//------------------------------// // Second Knight // Story: Sleepless Knights // by R5h //------------------------------// Mr. Blue Sky played on repeat in Rarity's head, and as she walked toward her first class of the day, she stepped to the beat. “Someone seems peppy,” said the voice to her left, and she looked that way to see Twilight. “You look nice—no bags.” Rarity could see the traces of a happy smile on her face. Was she trying to hide it? Rarity couldn’t really tell. In any case, she had no such qualms about her own smile. “Nouveau jour,” she said, still keeping the beat as she walked, “nouvelle Rarity. I slept like a baby!” She reconsidered. “Well, judging by how Sweetie Belle was when she was little, not a real baby. But you know the saying.” Twilight laughed at that. “I guess Vice-Principal Luna had some really good advice, then?” Rarity smiled brilliantly, and turned the corner to the corridor with her locker. “She was completely useless!” A pause. “Oh. Wow!” Twilight sounded outrageously surprised. “Then...?” “It just...” Rarity flapped her hand before she continued, “worked out on its own!” She stopped in front of her locker, humming along to the chorus as she twisted the dial on her lock. “All for the best, really. The vice-principal was speaking to me as if I were biting off more than I could chew. Me! When I've never taken too large a bite in my life!” She snorted, and opened the locker. “The nerve, really, to suggest that I might be carrying an unreasonable load.” And with that, she reached in and pulled out about fifty pounds of textbooks, and wheezed. Twilight grimaced, showing a lot of teeth. “This will probably sound crazy, but—” she laughed, then sucked in a breath “—are you sure she didn't have a bit of a point? And can I, like, get some of those for you?” “Nonsense, dear,” Rarity said, laughing right back with immensely more humor in her voice than Twilight's laugh had had. She snapped her fingers, and a floating diamond shape appeared beneath the bundle in her arms. She released her grip, and the diamond from her geode kept supporting the books. Rarity slammed her locker shut, locked it, and walked away; the stack of books floated alongside her. “See? There's nothing that Rarity can't do!” “Excuse me, Rarity?” The voice was right behind her. Rarity flinched, and lost her concentration, and the diamond fizzled. The pile of books came down right on Twilight's foot. Twilight shrieked. Mr. Blue Sky skidded to an abrupt halt in Rarity's head. “Twilight!” she yelped. “I am so, so sorry, are you all right?” “My foot,” Twilight moaned through gritted teeth, grabbing her ankle and clutching it as close as her flexibility would allow. “My foot is flattened. It's two-dimensional.” “Twilight, I am truly sorry, let me just—” Rarity gathered up the pile of books again, holding them in her arms this time. “Is there anything I can do to—” “Just let me carry the books next time!” Twilight whimpered. “I gotta go take care of this.” And with that she hopped a hundred and eighty degrees on her good foot, and then started hopping toward the nurse's office. Rarity glowered, and then she turned to the voice that had so barbarically broken her concentration, and possibly Twilight’s metatarsals by proxy. “Is there something I can help you with, Vice-Principal?” she said, ever so sweetly. Vice-Principal Luna winced. “I was actually hoping to talk with you about yesterday.” Rarity didn't say anything, and after several seconds the older woman was forced to continue: “Specifically, when I said I couldn't help you unless you dropped one of your many extracurricular activities.” “Well!” Rarity huffed. “I think you've caused me to drop quite enough, thank you very much. The answer is still no.” And with that she spun on her heel, or at least she did the best she could while lugging fifty pounds of paper products, and made to strut away. (Or, more realistically, lurch away.) “I'm not finished.” Luna held up a hand, stalling Rarity's rotation. “I looked into it last night, and it seems I was wrong. There's something we might be able to try—it's called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. It's a bit of a long shot, but I think it might be able to help with your nightmares. If you're willing.” Rarity blinked. “Really?” That certainly sounded good—good enough that she forgot to be mad for a few seconds. However, her memory was pretty good, so she smirked and said, “How very kind of you to offer, but you may be interested to know—I slept like the grave last night. Not a single nightmare!” “That's lovely news!” Vice-Principal Luna's smile, for all that it looked genuine, was there and gone in a flash. “Can you guarantee you won't have any more?” As snarky as Rarity felt at that moment, she didn't have an answer for that. Vice-Principal Luna frowned, glanced down at her watch, and sighed. “I shouldn't keep you from your classes. Look, I'm available to talk tomorrow at one o'clock PM, which I believe corresponds with a study hall of yours. If you think it might be useful, you can come by and we can talk about it. No pressure.” She smiled