheart just shrugged while maintaining her smile. “Why does our school just let anyone in without checking for ID or if they have legal guardians? How is it that one girl is the head of every athletic club at school? Why does the school have enough scientific equipment to make an actual research lab green with envy? Why is the home ec room better equipped than the cafeteria, or most professional kitchens for that matter?”
“All of this is just exacerbating my condition, you know!” Sunset exclaimed as the monitor began to beep erratically.
“Whoa! Calm down!” Redheart said, her smile finally dropping. “The Machine that goes ‘beep’ is all over the place!”
Sunset grit her teeth as the beeps refused to get back in place. “You mean the ‘heart monitor’?!”
Redheart shrugged. “I dunno… Maybe? I’m not a doctor.”
Sunset’s face turned red as her head began to shake in frustration.
Redheart leaned forward and put up a hand as if blocking her voice from some unseen party in the room. “Plus, it’s actually called a ‘Cardiac Telemetry Monitor’,” she informed with a smile that had just a dash of smug added to it. “Share that with your friends. It’ll impress them.”
The beeping from the monitor suddenly slowed down to a somewhat worrying pace. “I have no friends…” Sunset said dejectedly.
Redheart pursed her lips in confusion. “I thought you kinda saved the school? Maybe planet? I mean, I know you have a checkered past from the literally hundreds of people that have shown up here from stress seizures from your years of terrorizing the student body and faculty plus all the injuries caused when you went all demon and destroyed the school entrance.” A borderline wistful look came over Redheart as her lips pulled up ever so slightly. “So many blood packs used that day…”
The rhythmic beeping and slopes and valleys of the lines ceased, the former replaced by one solid tone and the latter by completely straight lines. Redheart looked over at Sunset who was still lying on her back but starting up at the ceiling with cold, listless eyes.
Scowl on her face, Nurse Redheart walked over to Sunset and slapped at her chest a few times causing the rhythmic beeps and changing lines to resume. “Dang faulty electrodes!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t deserve friends…” Sunset mumbled softly to herself. “I’m a monster…”
“You WERE a monster!” Redheart corrected. “Now you’re just a normal teenager! Uh… mostly...”
“A normal teenager who apparently makes MyStable pages in her sleep to embarrass her friends with several giant arrows pointing back to me because my subconscious doesn’t think I should be happy!”
Redheart’s eyes tightened and she tapped at her cheek slightly. “Erm, in my professional medical opinion, that sounds completely bonkers.”
“I thought so, too, at first!” Sunset said. “But the Anon-a-Miss MyStable page practically has my name all over it!” Sunset pointed to her jacket. “Go check my phone!”
Quizzical expression on her face, Redheart walked over to the jacket and checked the pockets briefly where she found a rectangular smartphone in the inside pocket. She pressed a button on it and a warm glow from the phone lit up her white face. “Wow… there’s no password or anything on this…” Redheart commented. “I mean… I guess that would be inconvenient, but in my professional medical opinion, I’d think a girl who ticked off the entire school over the course of a few years through blackmail and cyber-bullying would have thought to at least think to put a PIN number to unlock her phone…”
“I… SHUT UP, alright!” Sunset replied irritably as the beeping occurrences increased slightly. “I would have but, uh… reasons…” she said, mumbling out the last word as she clearly ran out of steam.
Redheart tapped at the screen a few times causing the screen to flicker, her forehead knit to the point where he eyebrows formed a unibrow. “Okay, yikes… I thought you were over exaggerating the ‘arrows pointing back at you’, but whoever made this clearly just applied some basic photo filters to pictures of you and put them up!”
“I knooooooow!” Sunset whined. “I thought my subconscious would be a lot smarter than this! I mean, I’ve been saying I could do things better in my sleep all this time, to make people feel bad, you know? But, no! Apparently, I’m incredibly stupid in my sleep!”
