//------------------------------// // 5. Concerns // Story: Slice of Strife // by helmet of salvation //------------------------------// Just one morning. What she wouldn't give for just one long, glorious morning to herself. To luxuriate in her warm, dry, comfortable bed, silk pyjamas caressing her hide, until she was ready to rise. To lower herself into a delicious, steaming bath, scented candles lining the rim, lathered shampoo oozing from her mane and tail as she slowly submerged. Then, with the dust, mud and grit of the outside world purged and before the first hint of wrinkling could manifest, to rise like a mythical benefactress from the cleansing water and envelop herself in a trio of soft, fluffy, gently heated towels. Once the excess moisture had been padded from her body she would ease downstairs, mane and tail still enwrapped, for a leisurely breakfast. Nothing too indulgent, of course, she had her physique to preserve. A couple of lightly poached eggs with shredded carrot on the side, some crepes with mixed berries, vanilla oat smoothie—— Oh for goodness' sake, Rarity, pull yourself together. Even if you were in a position to bargain some fantasy of yours into existence, there are a few other desires that would somewhat take precedence over lolling around and stuffing your muzzle. Some clue as to how to live up to your cutie mark, for starters. The white unicorn lifted her frilly pink-and-yellow eyemask to gaze out the window of her parents' spare bedroom. The sky was as dark as her mood. Princess Celestia was not yet due to raise the sun. Preparing the day's weather meant Rarity had to be up and about well beforehoof. For all the good that did. Rarity half-climbed, half-slid out of bed, dashed her eyemask somewhere or other, shuffled wearily towards her dressing table—why did last night's Sugar Shire game have to go down to the wire?—and enveloped her hairbrush in a blue telekinetic aura. As she gave her mane, coat and tail her usual perfunctory morning grooming—no sense in a full treatment since by day's end she'd look like something her cat dragged in—she cast her mind back to that glorious night she discovered her destiny and pondered, again, how things could have gone so wrong since then. It was an evening she had planned for moons. Ponyville's Fall Equestrianox celebration had never seen the likes of it before. She started with the clouds. A dazzling array of cumulus, cirrus and cirrostratus, arrayed so that they surrounded the setting sun without obscuring it, and caught the fading light so as to paint the sky in the most spectacular hues of orange, pink and lavender. Like a conductor before an orchestra, Rarity swept the clouds in all directions, so that the colours glided and flowed across the sky as if alive. Not too swiftly, like paint rolling across a wall, but with a steady, stately grace. As the sun eased lower, Rarity blasted the clouds into oblivion except for a vast sheet of cirrus. Her eyes closed, her focus on touch and proprioception, her magic drew the sheet down and dispelled into an uncountable cluster of ice crystals. She opened her eyes and cast the crystals to the western horizon. The scattered crystals gave the sun a charm bracelet: a bright, golden halo studded with three gleaming parhelia equidistant around the arc, one at the top and one on either side. The air rang with cries of awe and admiration. Rarity waited until the bejewelled orb drifted almost out of sight, glanced with a smile back to the east, then concentrated her magical energy on the ice once again. Taking care to keep the multitude of crystals within her aura, she guided them in a steady arc towards the eastern sky. There they united with the rising moon as if embracing an old friend, giving the lesser light its own silvery halo. The assembled ponies once again voiced their approval, several of them thumping their hooves on the ground in applause. Yet Rarity was not done yet. It was time for her pièce de résistance. Once the applause had died down, she sent the ice crystals skyward, up, up, until they caught the reflections of both sun and moon and gave the evening its crowning image. An aurora. The enormous, shimmering sheet waved like a flag in the darkening sky, as ponies gasped and cheered. Never had they seen such a breathtaking synthesis of light, colour and movement. It was a tribute to the beauty of Equestria's natural elements, and to the artistic vision of Rarity: a vision that manifested a white cloud with a rainbow-hued lightning bolt on each side of her hindquarters, sealing her destiny as steward of the weather. How long ago that seemed now. Managing the weather of an entire town throughout the day, prioritising and fulfilling the differing needs of temperature, moisture and air pressure, was a vastly different proposition from a localised light show. Rarity's true gift was in aesthetics so when beauty conflicted with practicality, she erred on the side of the former. Furthermore, when it came to managing