again. “Enjoy the rest of your day.” She walked away. Rarity grumbled, turned the other way, and staggered toward her classroom. After a moment, she frowned, and concentrated, and Mr. Blue Sky was playing in her head again. She did her best to lurch in time, and hummed along. The sketches were crude. The handwriting was terrible. The design was gravitationally impossible. Rarity had heard it said, time and time again, that the customer was always right. Staring at her computer's screen, trying to decipher this particular commissioner's intentions like an archaeologist poring over ancient runes, she wondered why anyone still repeated such a ridiculous phrase. Her workroom was well lit but cramped. A couple of mannequins clustered in one corner, with partially-completed suits and dresses competing for personal space between then. Her keytar was in another corner, and above it were pages and pages of designs pinned to the walls, many of them for herself and her friends. There was a pile of college application stuff, and a separate desk just for homework... it wasn't quite chaotic enough to qualify as organized chaos, but it still felt hectic even when she was sitting still. Not that she ever had the time to sit still. She stood and started pacing, back and forth in the square iota of free floor space she had behind her chair. All right, so there was no way that the gown could be made to do that, but she could get appreciably close. And she could bend the color choices... well, okay, calling them 'choices' probably was giving the commissioner more credit for thoughtfulness than they deserved, but the point was that she could rework them into something more harmonious and less... eye-melting. A vision formed in her mind. The disorganized chickenscratch and blaring colors changed, flowed, morphed into something dashing: elegant but bold, sophisticated without pretension. Yes, she could see it! She ran to her desk, flipped open her notebook, grabbed at a pen— Knock knock knock. The vision vanished, like tissue paper in a gale. Rarity froze, took a deep breath, counted to three, and said, “Yes?” The door creaked open. “Rarity, dear,” said her mother, “some of your friends are outside and they said something about band practice?” “What in—oh,” said Rarity. If she'd been anyone else, she'd probably have felt like the color was draining from her face. As it was, she navigated over to the room's only window with a chill feeling in her body, pulled aside the curtains, and opened it. “Yo, Rarity!” Rainbow Dash called from the sidewalk outside. She had her guitar slung around her shoulder. “You up for this or not?” Beside her, Pinkie Pie waved fast enough that her hand was a blur. Rarity racked her brains, and found something worrying: an appointment to rock out with the girls for right about now. “I'm so sorry, the jam session completely slipped my mind!” she called down. “Um... I'm afraid I'm in the middle of some important work right now, so....” “Boo, you suck.” Rainbow Dash kicked at some dirt. “Twilight said she couldn't make it either. You both suck.” “What?” Rarity leaned further out her window, trusting her legs to counterbalance her. “Oh dear, did I really crush her foot that badly?” “No, she's fine!” Pinkie yelled. “She just said she had stuff to do!” Rarity breathed a sigh of relief. “Don't worry about it, Rarity!” Pinkie waved again. “We know you're super busy and all! We'll just do an acoustic session this time!” “Yeesh, all right.” Rainbow turned around and walked away, arms behind her head. “See you whenever, I guess.” Pinkie Pie skipped along behind her. Rarity waved a goodbye, nearly overbalanced, and then pulled herself back in. She shut the window with a grumble, and then got back in her seat. What had she been thinking about, earlier? Something about how to fix this design, obviously, but how.... It was like trying to assemble a puzzle, except all of the puzzle pieces were blank, and also they were missing. She grimaced, screwing up her face in concentration, trying to recreate the specific mental images she'd had. Something about fixing the colors, and making it less absurdly poofy.... At last she felt like she had something. She raised her pen again— Her phone rang. With a twitch of her eye, she grabbed it off her desk and answered. “Hello? Yes, this is Rarity. Yes, the suit will be available by the time we discussed. No, you don't need to keep calling me about it, because I can keep my commitments.” She tried not to think about the band practice she'd just turned down. “Yes, I'm sure the wedding will be lovely, do send me pictures. Have a wonderful day.” And she ended the call, and slammed the phone down. “All right,” she muttered. She'd managed to keep most of the mental image in her head. After a bit more concentration, she had it, and she raised her pen.... And she held it there. “I'm waiting,” she announced to the universe at large. What was going to come barging in to disrupt her concentration this time? What metaphorical bull would wreck her china shop of thought? After several seconds, nothing happened, and then after several