Redheart raised an eyebrow. “Okay, it actually sounds crazier the more times you try to explain this as you uploading pictures, editing photos, and creating a site to punish yourself in some sort of fugue state… medically speaking.”
“Well, Applejack told me the story and the pictures were from my phone!” Sunset insisted. “And I kept complete track of it the entire time, provided you discount the solid nine hours of near-comatose sleep I had due to sleep deprivation and the fact that mornings suck in general! Who else could it be?!”
“I’m no detective outside the medical field, but if you didn’t do it, then anyone who could have gotten to your phone while you slept is a suspect.”
Sunset sighed. “But everyone at the school pretty much adores those five! Even me, now… Especially me, now!” Sunset shook her head. “Who’d want them to suffer so much?!”
“Maybe they weren’t the target? I mean… out of the girls impacted by this only one is lying in on a bed with blood and fluids being fed into their body…” A small, dark smile appeared on Nurse Redheart’s face. “So faaar…” she cooed to herself.
“Okay… I see your point,” Sunset said, “but who could I have possibly wronged in the past to warrant this sort of attack?”
“... You’re joking, right?”
“Erm… okay… I guess all five girls would have a potential motive if they were willing to suffer some humiliation if it meant getting back at me…”
Redheart smiled. “Now you’re thinking clearly.”
“Not to mention the entire school, service industry workers I’ve yelled at, my landlord, my mailperson, other people’s mailpersons… really anypersons whose job it’s been to deliver me packages over the last three years. The mayor, the mayor’s assistant, anyone whose staffed or even attended the local state fair the last few years, direct family of everyone I mentioned so far, extended family of everyone I mentioned so far, … uh… I’m sure there’s more.”
Redhearts smile dropped. “Okay, now I think you’ve muddied the waters just a tad…”
Sunset tapped at her left temple. “Right, right… not all of those people would have had access to my phone…” Her lips and face tightened thoughtfully. “Hmmm… there’s a missing piece here, but I’m just not seeing it… Somehow I just can’t put it all together…”
“Oh! I got it!” Nurse Redheart exclaimed. “You need more blood to think clearer!”
Sunset looked up at the still mostly full blood bag above her. “I uh…” she pointed at the bag. “I still have plenty!”
Smile on her face, Nurse Redheart nodded. “Sure! You’re getting blood into THAT arm, but you still have another perfectly good arm I could hook an IV too.”
“Uh… pass…” Sunset said with a concerned expression on her face.
“Aww…” Redheart said dejectedly. “But if I don’t use up the blood it’ll just go to waste as extra protein in the school cafeteria!”
Some color drained from Sunset’s face as the monitor skipped a few beats. “What…?”
Redheart made finger guns at Sunset. “Joking!”
Sunset let out a groan. “While I appreciate the levity—”
“I sense sarcasm.”
“—Your senses serve you well!” Sunset continued. “I still need to work out how to solve this whole Anon-a-Miss thing which is pretty much ruining my life.”
“Uh…” Redheart scratched the back of her head behind the big pink bun of her hair for a moment. “Right, sorry, but I’m not really qualified to give advice in that department…” She raised a palm in a half-shrug and glanced upwards. “I mean, I’m not really qualified to give a lot of the medical advice I do and that rarely stops me, but still…” Redheart leaned forward and looked at Sunset with a serious expression. “Maybe you can talk to the school’s guidance counselor?”
Laying on a black leather long reclining chair and staring up at the ceiling, Flash Sentry let out another in a long series of forlorn sighs as he stared up at the ceiling. “And it’s like… She just seems so far out of my league! Like, out of my planet, even… literally… No really… she literally lives off-planet. But also, like… There’s a portal and maybe one of us could just use it? I’m just not sure if me, a high school student, could just, you know… pop over to a different world. Normally, I have no trouble with girls and… you’re a great listener by the way… anyhow, I play the guitar, I have a cool car… but this girl is, like, a princess… literally. So that doesn’t matter and just… How do I even engage here…” Flash turned his head to his right. “You, know?”
