Sunset Shimmer, clutching her diary in her arms, walked down the stairs from the library as meekly as she could, hoping other students would not notice her, ducking and weaving through the crowd in a desperate attempt to not make contact with anyone as students dispersed from lunch to afternoon classes. She thought she was through the worst of it, but then someone slammed into her hard enough to knock her to the floor. With a sad grimace, she looked up to find herself facing an angry crowd.
“Who did that?” Sunset asked.
“Maybe it was Anon-A-Miss,” snarked a redheaded boy, rubbing his arm.
“Wait. She knocked herself down?” asked a heavyset lavender-haired girl.
“Why not? Wouldn’t be the first time she’s pulled something like that,” piped in a weedy Science Club boy.
“Anon-A-Miss. Tch. At least back when she was queen of CHS, she had the guts to stab you in the front,” said a curly-haired jock.
“You got me in-school-suspension. Narc,” one of the burnout boys from the Environment Club said to Sunset.
“I can’t believe she did that,” groused a matcha-skinned junior high girl.
As Sunset failed to hold back the tears, the voices became indistinct and intertwined with each other: “Traitor. Bitch. Thief. Ruined my life,” along with occasional mean-spirited encouragement: “Way to go. Keep it up. This shit is gold.” She curled into a fetal position, sobbing as the abuse continued until eventually all the students went their separate ways.
Sunset lay on the floor for a minute, contemplating many things. Then she stood up, dusted herself off, made sure she had all her belongings, then ran towards the school’s recently rebuilt front entrance.
A few yards away, Sunset briefly noticed, partially obscured behind a corner, Apple Bloom watching the spectacle with a look of concern. That was all she could make out before her vision blurred completely. Were the other two there? Probably, but she could not see them and had neither the time nor inclination to check. She needed to get away.
“I really don’t like how this is turning out,” Sweetie Belle whispered as she removed her hands from Apple Bloom’s back.
“Yeah, it’s gone way too far,” said Apple Bloom.
Scootaloo sat along the wall and scratched her head. “Should we just—?”
“No!” cried Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle in unison.
“Not yet,” Apple Bloom explained. “Things like this gotta be handled delicately. Or else they’ll get a lot worse.”
“They’re already worse. I want to, but I’m afraid,” Sweetie Belle admitted.
“If we do it, we do it together,” declared Apple Bloom.
“Right,” the other two agreed.
Sunset ran to the front doors, barely aware of anything around her, and promptly smacked into Flash Sentry. Involuntarily they embraced, although once Flash realized who he had kept from falling over, he immediately extricated himself and took two steps back, arms folded, levelling a glare that could melt a steel beam. However, it softened ever-so-slightly when he noticed Sunset’s eyes were bloodshot. Even so, he had a couple of choice words for his ex-girlfriend.
“Horse-lover?” asked Flash pointedly.
Sunset blinked in mild confusion as she looked up, her gesture for trying to work her brain, before eventually answering, “It’s not… incorrect. But, I never—”
Flash held up his hand in the universal gesture of shut up, which Sunset did. “Anon-A-Miss is pretty low even by your standards,” he said. “Also stupid. Why would you go after people like me who know some of your dark secrets?”
Sunset closed her eyes as she shook her head, saying nothing as she turned once again to exit the building.
As she did so, Trixie wandered into the area and immediately fixed her gaze on Sunset’s rear, obviously enough that Flash noticed.
“Ahh…” Trixie sighed. “Trixie hates to see Sunset go, but she loves watching Sunset leave.”
“Get professional help,” was all Flash could say in response as the door shut behind Sunset, a brief gust of cold air the only lingering reminder of her presence.
As a blanket of snow still covered the grass, Sunset kept to the sidewalks. Briefly she stopped at CHS’s iconic horse statue on its marble pedestal that, unbeknownst to most, doubled as a trans-dimensional gateway. She knelt down and pressed her hand against the pedestal’s southern face. Smooth. The portal was still closed. She sighed and slowly got back to her feet and continued on her way.
As she crossed Twelfth Street, heading north to her home, completely without regard to crosswalks or signals, she was nearly flattened by no fewer than two cars. Not that she noticed, or would have cared if she had. Life, to her, was little more than a sick joke with herself as the bad punchline. Sunset, much to her own regret, did not die an ignominious death in the road, so she had no choice but to continue her several-block journey.