more, nothing continued to happen. Rarity smiled, and began sketching. The curves would go like this and that, and the skirt would flare out like so, and the colors would be daring without assaulting the senses— “Rarity!” yelled the high-pitched voice from outside the door. Rarity slammed her fist on the desk. “What, Sweetie Belle!?” “Opalescence got up a tree and I need your weird magic powers to get her down.” Rarity took her arm, and pressed it up against her mouth, and screamed. Please, she begged in her head, if the waking world's not going to pull any punches, at least let me have decent dreams tonight. “This is garbage!” the commissioner yelled. He pointed his finger at Rarity, and the dress lit itself on fire. Rarity prostrated herself before him, even as the flames consumed her clothes, apologizing, begging for forgiveness: the dress just hadn't been physically possible, she'd done the best she could! “Oh, really?” The man smirked: his features were indistinct, but he was heavyset and sneering even when he smiled. He spread his arms— Rarity gasped. All around her and even below her, reproductions of the dress floated and bobbed and swarmed, like a fluther of jellyfish in the open ocean. They matched the original design exactly, including the captions and arrows pointing to various body parts. She sobbed, still wreathed in fire. “And what's even worse, you never got my keytar out of the tree at my wedding!” The man's rage was no less overpowering for the fact that Rarity couldn't really make out his face. Rarity bawled, and now the dress had stopped burning but her skin had started to char. “At this rate you'll never make it into Roan Island—” There was the neigh of a horse, and Rarity's head jerked up and to the right. The stranger was back. Their horse rode in from the side, through the tangled masses of impossible dresses, shredding them as they went by. The tatters fell to an invisible floor and disintegrated. The figure had a lance. The horse surged forward, and the lance smashed into the side of the angry commissioner. It went right through him, and he popped like a balloon, and then there was nothing left of him at all. The disintegrating effect spread, out and out and out unto infinity, so that instead of dresses Rarity was surrounded by gently falling ash, almost like snow. She stood, and she was wearing a simple design of her own making, and her skin was whole and unblemished, and she walked forward as the knight dismounted their horse. “You again.” The knight nodded. “Yes.” Again, Rarity didn't hear a voice, but she knew exactly what they said. “This is a dream,” Rarity said. “But... you aren't. You're not just part of my mind. I don't know how I know that, but it's true.” She stretched out her hand, and the ash parted around it, leaving her unsullied. “Who are you?” They stared at each other for an infinite moment, as the dust settled all around them, drifting in a nonexistent wind. And then the knight... groaned? “Seriously? I just spent all day fixing this! Hang on.” They raised their hand, as if grabbing at something above their head, and twisted. “Just... need to... adjust the transmitter....” And it was the strangest thing. As they kept twisting, their voice changed. Which was to say, it changed into an actual voice. Rarity started being able to hear it, and it was starting to sound recognizable. Moreover, the shape of their helm changed. Where before it had been a single piece of metal, it seemed to be morphing into a different design before Rarity's eyes. A design with multiple pieces and, most importantly of all, a hinge. “There! Knew I was close.” The figure released whatever it had been holding onto and then, without any pausing for dramatic effect, yanked the faceplate open. And a beaming, sparkling face looked forth. “Ta dah! Pretty cool, right?” Rarity gasped. She took a step back. “It's you.” “Yup! It sure is me.” The former stranger looked down and seemed to notice her raiment for the first time. “A suit of armor? Wow, that's a bit on the nose.” “You're... in my dreams....” Rarity held out a hand. “Yeah! Wasn't easy.” The knight scratched the back of her head, chuckling nervously. “So, am I helping with the dreams, or—” Rarity's outstretched hand slapped her across the face. “Get out!” “Ow!” The knight staggered back. “Rarity, what the—” “Get out of my dreams right now, or so help me I will wake up and slap you in person!” “Rarity, I was just trying to help—” The knight raised her arms defensively “—I thought you would be happy about—” Rarity sucked in all the air in the world, and then let it all out in a single ear-splitting scream: “GET OUT!” Her eyes snapped open. She sat up immediately. By the scant light that made it through her blinds, she could tell it was well before her alarm was set to go off, and a quick glance at her phone confirmed the time. A shame, really: her new choice of ringtone was much more calming. But she was in no mood to be calmed right now. Her fists bunched up the sheets beneath her as she looked up at the ceiling and shouted, “TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”