Blank expression on her face, a grey-skinned woman with purple hair sat motionless for a second, only the ever so slight heaving of her chest under her slate blue frock betrayed she wasn’t a lifelike statue of some sort. Finally, she slowly raised her open hand where a rock about the size of her palm and spoke in an even monotone, “Boulder says you should get that bitch a transparent crystal of tetrahedrally bonded carbon atoms in a covalent network lattice. Bitches love transparent crystals of tetrahedrally bonded carbon atoms in a covalent network lattice.”
“Ugh…” Sunset exclaimed. “Rock-hard pass!”
Redheart shrugged. “Well, uh… I know you said you have no family, but maybe there’s someone else you can talk this out with? Maybe, like… I don’t know… some person who’s maybe good at dealing with social misunderstandings and mending them before things get completely out of control?” She added with a hopeful smile.
Sunset tapped at her chin thoughtfully. “Huh… Nope… No one is coming to mind.”
“Well, shoot…” Redheart replied. “I guess just try to lay low for a while…”
Sunset suddenly sat up, thrusting a forefinger up which pierced the air in an ‘I got it!’ fashion. “Ooooor, I can run around blaming others for this mess without a shred of hard evidence or even motive to their actions!” Smiling demonically to herself, Sunset wrung her hands together. “Because that’s what happened to me!” she added darkly.
“That sounds like the opposite of a good idea,” quipped Redheart, “but you do you, girl.”
Sunset quickly ripped off the leads on her chest and pulled out the needle in her arm.
“No, no, that’s fine,” Redheart said with a touch of irritation, “it’s not like there’s a medical professional in here that could do that without risking damage to important blood vessels.”
Clearly having built up her own momentum, Sunset threw on her bloody shirt and jacket.
“Oh, good yes… Just put back on the shirt caked in your filthy, dried blood,” Redheart said sarcastically. “That’s hygienic.”
Sunset pumped a fist into the air. “Stupidity got me into this mess, and it’ll assuredly get me out!”
Redheart raised an eyebrow. “Ever hear the expression ‘two wrongs don’t make a right?’”
“No!” Sunset replied cheerfully as she grabbed the handle to the office. She pulled it open and ran out. “Thanks for all the advice, Nurse Redheart!”
Redheart waved and shouted after Sunset, “I also kept you alive and you’re following literally none of my advice, but okaaaay!” Sighing, Redheart slumped her shoulders and let both her hands and head hang down dejectedly. “I’m going to need more blood…” she said, punctuating her resigned statement with a small chuckle and a scythe-like smile.
~*-Days Pass…and the entire school body of Canterlot High has nothing better to do than pick on five students-*~
“Ugggghhhh!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed as she slumped down to the ground, and practically buried her face in her electric guitar. “Sorry, guys… just not feeling it.”
A somewhat discordant sound of drums, bass, keyboard, and tambourine ceased as a series of murmurs came up in agreement.
“I understand,” Fluttershy said as she slumped against the wall of the band room and held her tambourine against her lap. “If only we knew someone who was good at solving social problems like this!”
“Gee, I know, right!” Pinkie said from behind her drum set. “I mean… but that’d be like finding a magical unicorn that also had wings!”
Sitting down one of the tiers of the band room, Applejack added her sigh to the dejected atmosphere in the room. “Face it, girls, there ain’t anyone or anything like that and there never will be.”
A white-skinned woman with long, cascading purple hair nodded, her pink wide-brimmed hat and red-framed sunglasses joining her fashionable pink trench coat that left her knee-high purple boots visible perfectly disguising her identity. “ I know, dear,” Girl-Incognito-Not-Rarity replied, “and even if such a person or creature existed, it’s not like we could just walk through a magical portal that’s literally always open and ask for his or her…. most likely her, help.”
