"Good game," Sour said, gathering everyone's cards and shuffling the deck back together. Similar comments came from the rest of the group as well.
"You just had to keep pushing on the bid, didn't you?" asked Sunny, sitting straight again.
"Hey, it worked," Indigo replied, crossing her arms behind her head. "You did lose because of that. I just had no idea you'd pick me."
"We could have won if you hadn't set the bar that high." Sunny poured herself another glass of the yet unidentified drink.
"You're the one who chose to keep up with me. You should have known better," replied Indigo. "I could have won if you hadn't set the bar that high. Although I would have called the Ace of Swords."
"Oh. That would have been me," said Applejack.
Sour finished shuffling the deck and placed it back on the table. "I wonder if you would have been less obvious about it."
"Sugarcoat's always good at that. You just can't get a read on her face when she's really trying," Lemon said.
Applejack opened her mouth, but was silent for a moment. "I'm not just a replacement for her, right?"
From across the table, Sour looked at her. "Are we replacements for your friends?"
Everyone was silent for a short while. Before either Lemon or Indigo had a chance to attempt to lighten the mood with potentially horrible results, Sunny spoke. "I think we feel the same way you do about this. We're missing something, and we found a way to fill that hole that's similar enough to what was there before, but we don't want it to be or feel like just a replacement. Denying that the similarities at play are influential to this would be wrong, but that doesn't mean there aren't genuine intentions beyond them."
Applejack nodded. "Yeah. Sorry if I brought that up."
"Hey now, better to bring things up and resolve them than to let feelings fester into a dark blob of irrational emotions that ends up swallowing you and clouding the way you see things until either everything eventually breaks down in the worst way possible or your inner self crumbles under the pressure of unspoken worries." Lemon offered Applejack a thumbs up.
Applejack's mouth silently opened and closed for a moment. She understood the message, but was mostly puzzled by its source.
Indigo evidently noticed that. "Lemon can be really deep sometimes. Usually on accident."
"It's like necrosis," Lemon continued. "You'd rather chop off a finger than wait and have to remove the whole arm once it spreads there. Or like cutting away the rotten part of an apple. Or when you accidentally leave leftover food in the oven and forget about it for a couple of days and when you find it again it's growing mold but only on one side so you take that away and still eat the rest since it's usually still pretty good and it would be a waste to throw it away."
"And then she goes and ruins it like that." Indigo sighed, leaning back into her chair and looking towards the ceiling.