multiple volatile atmospheric elements simultaneously, her ingrained approach of organised chaos was less than optimal. Rarity's resulting attempts to maintain Ponyville's climate quickly turned ugly. Crops were ruined, construction and public works delayed, sicknesses spread. There was scarcely a resident in the town who did not snarl their disapproval at the unicorn, and there was not a single word she could utter in her defence. Had this been merely a profession she would have quit long ago in pursuit of something more attuned to her innate talents. Yet ponies simply did not give up on their destinies. Their callings chose them, not the other way around. She was not completely friendless, of course. Fluttershy even offered to help but her halting, timorous efforts to soften the citizens' anger and brighten their moods bore less fruit than Pinkie Pie's apple trees. Far worse to Rarity than the abuse she endured or her own sense of inadequacy was the misery inflicted upon her family. Hondo Flanks and Cookie Crumbles, her parents, were unable to venture outdoors without somepony making their feelings known: indignant complaints, dirty looks, overt shunning and passive-aggressive cooing about of course it isn't their fault and how so very hard it must be knowing they had brought such a failure into being. They withstood it unflinchingly, drawing on their unshakeable, unconditional love for their daughter. It was Rarity's little sister, Sweetie Belle, who truly suffered. Every recess and lunchtime spent huddled in the weather shed, every field trip and special school visit cancelled due to inclement weather, and the little white unicorn would find herself the focus of dozens of pairs of eyes , withering, accusing, as if she herself were responsible for the conditions. When it eventually was safe enough for the pupils to venture outdoors, they would inevitably pelt Sweetie Belle with slush, drench her from all sides with puddles of rainwater or shove her into pits of soaking mud ("Oops, didn't notice you there. It's so hard to see with all these dark clouds around"). Things might have been more bearable for Sweetie Belle had she acquired a cutie mark of her own. Yet she was still, in the schoolyard parlance, a 'blank flank'. Not only did she have no apparent special talent to set her apart from her sister's ineptitude but her classmates wondered none too quietly whether she would be just as hopeless as Rarity at her destiny when it finally did manifest itself. It was a question that Sweetie had asked her parents, and herself, several times. Sweetie Belle's attempts to shield herself with her under-developed magic only provided her classmates with another source of mockery. Protesting her innocence had also proven to be worse than useless. "So whose fault is it then?" Diamond Tiara, the tiara-wearing, pink-coated ringleader of Sweetie Belle's persecutors, had taunted. "Uhm..." "Go on, we're listening. Tell us all in a nice, loud, clear voice, exactly who is the hopeless, bumbling pony who keeps ruining everything for us and for everypony else in this town, and is such a total loser that she can't even fulfil her own destiny?" She could never vocalise the answer, of course. Sweetie Belle deeply resented Rarity for the ostracism she and her parents faced, and made no secret of her feelings within the confines of home. Yet disparaging immediate family in public to appease a mob of schoolyard bullies would have brought more ignominy upon herself than a hundred unsolicited mud baths. At least in the latter case, the mud would wash off. So she endured it, day after wretched day, her sense of injustice and powerlessness boiling into a rage that she would vent with a foal's intemperance on poor Rarity the moment she saw her. It had reached the point where Sweetie had begun begging her parents not to send her to school. Hondo and Cookie were sympathetic, and did agree to look into the feasibility of homeschooling the little pony. However, they also cautioned her that she could not spend her life fleeing from her tormentors. Sooner or later, she had to learn to take a stand, to fight back. "I don't WANNA fight!" As characteristically happened in moments of high emotion, Sweetie Belle's emphasis lifted her voice into a high-pitched squeak. Normally, Hondo and Cookie found this tic adorable; on this occasion, it broke their hearts. Sweetie Belle sank into the living room lounge and clutched a throw pillow to her chest. "I never looked for any trouble." Hondo knelt down to engage his daughter at eye level. "Sometimes trouble looks for us. We can't hide from it forever. We have to deal with it." "But they're the ones doing the wrong thing. Why am I the one who has to change?" "Change is how we grow, Sweetie Belle," Cookie replied. "We can't be responsible for other ponies' actions, only our own. And you can stand up to bullies without changing who you are." The filly's eyes widened with fear and imploring. "What if I get hurt?" "Remember