“Save me.”
That’s what the kitchen said, or at least what Sonata Dusk thought the kitchen said as she took in the piles of food smeared plates and forks as well as the cups sporting the remnants of drinks imbibed. It was a scene not altogether unfamiliar to her. In fact, the pile in porcelain sink was modest compared to the entire massive kitchen-sized disasters she herself had created in the name of making meals for herself, sisters, and occasional guests (most there willingly even!).
Right, she could handle this pile of dishes… It was mostly that. Mostly. Though, the black-brushed chrome stove sported a few tomato sauce splotches and a section of the woodgrain countertop was smattered with flour. Also, a steel pot and baby blue pan sat next to the sink, likewise hit with red sauce. A ladle, bread knife, pairing knife, and chief knife all shown signs of recent use and all three needed sharpening.
Sonata noted with some seething, boiling rage, quickly displaced to ‘the void of hard to escape’, that the bread knife had never been sharpened.
Shame on Mommy Love Tap. Lotsa peeps and pones seemed to think serrated edges didn’t need to be honed, but that was an untruth.
‘Lie’, spazy-brain, just think ‘lie’!
Are you for realzies?! Lie implies malicious intent! Untruth can mean a mistake! Like maybe agreeing to do the dishes and clean the kitchen alone.
Cleaning was usually something she did with a garden hose with a high pressure attachment, a suggestion Mommy swatted out of hoof.
Mommy? Erm… Mom, maybe? Or just Love Tap. I mean, she wasn’t Sonata’s real mom, not that Sonata was likely to ever figure who that was given sirens parents where usually too busy sucking up love to stick around for the ensuing bloodbath that was The Hatchening. ‘Mommy’ also sounded babyish… Little brother Button Mash rarely even used it and he was a bigger crybaby than Sonata… Bigger at being a crybaby, that was. Sonata was over twice her adopted bro’s size.
Crybaby… She didn’t want to be a crybaby… Or rather, she didn’t want to be a baby.
Babies get attention, but not respect…
“Sonata, sweetie?” Love Tap called from the living room, thank you very much Pegasus spacial awareness. “Do you need help in there?”
Need...babies need help. Would it have killed her to say ‘want’? Need implies I can’t do this alone.
Sonata took another look at the soiled kitchen, the cry for help only intensifying as the weight of the lonely task spread like green mold across her psyche. “I’m fine!” she lied, a worried smile appearing as she spoke. All the same, she could hear Love Tap get up from her comfortable seat and trot across the carpeted hallway towards the combo kitchen and dining room. Sonata did not want that. She wanted, no needed to prove she was a good daughter.
You’re going to need help.
The soft-spoken voice was back… She/he?/they weren’t exactly wrong, but Sonata really didn’t need the madness-zone and weirdness to increase, especially if she was gonna be the source. Well, the per-seevid source at least.
It’s perceived. You know the word. You’re slipping towards super-moronic mode. Stop, please.
Stop please! Stop please!
Stop! Stop it, now!
STOP!
PLEASE! ...Please?
Help is on the way. Please accept it gracefully. You can have your greater victory later. Let Love—
“You’re going to make it worse!” Sonata shouted.
“Uh, deary?” Love Tap said from the room entrance as her ears flopped down and cerulean eyes filled with concern. “Let me help with those dishes.” She forced a small smile and began to talk in her sing-song maternal tone, “I assure you I have plenty of experience cleaning up after dinner.”
Assuring, if slightly condescending, statement should be accepted with gratitude.
“I said ‘I’d clean up everything in the kitchen!’” Sonata forcefully insisted. “I can do this, okay?!”
Button Mash’s cheerful voice called out from down the hall, “It’s okay littlest big-sis! Mom loves cleaning.”
Love Tap shot a glare down the hallway. “Button? Maybe it’d be better if you helped Sonata.”
Button’s Amber eyes refused to leave the JoboyTM screen they had been locked on to since the second his spaghetti had been finished. “But moooOOOOOOoooom! Sonata volunteered! And you’re already trying to help! I’m saving a Ol’ McHerdspone’s flock! If he doesn’t get a good price for his wool, his sick children don’t get medicine. And I need just nine more wolf pelts to get a 100 whole gold so I can buy a better sword to kill scarier wolves and get more pelts.”
Love Tap sighed practically in tandem with one of the other girls. “Bro?” Aria Blaze began in an amused tone. Deciding Button’s interaction with LT was more worth her time than the firey carnage and red CarnageTMpone splattered across her graphicgraphic novel, Aria’s dark plum eyes landed on the green propeller-beenie wearing colt with something close to affection. “Remind me to teach you the art of quitting before you take a back-hoe to the hole you dug yourself. Also, fetch quests are the worst. Kill that farmer, ransack his house, feed his flock to the wolves, and rough up the pack leader to take it over and terrorize the bitches of the local court.” She took a goblet of red wine into her forehoof and took a drink to both add an extra layer of badassery to her statement and to remind her she had an excellent prop to use should someone in the house need asserting that a pony was nothing but a ‘miserable pile of friendship’.
