The sandwiches Maple served were arranged on a platter that had clearly been borrowed from a set, covered in an overly-bright floral print that looked hideous on its own, but would be just fine next to similarly bright, contrasting colors. She had arranged the sandwiches themselves with a fanciness to match, each one cut in perfect triangles that were stacked neatly on their edges.
"Uh, wow," Valey remarked, eyeing the frilly plating. "You know we just had lunch, right? You didn't need to go this all-out..."
"But I wanted to," Maple sang. "And it was an early lunch, and it's been four hours. Everyone else is working, though, so I wanted to contribute too."
Gerardo was already helping himself. "No complaints from this side of the table, my good Maple."
Fishy and the ponies she had rustled up to help with the work heartily agreed.
As the tray was passed around and Maple followed it with several voluminous pitchers of lemonade, Starlight got her first look at just what had been done to the house while she was holed up in her room with Fluffy. It almost felt more empty than it had earlier, but this was because there were now things to contrast where there weren't things: a sofa, table and big sitting chair had been dragged into the living room, carefully arranged, and the kitchen held several open boxes filled with dishes, pans and cooking utensils a respectable chef couldn't get by without. A heavy-duty rug had been arranged in the foyer, though Starlight suspected that one wasn't staying and was just for the workers.
There were light fixtures, too, not that the house needed them when it was already fully wired... though after staring long enough at the lamp in the corner, another memory shard surfaced in Starlight's mind: when the house was dark and the sun long set, sometimes a single light was the nicest thing to read by.
"Aren't you going to have some sandwiches?" Fluffy mumbled loudly, unable to speak properly with her mouth full. "They're good!"
Starlight blinked at the filly, the corners of her muzzle wet with lemonade. "Oh. Right. I should..."
"After all that work, we deserve a break too," Fluffy encouraged. "I'll be on the stairs, watching!"
On the one hoof, they hadn't really done any work at all. On the other, Fluffy had just flown home, so maybe that wasn't actually true... Starlight shrugged, helping herself as well the next time Maple came around. Pickle, lettuce and... tuna fish? Her adoptive mother was already helping herself to the local ingredients.
Her train of thought couldn't finish, as she had to duck out of the way of two stallions lugging a huge wardrobe up the stairs, Fluffy getting shooed out of the way with a yelp. "Oops," Fluffy admitted, ears down. "Maybe that wasn't the best place to watch from after all."
"You kids looking for ways to help?" one of the movers asked, stopping and glancing their way.
"Once I finish second lunch!" Fluffy beamed. Starlight sort of agreed.
"Let's see..." The stallion rubbed his chin. "Well, yardkeeping around here has been being done by community volunteers while this place was empty. Kind of a minimum level of service. Why don't you kids see if there are any sticks to pick up or weeds that need uprooting? You could make a game of it, I'll bet."
Fluffy glanced gamely at Starlight. "Sure, we could go outside. Want to give it a try?"
Starlight tilted her head. "And pull up weeds and pick up sticks?" It was a kind of mundane task... but when had she been looking for glamor? "Well, okay."
"Alright, here we go!" Fluffy was away before Starlight could even begin to second-guess herself.
Outside, there was an even bigger pile of things that had been delivered but not carried inside yet, mostly boxes and chairs and smaller things like bedstands, though a bed for Maple was there as well. Starlight figured her bed was probably in the boxes from Fishy's basement. After months and months of sharing beds with Maple and her friends, she wondered what going back to her own room would really be like. If it wasn't nice, though, it wasn't like anyone could tell the two of them what to do...
"Wow. Somepony's going to be busy," Fluffy remarked, surveying the pile. "Look at all this! It's like a flag for the neighbors to see that someone's here." She blinked, her eyes widening with an idea. "We should put a flag on your roof! Or sticking out your window!"
"A flag?" Starlight paused, unsure what that would even look like. "Of what? Where would we get one?"
"You didn't save any flags from your travels?" Fluffy's face fell. "Come on, every region has to have some sort of symbol to stick on a flag. How else do you tell ponies who your ships belong to?"
That was actually a good question. Starlight couldn't remember any flags on the seafaring ships she encountered in the north... though it might have been because all of them were either griffon merchants or sarosian pirates. Neither of those sides would be particularly keen on advertising themselves.
"Well, that's lame." Fluffy looked thoroughly put out. "You could just make your own, though. You remember Canvas Crease from school? He got his cutie mark in kite-making while you were gone. I bet that's close enough to flags that he could lend us a hoof."
Starlight watched her, wondering what it would be like to have a lack of decorative flags be a problem one felt down about. It was such a trivial trouble. If she really needed one, she would find a way to get one or make her own before even considering it a problem. Fluffy wasn't happy with the present state of affairs... Would she be happier if she was more dogged and could easily fix this herself? She decided her new friend wouldn't be. Being stronger just meant you traded out the little problems you dealt with for bigger ones. She wished she could be troubled by not having a-
"Easy peasy," Fluffy interrupted, holding out an open page in her sketchbook with a rough drawing of the Immortal Dream sitting in the bay. For a filly who had only seen it once, the drawing was shockingly good.
"There's your flag," Fluffy continued. "We can tear it out and tape it to your window when we get back inside, and maybe make a better one later. Now weren't we going to pick up sticks?"
Starlight gaped. "How did you do that?"
Fluffy stopped in her tracks, looking around urgently and realizing there was nothing to see. "Uhh... do what? This?" She pulled back out the sketch. "Well, I do practice. Having a cutie mark in one thing doesn't mean you can only do that one thing, you know."
