The Dazzlings peeked her head around the corner. Sure enough, the janitor was still mopping the floor with intense precision and care, headphones in his ears and keys jangling on his belt.
Adagio was not happy about it.
“This piece of human scum is taking forever!” she groaned, pulling on her hair. “He’s been mopping this one spot for thirty minutes! It’s already 8pm! If the floor isn’t clean by now, you either need to move on or change professions!”
Aria looked up from her comic to roll her eyes. “Calm down. Let him do his job or whatever. It’s not like we don’t have the entire night for this.”
Sonata raised her hand. “I would like to sleep at some point.” She crossed her arms and tilted her nose into the air, as if she were preparing herself for the other sisters’ imminent protests. “After all, good poetry comes from a healthy brain and body.”
“Will you stop with the poetry?!” Aria tossed her light reading at Sonata’s face, but the younger sister was expecting such a move and expertly dodged it.
“I will not, Ari. You make me so mad sometimes. You are the worst. Truth.” She paused. “A haiku.” Aria clenched her fists and geared up to strike, but decided against it at the last second.
Adagio looked around the corner once again, desperately hoping for a different outcome, but the janitor remained stationary. She bit her lip, trying her very hardest not to scream at the top of her lungs. This was going nowhere.
“Girls,” she muttered, struggling to keep her cool. “We need a new plan.”
“Did we have an old plan?” Aria asked, rubbing her forehead. “All you said was we needed to ‘destroy trigonometry,’ which, by the way, makes no sense. Math is an abstract concept, not a physical object.”
Adagio devilishly grinned. “Math was a physical object when I put my test through the paper shredder in the library.” With those words, Sonata and Aria shared a glance of worry. “Now, I need one of you idiots to sneak behind him and steal his keys.”
“Why do you need his keys?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
Aria rolled her eyes, but didn't dare argue with her older sister, fearing what her and Sonata apprehensively called ‘The Wrath of Adagio’. Between how their sister was acting in history class earlier and her current frantic mentality, Aria and Sonata could sense it was coming. It was only a question of how long before the big-haired volcano erupted.
Adagio Dazzle stared intimidatingly at her sisters, waiting for one of them to follow her demands. Aria pushed Sonata forward, but the youngest sister quickly darted behind Aria and nudged her forward, prompting Aria to push Sonata forward again. This cycle continued for another minute or so, until Adagio got tired of their shenanigans and stepped in between them.
“Great,” she said, lightly placing her hands on their backs. “You’ve both earned the privilege of grabbing the key.”
With a burst of force, the lead Dazzling shoved her sisters around the corner, and they immediately slipped and fell onto slippery tile floor. Due to the headphones in his ears and his back being turned toward the girls, the janitor didn't notice the girls and kept innocently mopping.
“Dagi!” Sonata whined, lying on the ground. “That hurt!”
“Perfect! You can write about it in your next poem!” Adagio hissed, sharply pointing at the janitor. “Now get me that key!”
Aria raised her middle finger at her sister, but still did as she was told and slowly inched toward the unsuspecting custodian. With Sonata close behind, she took quiet, careful baby steps, doing her best to keep her footing against the newly mopped floor. Adagio watched intently, hoping her sisters wouldn’t botch their mission, but fully expecting them to.
Once they were about a foot away from the man, he finally decided he was done mopping that section of the hallway and turned around to put his mop in a bucket. Caught off guard, Sonata ducked while Aria slid across the floor, clinging onto a nearby wall as if her life depended on it. Adagio held her breath. Luckily, the janitor was deeply into his music and thus wasn’t paying great attention to his surroundings. As the pair of sisters let out a sigh of relief, it quickly became apparent that their lucky break was short-lived, as the janitor began walking away, looking for a new place to excessively clean.
“Get him!” Adagio yelled, shooing the girls with her hands. Aria moaned, then tailed the janitor, following him around another corner. Sonata shuffled behind her, nearly slipping on the floor once again, but just barely keeping herself up at the last moment.
Adagio, however, did not follow. Instead, she trusted her sisters would complete her task, and honestly, she couldn’t care less about the damage they caused along the way. Without so much as a glance in their direction, she walked back into the locked library, which she had purposefully wedged open with a book following the end of the Study Buddies session.
On the staircase was the book Twilight Sparkle had left her, All About Triangles. Adagio opened up the first page, which had an illustration of a red triangle in a park on a sunny day. Of course, since it was a children’s book, the triangle had a face and could talk. Hi! I’m a triangle! I’m a shape with three sides!
Adagio glared at the abomination. Why should somebody care about that dumb triangle? And why did math have to get more complicated than 1+1=2? She flipped through the rest of the book, and, as expected, it was filled with more useless facts than a tabloid. This was it.
In one swift motion, Adagio grabbed the first page and ripped it straight out the book, leaving a jagged trail of paper clinging onto its binding. She stared at the red triangle one last time, looking at his tender, warm smile and idyllic city life. He looked so happy to be a triangle. Like he didn't have a care in the world.
And thus, Adagio Dazzle put him straight into the paper shredder. In an instant, that triangle and his perfect world has been reduced to nothing but strands of rubbish.
