Sunset chewed the end of her pencil in contemplation and leaned back against the park bench. It was a strangely big deal to call someone 'the worst,' and it felt familiar in an itchy, uncomfortable way. Her old self had been about ego and pride, but it had also been about paranoia. She'd had just a blanket assumption that ponies and people were bad, broken, and nasty. It made them easy to hurt.

Luckily, Twilight had written that she was going to be gone most of the day, so she had time to add to the entry and explain. She decided to just follow her feelings and trust Twilight would understand she wasn't being cruel for its own sake. She began to write:

His name is Weeping Willow. They met from volunteering at the local animal shelter. She'd mentioned him a couple of times before, just to say he was quiet and helpful, and he seemed to enjoy working with her. We were all surprised when she said he asked her out and she accepted, but I didn't feel like anything was wrong. But when I met him I changed my mind. We tried to be nice to him, we tried really, really hard. But...

She paused in thought again. Thinking about this made her less concerned with being unfair and more concerned that she would rant so long that Princess Twilight would get bored. She took a deep breath to try to calm down.

Sunset jumped in surprise and whirled around, clutching the journal to her chest. There before her, mouse-brown hair frizzing above his round glasses, hands accusingly on his hips, oily, beige face contorted into a sneer, was Weeping Willow himself.

She frantically looked from side to side, terrified he had seen what she was writing. She forced her face into a warm smile, hoping it did not come off too unctuous. "Weeping!" she said warmly. "Wow, hey, you surprised me, there. How's it going?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "I'm coming home from my job. You know, the thing I need to do because I'm not a superhero pop singer movie star with a bunch of magic glowy stuff I can keep all to myself."

Sunset's smile became extremely unctuous, because it was all she could think to do to keep it from becoming a grimace. "Well," she said, "jobs can be annoying, yeah."

"What would you know about it?" Weeping Willow grunted. "Look at you. Boys probably just give you stuff all the time for free. Some of us can't live that way."

Sunset snapped the pencil she was holding in her hand. Her unctuous smile became a full-fledged grimace. "Listen..."

"Oh well, you're not going to be pretty forever, you know. Once that stops, you'll see what I mean."

Sunset threw the journal on the ground, gearing up to unleash her anger, but then she remembered: Fluttershy had made it very clear that they were not to fight with Weeping Willow, or she would stare at them. (Sunset was acutely aware of how stupid that sounded even in her own head, but she had also literally never been intimidated by anything more than she was by that look Fluttershy got in her eyes sometimes.) She forced her rage back down into herself, closed her eyes, and counted slowly to five.

When she opened her eyes, Weeping was kneeling over the magic journal, poking at it disdainfully. "Stupid magic stuff," he muttered. He looked up at her with contempt. "You're not cool just because you have magic stuff, y'know."

Sunset looked and saw Fluttershy running up to them in a panic. "Oh no," she was saying. "No no, you two should not be..." She reached them and seemed to calm herself slightly. "Um, I mean, hi. Sunset, I didn't expect to see you." She positioned herself between them. "Um, but we have to go? On a date? Right, Weeping? We should go."

Fluttershy's face was stricken with something close to terror. She stared up at Sunset with big, wet eyes. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I hope he didn't... I mean, I didn't know you'd both be here at the same time."

Sunset felt like her heart was experiencing an eclipse. She gently reached out to place an empathizing hand on Fluttershy's arm.

Fluttershy jumped away like a fox evading a spring-loaded trap. She landed a few feet away, softly rubbing the place Sunset would have touched, looking back in sorrow.

"I'm coming!" Fluttershy called. With an empathetic glance back to Sunset, she scampered off.

Sunset stood alone for a few moments, trying to determine exactly how tightly she could clench her fist. Eventually, she walked over to where the front half of her pencil lay on the sidewalk. She went to the journal, opened it to where she had stopped, and she simply wrote:

He's just the worst.

Cuteness wasn't a contest. There were cute things about practically every animal, if you looked closely enough, and the very idea of ranking all those sweet creatures was unnatural and wrong.

But if there WAS a contest, otters would win. Chittering and playing and floating around while holding hands...

She thought about otters because that was the best way she had learned to maintain a positive demeanor when Weeping Willow was talking.

"...I'm sorry, it's a very intellectual show," he was saying, as he tilted his chin upward, eyes half-lidded. "Some people just aren't smart enough to really get it. It's not about feelings, it's about the mind. But he just kept going with his irrational ad hominems, and I..."

Fluttershy smiled blankly. Otters sometimes liked to swim in tight little circles for no reason.