"No, you..." Starlight fumbled for words. How was she supposed to explain that when you got stronger, you just had bigger problems to deal with, and she was envious of Fluffy's only having to be upset about not having a flag, which was so much better than having problems like windigoes or Crystal or fanatical crowds, yet Fluffy had somehow dealt with it even more easily than Starlight could have herself and was completely happy with the result? It was like she somehow didn't even have bigger problems, like there was truly nothing weighing on her shoulders, like she had cheated life itself. Things just didn't work like that!
"Are you alright?" Fluffy asked, the flag drawing all but forgotten.
"Um... I'm..." Starlight swallowed. "No. Never mind. I'm sorry..."
Fluffy didn't buy it, tilting her head aggressively. "What's up?"
"Sorry," Starlight repeated, shaking her head. "You're just so carefree. You got upset about not having a flag and were over it in seconds. I'm a little jealous."
"Oh." Fluffy blinked, nearly comprehending... and then understanding eluded her at the last second. "Wait, how does that work? I wasn't upset. I mean, maybe a little, but you don't have a flag. Big deal! It's funner to make one anyway, and it was just an idea. You don't really need one in the first place."
Starlight's ears fell. "Oh. It looked like you were upset." She definitely wouldn't have reacted that way herself to anything that didn't upset her. Smaller problems weren't worth the energy of getting worked up over them for a few seconds.
"It's fine!" Fluffy reassured, looking more confident. "I'm not mad at you. Sorry if I scared you. Hey, do you want to go see what the yard looks like out back?"
Starlight had no better ideas.
The upkept appearance of the old house's yard, Starlight and Fluffy quickly realized, only extended to the front. It had a sizable backyard, thanks to being on the western edge of town, the ground sloping up from the house's foundation and gathering steepness quickly until the mountain slope formed a natural wall, a rugged fence installed a ways up to keep debris from tumbling down the mountain and into the yard itself. But that hadn't stopped dozens of sticks and larger branches from blowing down during windstorms, and there was even a section of a tree large enough to be considered a proper log. The hedges that separated the sides of the yard from the neighbors' were ingrown, and the only thing keeping the yard from becoming an eyesore to others.
"Woah." Fluffy's eyes widened as she took in the mess. "Did they even check this first? This might be out of our league."
"We can at least move the smaller ones," Starlight pointed out. The backyard was a lot less cleaned out than the inside of the house, left to the wild instead of being preserved like a mausoleum. It didn't feel right, seeing it in this state. There were so many memories for her here, too, but instead of floating in time like scattered shards, they were being choked out by disrepair. "You get the smaller ones. I've got the bigger bits."
She had to change this.
"Sure?" Fluffy hesitated at the tone in her voice, but Starlight didn't wait. Marching up to the big log, she tried to summon the black sword to carve it into more manageable chunks... and remembered it hadn't been bound to her ever since she took off the artifice. She could no longer do that.
But if she wasn't going to use her magic anyway, what was the point of having the artifice removed?
"Hang on," Starlight said, holding out a hoof, more focused on the yard than on Fluffy. "I need to get my bags."
Her horn flashed, targeting the ground, and crystals erupted in a pillar, once again copying Puddles' signature move as Starlight boosted herself towards the first-floor roof of her house. Better to avoid the stairs, if the movers were using those... She only grew it enough to launch herself the rest of the way, landing and catching her balance easily on the sloped roof thanks to Valey's training. She couldn't believe she had once almost fallen off.
Without any effort, Starlight stepped to her open window, reached inside, grabbed her saddlebags and rooted around until she found the sword. It was still in knife form for easy portability, no longer able to be changed without the cutie mark connection, but that was fine enough. Taking the knife handle in her teeth, she jumped back to the ground, using the pillar as a step and letting it vanish behind her. The knife met no more resistance from the fallen log than anything else, and with a few careful cuts she had severed most of the awkwardly-attached branches and cut the base into more manageable chunks.
There. Not better already, but a lot easier to clean up.
Behind her, Fluffy was flabbergasted. "You just... but... You can use magic to jump onto the roof!? And how did you cut that tree!?"
Starlight blinked, realizing she had just accidentally shown off despite barely using any of her power. "Oh. Um, yes, I can."
Fluffy was pointing. "You jumped clear up onto the roof. I have to fly to do that!"
Well, the whole point of the move was to give her some way to reach fliers in a fight... "I can make crystals with my horn," Starlight said with a shrug, pointing at the ground and freezing a little patch in a crystalline hexagon. "See? All I did was make them grow beneath my hooves to lift me a little. I don't think it's that special of a spell. I just thought a lot about how to make it useful."
"That's so cool..." Fluffy mouthed, pupils huge. "How high can you make yourself go?"
That wasn't something Starlight had actually put to the test. "High enough I'd probably hurt myself falling back down."
"But... But you just... You just jumped! Up to the roof!" Clearly, this was going to take some time for Fluffy to process. "I've never seen someone do that without being a pegasus!" Her wings were fully outstretched in excitement. "We could have, like, a hanging out on the roof club! Or... Or somewhere else! I bet you could climb the mountains with a spell like that!"
Starlight could, and she hadn't even discovered her crystals' utility as an elevator back then.
"I can't believe this! That was out of nowhere! You didn't even look like you concentrated! You were just standing there, and then poof!" Fluffy tripped over her jaw, trying to speak faster than it would move. "Y-You, um... Oh. Do you...?" She blinked, finally slowing down. "You probably already know all that. Sorry if I'm embarrassing you..."
It was fine. That wasn't the reaction Starlight was hoping for, but it was the one she expected, and Fluffy was thoughtful enough to reign herself in before Starlight had to take matters into her own hooves. And that was good enough for her.