Glaring at the bandroom wall, Rainbow Dash motioned out into open air. “Just… she got ahold of my paper on buoyancy and posted it for the world to see!” She shook her head. “Like… She must have crazy ninja skills or something to get past me and get ahold of my bag, take out the report, snap a photo, and then put it back without me noticing! Plus, now she’s attacking other people at school with secrets she’s finding! You’d think everyone would know better to tell Sunset Shimmer anything after all these years and now this Anon-a-Miss thing, but it’s like they’re spilling the beans to her non-stop! Almost like they think she’s a different person and hasn’t, clearly, just put up a website to share secrets!”
Fluttershy’s lips pursed into a frown. “And I heard the new secrets are coming out so fast. Sometimes minutes apart, from students who are clear across school from each other!”
“And she keeps on addin’ details to this Piggly-wiggly story!” Applejack said, also shaking her head. “It’s bad enough she shared everything Ah mentioned at the slumber party, but now she’s adding details that only my family would know about! It’s jus’ cruel, Ah tell ya what!”
“It’s positively ghastly!” Most-CLEARLY-Another-Fashionable-Girl-Besides-Rarity exclaimed as she stood in front of her keyboard, “Why, she even revealed my deepest, darkest secret! A secret so dark and terrible that I never even told you girls, let alone Sunset Shimmer!”
Pinkie spoke up, “I heard she caused Mr. Doodle’s cancer and even pushed him into a secret double life of crime!”
Everyone turned and stared at Pinkie.
“Er… I don’t think that’s very likely,” Fluttershy said.
“Which part?” Pinkie asked with a smile.
Applejack threw her hands in the air. “Look, no one is suggesting something silly like Sunset Shimmer caused cancer! Jus’ that she apparently has the ability to enter and exit places completely unnoticed and maybe be in multiple places at once!”
“Oh!” Rainbow Dash spoke up. “Also, and maybe read minds!”
Pinkie shrugged at this last suggestion. “Naaawwww… give it a couple movies.”
“Well, she’s a fiend, for certain!” Totes-Magotes-Not-Rarity stressed. “I can’t believe she’d quite literally air my dirty laundry out for everyone at school to see like that!”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Is it the polka-dots and the stripes thing?”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” moaned Rarity-But-Totally-Not-Rarity-Because-Rarity-Doesn’t-Wear-Sunglasses-Inside-You-See.
Applejack sighed. “Not that it’s a competition, Rarity, but that’s pretty minor.”
“Yeah!” Rainbow Dash agreed. “Because if it was a competition, I’d totally be winning!”
“What?!” Applejack protested. “Ah’ve been getting cartoon drawings of pigs and notes that say ‘Piggly-Wiggly’ all week! Ah mean, it’s clear Ah’ve been getting it longer and harder than the rest of ya!”
“Erm… phrasing,” Fluttershy said as she sat on the floor and hugged her knees.
Sitting at her drum set, Pinkie looked over at her fellow percussionist, “What’s she done to you Fluttershy?”
Fluttershy sighed. “Well, she’s still showing pictures and movies of me at our slumber parties making fun of me… Nothing new yet… She seems to be mostly focusing on you three for some reason,” she said as she looked over Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Applejack.
The three girls seemed to consider this for a moment.
“Huh…” Applejack uttered. She looked over at Pinkie. “Has she singled you out at all, Pinkie?”
“Oh me?” Pinkie replied cheerfully. “Oh, no. She actually blocked me because I kept on submitting embarrassing stories for myself!”
The other four girls all exchanged confused looks.
Pinkie just giggled. “Like the time I flooded the cafeteria with cookie dough! Or the time I fired off a party cannon at school and the police were called! Or the time I ate sooo much of Mr. Doodle’s secret blue sugar I took off my clothes and stre—”
“We GET it, Pinkie!” Rainbow Dash said. “But we all agreed it HAS to be Sunset and only Sunset, right? I mean… she wasn’t in any of the embarrassing pictures and they had to be from her phone!” Rainbow Dash let out a dismissive gust of air. “Open and shut case, am I right?!”