She was very good at thinking about things, which made her also very good at not thinking about things. That didn't make sense, but in practice it worked out very well. Like when Twilight was trying to learn how to hypnotize people, and when Fluttershy volunteered, she spent the entire time intensely aware of all the crowded mess of things she was thinking, so she barely even listened to what Twilight was saying. But then Twilight had snapped her fingers, and Fluttershy did whatever the silly thing was she was supposed to do, without even knowing it.

She made sure to never let Twilight try to hypnotize her again. She remembered being alone in that room with Twilight, how her voice was uncharacteristically soothing and lilting as she read out of that book.

Fluttershy almost thought about one of those things she absolutely never thought about, which meant it was time to pay attention to Weeping Willow again.

"...so they ban me, just for some trash talk! Come on, it's satire! If you can't take it, you shouldn't be playing the game. Hey, are you still having that problem with your rabbit?"

Fluttershy was not certain what problem he was referring to; Angel was fine. But she just smiled placidly and nodded.

"That's tough," he said, eyes fixed slightly above her gaze. "The thing about rabbits you might not know is, they're not rodents. They're lagomorphs."

"Not everyone knows that, so it's okay that you didn't. See, lagomorphs have longer..."

Fluttershy decided it was time to think about otters some more. An image popped into her head of a hypnotist otter, wearing a little top hat and waistcoat. That was nice. That made things okay for a little bit.

"Okay," the hip-looking stallion announced, "next question in the Caneighdian Celebrities round: What musical instrument is jazz legend Sesame Seeds famous for playing?"

"Ugh!" Moon Dancer rolled her eyes. "It's the drums. This is just insultingly easy." She scribbed down the answer with irritation.

Lyra sipped her ale and smiled awkwardly at the rest of the table. "So, uhh... you know we don't have to come here every week."

Bon Bon regarded her with hooded eyes. "What are you talking about? You're the one that likes trivia so much."

"Yeah, but..." Lyra waved her hooves around unhelpfully. "With Moon Dancer on the team, don't you think trivia gets kind of.... boring?"

Bon Bon squinted. "If you're asking me if I think winning is boring, the answer is no, I definitely do not."

Lyra poked a hoof at Fluttershy. "What about you? Come on, I know you love how Moon Dancer is smarter than everypony, but don't you wish you could contribute some?"

"She did contribute!" Bon Bon argued. "Fluttershy and I came up with the team name."

"I just like the double-date idea," Fluttershy cut in sweetly, trying to head off a potential quarrel. "I don't care much what we do. This is fun!"

"Ag!" Moon Dancer burst out, apparently responding to another question the others had not paid attention to. "It's Whinniepeg! Come on, everypony knows that."

Lyra sighed. "Okay, okay. Hey Fluttershy, what were you saying about... some kind of alien version of yourself?"

"Oh. Yes." Fluttershy sighed. "I don't really understand it, but there's a... monkey dimension, and monkey versions of everypony in Ponyville."

Bon Bon gave her an unnervingly serious look. "Humans. They're typically friendly, but if they tried a large-scale invasion, they..." She trailed off at Lyra's awkward glance and Fluttershy's bewilderment. "Uh, I mean... Whinniepeg!" She slammed a hoof down on the table in indignation. "Right! So easy!"

"Um..." Fluttershy blinked and decided she was best off not thinking about it. "Anyway, Twilight has met that version of me, and yesterday she found out that she's actually dating a boy-monkey. Um. Stallion-human. I'm not sure what they call it."

"Gragh, it's like he thinks we haven't read a book in our lives; it's Raspberry Tarts!" Moon Dancer growled, flailing her hooves in a manner her tablemates had ceased even registering.

"Huh," Lyra said, thoughtfully sipping her ale. "And... uh, sorry to be so blunt, here, but I assume this boy-stallion dating is not something that pegasus Fluttershy would ever want to do?"

"I... really don't think so," Fluttershy replied, cringing a bit. "I've never tried, but..."

"Say no more," Bon Bon said, scratching her chin. "So this means either you're different... or human Fluttershy is not making very good choices for herself."

Fluttershy nodded. "It feels silly to worry about her, since we've never even met. But I just imagine myself in that situation and I feel so trapped." She blushed slightly. "Also, I've seen pictures of humans, and they're so adorable. They have these big heads and tiny little necks."

"I don't know," Fluttershy replied. "Twilight has a good friend living over there, and she said she'd try talking to me. Uh, her."

Lyra glanced over at Moon Dancer, who was glaring grouchily at her microbrew. "Uh, you okay there, Moon? Did the round get better?"

"Round's over," Moon Dancer grunted. "I already turned our answer parchment in." She crossed her hooves over her chest and pouted in indignation. "Do you believe it? Ten questions about Caneighdian celebrities, and not a single one about the National Theater. Not a single one about the Bison Rennaissance! There was a question about the cast of the Starpress Revue, but it was about Raspberry Tarts, the most obvious one!"