when you first learned to ride a bike?" asked her father. "Yeah." "Remember how many times you fell off?" Sweetie Belle's cheeks burned red at the memory. "Yes," she snarled. "Did it hurt?" She looked away and said nothing, not wanting to follow the direction she knew her father was taking her. "All those bandages, all those tears, and still you kept getting back on and trying again," said Hondo, stroking Sweetie's flowing pink-and-lavender mane. "Letting ponies push you around hurts too, doesn't it? Maybe not as much as falling off your bike, not at the time, but it's the kind of pain that never goes away, even after the bullies do." Sweetie Belle whined in concession, and in anticipation of what she was sure would be some tough lessons that would take a long time to learn and even longer to implement. Rarity, lurking in the hall, stifled her own moan of anguish at the overheard conversation. She should have been accompanying her sister on bicycle rides under pleasant, balmy skies. She should have been helping teach her sister how to carry herself. Yet there were few balmy skies anymore, and Rarity would sooner try to take a bone from a bulldog than approach Sweetie Belle with any advice lately. The grievous memory spurred Rarity to snap out of her funk. It was time to change. Time to restore her family's standing in the community. To make them proud instead of ashamed. To be the weather pony this town needed. To fulfil her destiny. The question was, how? She could start by clearing all the clouds. Yes, bring back those pleasant, balmy skies. Keep the rain, hail and lightning from tormenting the townsponies. Except Pinkie Pie still needed that rain for her farm. Even more so, since Rarity had failed to deliver yesterday. Her soil could probably use some well-placed lightning too, to boost her nutrients. So too the other farms in the semi-rural township. Oh, who would have thought controlling the weather would be so complicated? As she sagged her head away from the window her eyes fell on her dishevelled bedclothes. She should probably straighten them before she left. She enveloped her quilt in a magical aura, lifted it from her bed and held it upright in front of herself. Her mind drifted back to her foalhood, to a time when she and Sweetie Belle were sisters in more than just genes. To the quilt they used to snuggle under together to share their stories, jokes and dreams. She remembered the design on that old quilt cover... "I-de-a!" * * * So simple, yet so elegant. How could she not have come up with this before? A patchwork. Instead of galloping this way and that, trying to maintain a dozen conflicting climatic conditions scattered about the town, she could keep them all together in one comparatively small area. Then she could draw on them as needed and keep them replenished. Like those fabric samples Applejack kept in her boutique. Standing at the edge of the main bridge out of the town centre, Rarity guided together into the sky overhead a host of different clouds. Some were filled with rain, some with snow, some cracked with hail, some flickered with lightning. Some were wisps and sheets that split the sun's rays into breathtaking colours. Some were just fluffy white bundles of shade. She couldn't leave them as they were, though. Different shapes, sizes, densities—no matter how tightly she drew them they looked like a lopsided, haphazard mess. Rarity adjusted her magic to shear through the edges of the clouds, cropping them into neat square prisms, then arranged the prisms into a tessellated pattern. She gazed astonished at the fruits of her inspiration. The sun's rays shone down like spotlights through the cloudless squares, as if Ponyville herself were the star of a stage spectacular. Rainfalls of varying intensities caught the intervening sunbeams and split their light into a troupe of rainbows. Delicate snowflakes twirled and drifted to the ground, the surrounding shafts of light showcasing the unique, precise designs of each flake. Her intention had been to make the elements more manageable. She never expected the outcome to be so beautiful. Yet it still lacked something. A little fog perhaps, to give the arrangement an air of mystique? No, something bolder, to add a little contrast to the mostly pale pattern. Where was that great big storm cloud she had pushed aside to keep from blocking her sunlight? Oh. Did she really move it that far? She had been so deeply 'in the zone' while creating her weather pattern, she had swept away the monstrous cluster of condensation without noticing the tremendous weight, the wild inner draughts, the ominous crackling of the electricity. Failure to keep the cloud under control could lead to disaster, dumping the entire mass of water onto some unsuspecting pony below. Or jolting them with lightning. Or, far worse, both. Her muscles taut, her teeth clenched, Rarity heaved the massive thunderhead through the air above the bustling main street. She wasn't good with the thundery ones.