“Uh-huh!” There of the other four girls said in agreement.
“Well…” Pinkie began.
Rainbow Dash rose her fingertips to her head in exasperation. “Not this again…
“I just think we haven’t explored other options!” Pinkie said. “I mean… it could have been a sneaky wolf-man! Or the state of New Mexico! Or even an evil supervillain dentist! Or maybe a ninja! Or even a Mummy!” Pinkie glanced upwards for a moment. “Or maybe something from SPACE! OR a devil even! Ooo! Ooo! Space devil!”
Rarity-Someone-Finally-Said-Her-Name-Up-There-So-I’m-Finally-Done-With-This-Joke let out a heavy sigh. “Okay, but discounting the supernatural, aliens, entire states, or crazed medical professionals, we’re all in agreement that is has to be Sunset, right?”
“Oh my, yes,” Fluttershy looked at her phone. “I mean, who else could this avatar of a mean girl with long, red-colored hair, orange skin, wearing a leather jacket be?”
Pinkie threw a hand up in the air as she thumbed her phone with the other. “It’s like she’s not even trying at all! Hehehe… Now, Ms. Harshwhinny is telling Sunset Shimmer how unprofessional this is on the page! Oh! And Sunset is replying that ‘It’s not me! And it’s unprofessional to follow a gossipy MyStable page! Hah! NOW Ms. Harshwhinny is getting really mad and the two are just spamming ‘Unprofessional’ at each other!”
Rarity grabbed the frames of her sunglasses and lowered them to look at Pinkie. “Pinkie, why are you MyStable friends with that horrible Anon-a-Miss?!”
“I’m friends with everyone, d’uh!” Pinkie replied without looking up from her page. “Plus, like… Anon-a-Miss has over 6,000 friends! That means more people than the entire school and the family members of people from the school are interested in her petty attacks on us! Ooo! Ooo! Now Sunset Shimmer as Anon-a-Miss is responding to Sunset Shimmer as herself and Harshwhinny to ‘Stop spamming!’ and ‘Crud! I’m going to give the whole thing away!’ Also, ‘How do I delete comments, guys?!’ And now, ‘Scootaloo! Stop Typing everything you’re saying!’. Ooo! Ooo! And now ‘Stop typing what I’M saying!’”
“Huh…” Fluttershy uttered. “Well that sounds… confusing.”
Rainbow Dash gasped. “What! OF COURSE!”
All the girls turned to Rainbow Dash expectantly.
“Of course, what?” Applejack asked.
“Sunset must have concocted this whole scenario to throw us off the trail which she also cleverly made super obvious in an attempt to defer suspicion to herself!”
Her face still glued to her phone, Pinkie giggled more, “and now Sunset Shimmer is accusing Ms. Harshwinny of being the real Anon-A-Miss while her typing becomes increasingly erratic and typo-heavy!”
Rarity narrowed her eyes. “She’s more clever than we even thought… to think she had has going with that ‘absolutely no motive for doing this’ talk.”
Pinkie put her phone away and giggled. “Yep! We sure figured that one out!” She sprung to her feat and reached into her hair, pulling out a pink glitter pen as she walked over to the wall at the front of the room. Pinkie took off the cap to the pen and began to write.
“Uh, Pinkie?” Applejack said. “Is that gonna wash off or are we gonna get in trouble again and have to repain—”
“Shhhh!” Pinkie shushed. “I’m on a roll!” she declared as she continued writing. Dotting one more exclamation mark with a heart, Pinkie smiled to herself and placed the cap back on the pen. “There!” she said as she stepped away and motioned to her work.
In bright, sparkly, pink glitter pen, clear as day, Pinkie’s message read:
‘Step 1: Embarrass the Rainbooms.
‘Step 2: …
‘Step 3: Profit!’
Rainbow Dash nodded solemnly. “We’re through the looking glass, everyone.”
Fluttershy looked at her friends in concern. “Well, what do we do?! I mean, we’re all certain it’s Sunset Shimmer doing all this!”