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I like this host; I've seen him at the indie movie theater at Canterlot, and he's always nice," Moon Dancer continued sourly. "But have you noticed, every question he ever asks is about ponies? Nothing about bison or griffons or dragons or donkeys or anything. I don't think he even knows how restricted his knowledge base is. I wrote him a little note about it on our answer parchment before I turned it in." (Fluttershy looked over and noted that the triviamaster was indeed glancing over at them with an unreadable frown.)

"Hey!" Lyra said brightly, clearly trying to head off a spiral, "what do you think of the whole human Fluttershy thing?"

"Oh, right, that," Moon Dancer mumbled. She sipped her beer and frowned. "Fluttershy dating a boy. Super gross." Her expression softened slightly. "But she's still in school, right? Still living at home? And she's basically still just a filly?" She sighed. "I guess I get what she's probably going through."

"Okay," the hip-looking stallion announced, "we have an official winner for the Caneighdian Celebrities round, and once again, with a perfect score: Bon Bon's Bunny Brigade."

As the ponies at the other tables weakly applauded, Lyra pumped her hooves in victory. "Yeah, the four Bs!" she cheered, then paused. "Wait, that doesn't sound good."

Moon Dancer was not going to let a little thing like being poked repeatedly in the arm stop her from concentrating. But when Minuette started talking, accenting each syllable with a poke, it became harder to take.

Moon Dancer tried to refocus. Her interest in the development of modern architecture was not going to be swayed. She refocused on the paragraph on spires.

Minuette ran out of things to say, but she did not stop talking or poking. She just started saying "Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke." That, somehow, increased the annoyance factor considerably.

"Please," Moon Dancer said, keeping her calm as best as she could. "I'm reading about spires."

As Minuette surely knew, the back-breaking straw was refusing to take knowledge seriously. Moon Dancer closed the book and stared her friend in the eyes. "Hey! Listen, this is exactly the same era we're learning about in AP history!"

"No, it's really interesting! You get to see how technological advances and cultural changes were influenced by historical..."

"Aaaaaaghghguuughhh. Moon Dancer, you promised that if we hung out, you wouldn't do any studying."

"Oh fiiiine." Minuette dramatically flung herself sideways in defeat. "You said you wouldn't study much. And you have crossed the much boundary."

Moon Dancer sighed, but she could not deny that her friend's antics were endearing. "Well, I'm just trying to distract myself from this awful coffee." She jostled her cup with disdain. "I don't know why you wanted to go to this corporate chain place, anyway. The Sylvan Glen is just a few blocks away. They have better music, and their coffee is way better."

"Oh, yeah you are." Minuette had a sly look in her eye, suggesting the massive amounts of sugar in the horrible foamy monstrosity she was drinking were beginning to affect her. "You're both all about, 'Oh, let's go to the Sylvan Glen, there's a theremin symphony playing tonight.'"

"That band only had one theremin player, and..." Moon Dancer suddenly trailed off. Behind Minuette, across the cafe, she could see a boy and girl waiting in line to order. The boy was scowling smugly, with glasses and frizzy, brown curls. The girl was absolutely gorgeous, with flowing, hippy-dippy clothes and long, pink hair.

Moon Dancer was momentarily frozen, her mouth hanging open, but suddenly, she regained her senses. In a panic, she grabbed her architecture book, opened it and held it up in front of her face. "Sh!" she hissed. "Don't look. Don't move."

Minuette probably looked pretty confused, but Moon Dancer could only see the inside of the book. "What?"

Moon Dancer slowly peeked over the edge of the book. Minuette actually seemed to be taking things in stride, just raising an eyebrow at her. But behind her, the boy reached the counter and scanned the menu in a comfortably self-satisfied way. The girl clasped her arms behind her back daintily.

Minuette complied, though she began to look pretty impatient. "What's the deal?" Moon Dancer did not reply; she just sat there with her mouth open. Minuette sighed. "Okay, I'm just gonna look."

Minuette blinked in obvious surprise. "Huh. Um, have you talked to him at all since..."

Moon Dancer watched as Weeping and his bizarrely attractive date received their drinks. To her relief, they sat at the opposite side of the cafe. To her distress, they sat right next to the exit. "So, bad news," she said. "I think we're kind of trapped here for a while." She looked up hopefully. "Wanna talk about spires?"

Minuette rested her chin in her hands and rolled her eyes. "Fiiiiine. Ugh, what a terrible choice: unnecessary AP history learning, or having to have the most awkward conversation in the world with Weeping Willow." She sighed. "It's almost enough to make me wish he had shown up to that dumb party you threw."

It Turns Out They're Windmills

by J Carp

Icky