Along the pine-slat privacy fences separating people’s yards from the hustle of Harmony Avenue and its cracked sidewalk, Sunset plodded forward, taking a few seconds to glance at the posters plastered every fifteen feet that implored citizens to vote for Orangeglow in the Governor election happening the next summer. All the posters had his grimacing face amidst a background reminiscent of the Aristeque flag. Some additionally had messages about ending ‘handouts’ or deporting ‘illegals’. Sunset scowled at that last one, being an ‘illegal’ herself. But, thanks to years around political leaders, she knew all too well the hypnotic effect of an effective siren song to the ignorant masses. She sighed sadly as she continued towards her home.
A few snow flurries fluttered down from the uniformly light-grey sky, accompanied by a light but chilly breeze from the Nordlein Mountains. She nearly tripped over a fire hydrant in her zoned-out state.
“How come, even here, North means cold?” she asked the hydrant. “Is Aristeque in the northern hemisphere of a planet? I mean, in the decade I’ve lived here, I haven’t heard of any other countries even existing …which does sort of make me imagine the thing about so-called illegals is a personal attack. After all, I’m the only one I know. No one else save Twilight and that dog-dragon of hers has crossed that portal, and they’re gone. Eh, what does it matter? I really don’t care anymore. Try and send me back, and when that doesn’t work hang me from a gallows in Connemara Square or tie me up at Central Station and push me off the platform to get flattened by the Evening Special. Nothing matters.”
The fire hydrant, being a fire hydrant, said nothing.
“You’re connected via a network of water pipes to most of the other hydrants in the city. I’m not connected to anyone or anything,” she explained to the inanimate hunk of metal as she began to walk away from it, still talking.
“I’m literally alone in this world,” she said to the falling snow. “I mean, I always was, but it takes an incident like this to really throw it into sharp relief. Always nice to know where I stand,” she concluded sardonically.
On the other side of the street, she noticed the soaring stone spire of the Harmony Avenue Sun-Kirk topped with its icon: a gilded stylized sun with eight rays atop a tapering pedestal with a cross-beam just below the sun. Despite the near-total lack of actual resemblance, Sunset always associated it in her mind with the Ancient Equestrian symbol The Eye Of Horse, or Wadjet as it was known at the time. She rolled her eyes at the shining topper, speaking to it in her tired and increasingly ragged voice.
“What’s the point in worshipping an invisible deity when I grew up with an entity as close as you can get to the real thing? And even with all the kowtowing by all those sycophants, She isn’t exactly worth worshipping. Unlike any god, She is fallible. After all, She took me in, right?”
The Sun-Pillar glinted in non-response. Sunset ignored it and continued the last couple of blocks to her apartment building, briefly looking over to the parking garage to ensure her motor-scooter had not been stolen.
Once she reached her building, she decided not to take the stairs as usual and instead rode the glitchy elevator up to the fifth floor where she lived, trudged down the hall, unlocked her door, and moped to the bookshelf in her bedroom, where she pulled out a leather-bound book emblazoned with her old cutie mark: a blazing sun where the red and yellow in the middle wrapped around each other to symbolize the duality of her personality and, indeed, her very existence. The book was also incredibly dusty, as if it had not been touched in ten years. Which it hadn’t.
Sunset blew the dust off the page edges, which did little to nothing for the cover, and opened it to one of the earliest pages. The writing on the top quarter of the page was distinctly childish.
Dear Princess Celestia, I don’t understand. Why are the other ponies so mean to me? I never did anything to them but be better at magic. You tell me to make friends, but what if no pony ever wants to be my friend? Will I be alone forever?
The response, which had appeared at the time within just a few minutes in gold-ish regal penmanship, read simply:
Dear Sunset, I am so sorry. It is never easy to lose even potential friends. I wish there was something more I could do to help you. But some journeys must be taken on one’s own. This is one of them. I chose you as my protégée because I have faith you can overcome this. It took me a long time to learn this lesson. I had to learn it more than once, with many regrets in between.
But what if I can’t? How do I do it?
Sometimes, all you can do is stay strong. Remember who you are. And you will find your family.
“Find my family, huh?” Sunset scoffed. Then her eyes lit up.
She pulled out her phone, looked up Anon-A-Miss’s MyStable profile, and began reading entries.