Pinkie Pie shrugged. “Eh… I’m still hedging my bets that it might be ninja-mummies…”
“Most of us are certain it’s Sunset Shimmer!” Fluttershy clarified. “Maybe we can confront her about it and put a stop to it once in for all!”
Rarity shook her head. “I don’t know, darling… Sunset Shimmer is very cunning… She’d probably know we’d try to stop her…”
Applejack nodded. “Especially after we flat out accused and publically humiliated her!”
Rarity continued, “No, no… she must have a contingency plan for that…”
“Like what?!” Pinkie asked in a bubbly tone.
Rarity stroked her chin. “She must have an idea so brilliant, and so cunning, there’s no way we could even hope to know what it is!”
Pinkie gasped then lowered her eyelids. “Diabolical…”
“Okay, but what do we do, then?!” Rainbow Dash asked.
“Ah got an idea!” Applejack said. “We do nothing!”
The other girls present all paused.
“Come again?” Fluttershy said.
“We don’t do anything!” Applejack reiterated. “See, Sunset expects us to do something about all the teasin’, but if we don’t do anything she won’t know what to do!”
Rarity took a short, sharp, excited breath of air, “And then all our problems will fix themselves somehow!”
Fluttershy smiled, “Everyone will go back to quietly making fun of my social awkwardness behind my back instead of doing it to my face!”
Rainbow Dash stood up and pumped her fist into the air. “And she’ll stop getting into my things and stealing hair brushes like she’s been doing for more years than Sunset Shimmer has even been on this planet!”
“And then marshmallows and chocolate rain will fall from the sky and also end world hunger!”
Again, every pair of eyes in the room was on Pinkie.
“WhaaaaAAAAaaaaaAAAaaat?~” Pinkie protested. “Is it a crime to dream?”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Look, the important thing is, we’ve out-geniused the super-genius here!”
“Hello, Trixie!” Sunset Shimmer greeted in a dark, accusatory tone.
With a slightly startled expression, Trixie placed her books in her locker and turned. “Ah!” she exclaimed as she looked over the girl in front of her.
Sunset’s hair was disheveled if one was being generous. Her right eye sported a dark circle, one that might have been shared by her left eye except it had turned black to match the bruise on her forehead. Furthermore, while her shirt had clearly been washed, it still sported a massive patch of dark brown discoloration from the blood Sunset had shared with it.
“Ah, Miss Shimmer…” Trixie said doing her best to sound confident. This was usually not a challenge for her, but a short lifetime of appearing confident was suddenly weighed against this rather unhinged looking individual. “How are you? You’re looking… deranged…”
Sunset folded her arms across her chest. “Save it, Trixie!” Sunset said with a glare. “You’re Anon-A-Miss, aren’t you?!”
“Hah! I wish!” Trixie exclaimed. “She’s stirred up the school more than Trixie ever could! Whoever she is, I’d like to thank her! Because… uh…” Trixie’s face scrunched up and she looked upwards as if searching her mind for something. “Actually, I’m not sure how this situation benefits me...” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “It actually makes it harder for everyone to focus on Trixie because they’re so busy picking on the Rainbooms or dealing with their own personal dra…” Trixie trailed off as she noticed she was now talking to herself. “Uh, Sunset?”
Sunset’s heavy boots echoed through the hallway as students quickly got out of the way of the sprinting firebrand. “HEY! YOU! YOU’RE ANON-A-MISS, AREN’T YOU?!”
A peach-skinned male student, his tousled brown hair under a grey beanie, pointed to himself. His expression clearly said, ‘Who me?’ as Sunset rapidly closed the distance between the two. “I… what?! How could I possible-Oh, God!”
Sunset lunged the last few feet and tackled her target to the ground with a ‘Thud!’
“CONFESS, SINNER! CONFESSSSSS!”
“WHY DOES THIS STUFF ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME?!”