One by one, she ripped out the other pages of the book and placed them straight into the metal box of death, watching their remains beautifully fall inside the machine, reborn as perfectly cut strips. Much to her delight, watch something she passionately despised be destroyed right before her very eyes was immensely satisfying. When it came down to the final page, she laughed. And, much to her surprise, it quickly evolved into a maniacal laugh, something she hadn’t done since the Battle of the Bands. It had come so naturally, despite being dormant within her for so long. It felt good.
Very good, indeed.
The other Dazzlings returned to the library about twenty minutes after they had begun chasing the janitor. Aria had his key ring in her hand, Sonata carried his mop, and they were both soaking wet.
“Goodness, girls,” Adagio sighed, marveling at the state of her sisters. “I asked you to steal his keys, not his job.”
Sonata began wringing out her hair, creating a puddle of water below her. “We ran into a couple of issues along the way, but Ari and I are amazing ninjas, so we got the key just like that!” She snapped her fingers, accidentally knocking over her mop.
“No, we didn't!” Aria argued, shaking out her shirt. “It took forever! He kept walking away right as we were about to grab his keys! Eventually, we got so frustrated we just stole the stupid mop and ran away.”
“Which worked out in the end. When he noticed it was missing, he was soooo distracted, he didn't even realize the keys were coming off his belt!”
Aria scoffed. “Of course, someone just had to knock over the mop bucket and cover us in dirty water before we left.”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
Adagio raised her fist up, silencing her sisters. “Adequate work, girls. For once.” She snatched the keys from Aria’s hand and began sauntering through the library’s door. “Come on. We have work to do.” The other two Dazzlings groaned, but followed their leader’s demands without much hesitation.
The three sisters walked back through the hallways, peering around every corner to make sure the touring janitor wasn’t around, seeking vengeance for his stolen mop. Once they could confirm he was not in the area, they advanced forward, not daring to make any sound that would make their presence known.
After a minute or so, they made it to their destination.
“Principal Celestia’s office?” Aria asked, leaning against the wall. “If I end up in detention on my second day of school, I’m going to be very grumpy.”
Sonata laughed. “You’re always grumpy.”
“Relax,” Adagio replied, her voice calm and collected. Though her heart was racing, it didn't show. “No one will ever know we were here.”
She put the key into the lock and turned it. With a resounding “click” that faintly echoed through the hallways, the door opened.
They were in.
Principal Celestia’s desk was riddled with paperwork, sun momentos, and a desktop computer that looked like it belonged in another decade. Adagio Dazzle comfortably sat on her chair and booted up the machine. Unsurprisingly, it asked for a password.
“Great,” Aria scoffed. She sat on the desk, next to Adagio. “How do you plan to bypass this?”
Adagio looked around, spying a post-it note under a stack of Fire Codes. sUn15b3Tt3Rth4NmO0n. She smirked and typed in the code. Sure enough, her desktop, decorated with a sunny background image, appeared on the screen.
“Adagio’s a hacker!” Sonata gasped, backing away.
“Adagio’s a lunatic,” Aria grumbled, crossing her arms. “Can I just point out that either dropping the class or studying for it would have been much easier than this?”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” the eldest siren replied, pulling up a search engine and typing “teachers” into the search bar. Several of Celestia’s previously visited websites appeared, and Adagio clicked on the first one she saw.
Through the power of guesswork, she managed to pull up a master list of all the classes and periods. Since they were in alphabetical order, she scrolled down to the “T”s, and there it was. The bane of her existence. Trigonometry.
She clicked on it, and a pop-up box appeared. In the bottom right corner was a button that read “Delete.” Without an ounce of hesitation, she pressed it.
“We’re done, girls,” Adagio Dazzle laughed, cracking her knuckles. “Simple as that. We’ve destroyed Trigonometry.”
Sonata and Aria looked at each other in disbelief. She couldn’t have just deleted an entire class. There had to be a catch of some sort.
Regardless, their fear of Adagio’s wrath kept them from asking questions, and they blindly followed their leader back to the library, where they spent the rest of the night.
“Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk, please report to the Principal’s Office immediately.”
Crap.
The three girls walked into the room, greeted by a very angry Principal Celestia. Without saying a word, she turned her desktop screen toward them.
Are you sure you want to delete Trigonometry?
Adagio bit her lip. She could feel Aria’s glare boring into the back of her skull.
“That wasn’t us,” she instinctively blurted out, crossing her fingers behind her back.
Celestia rolled her eyes. “The security camera footage says otherwise.”
Adagio could feel the sweat sliding down her forehead. All that work for nothing. And what was worse, it wasn’t even Sonata or Aria who had botched the mission.
It was her.
Celestia was reprimanding them and explaining their punishment, but her words couldn’t reach the stunned Dazzling leader. Once again, she had failed, only this time, she couldn't run away. Canterlot High was all she had. And already, on her second day, she was losing it.
The only thing she could process was Aria Blaze, who leaned over and whispered in her ear.
“Adagio Dazzle, I am going to kill you.”