Aria also noted that she could get a fire going now that ‘Nata was busy and wouldn’t be a s’more-heating wall of feathers and stupid for her throwing her glass into the fire.
Love Tap grit her teeth. “Button, listen to the first thing your big sister said, but not the second. You have a good paragon run going and—”
“Too late, mom! I killed Old McHerdspone, got a sweet herding staff from his still-warm corpse and I’m already beating his wife to death with it in front of his screaming kids. Renegade for life!”
“My man!” Aria exclaimed as she exchanged a quick hoofbump from Button.
“Ouch!” Button exclaimed, giving his right foreleg a shake. Aria middle-big-Sis was getting better at not hurting him with hoofbumps, but her earthpony strength was deaf(?) felt, still.
Love Tap let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, Button…” she uttered in lamentation of a time where Scootaloo and Gibson were Button’s source of bad influence.
Meanwhile, Sonata’s mental and emotional state had continued to di-terror-err-rate.
‘Deteriorate’, also accept the help, please.
I know what I thought, Mod-thot, and no! I can use this complete lack of attention on me in my darkest hour to prove myself. In a flurry of light-blue feathers and eager forelegs, the sink was turned on, a sponge was hoof-grabbed and soaped up, and dishes were being scrubbed.
Love Tap turned her attention back to Sonata, her anxiety levels rising slightly as she watched the still klutzy pegasus use both wings and legs in her washing spree. “Dear, I love that you’re helping, but you don’t have to go so—”
‘CRASH!’
Love Tap’s eyes shut in frustration at the not unfamiliar sound of something in the house breaking. In this case, a gray ceramic plate with a thick baby-blue rim. Once part of a set of eight now down to six after a Gibson strength booboo and now another lost due to this Sonata Dusk episode. “… fast.”
Sonata looked down at the dish as if she had just earned herself a dungeon sentence. The plate was broken, her heart was breaking, and her soul felt like it had been exposed for the universe to judge. Before any other pony could utter a word, Sonata touched hooves to the ground and feathers to soapy and still food-smeared plate shards and began trying to wing sweep them back into a round shape.
Love Tap’s eyes shot open wide as she realized this wasn’t a simple parental challenge she could solve with some tried and true ‘Momma PowerTM!’ Sonata was having an honest to Luna crisis. With a few steps, Love Tap was sitting next to Sonata. She placed a gentle forehoof on the small of Sonata’s back and rubbed it gently. “It’s just a plate. I’ll get a broom and mommy will—”
“I’m older than you, Love Tap!” Sonata Dusk yelled, her well-trained singing pipes resonating through the house. “By a few, frickin’ millennium!” she added, buffeting Love Tap away with a flap of her wings.
Surprised on almost every conceivable level, Love Tap took several steps back. A smear of something red had been feather brushed across her face, though Love Tap took no notice.
There was a dearth of noise in the house. The sort of absence that allows dropped pins to be heard even if it’s carpet that catches their fall.
This was interrupted by Aria Blaze uttering the word “Shit…”
That was followed by a soft-spoken, paternal voice chiming in, “… Darling, I’d chastise Aria, but her timing seemed apropos. Also! Processing what I just heard with all available internal computing power.”
Her own brain-biocomputer working overtime, Love Tap responded with, “For-for realzies, dear!” The situation with the girls and the tone of Sonata’s statement had her believing it immediately, but the reality of one of her youthful fantasies come true in the form of three mares who were likely all something far more dangerous than she previously imagined was going to take a lot of discussion with her family.
“… I have the coolest sisters ever~!” Button Mash sang out.
Except for Button, apparently. Score one for youthful naïveté.
An upstairs door announced its opening with a ‘bang’. Hooves fell heavily onto the carpet above and the wooden stairs creaked a bit. Hooves fell just as resounding on the light blue hallway carpet. Adagio Dazzle trotted into the combination dining room and kitchen, garnet eyes glinting with anger that complimented the shade of her blood ruby attached via black choker to her neck. Her nostrils flared and she brushed back a strand of moist, glistening curls from her face as all her disapproval was pointed like a loaded cannon at Sonata Dusk.
Appearing like a shadow that couldn’t quite keep up with its master, Gibson trotted up alongside Adagio’s right. Huffing and puffing like something a bit more strenuous than trotting downstairs had been his last activity, his amber eyes attempted to take in the scene in front of him and everything he had just heard. The double-scoop of gray matter sitting in his stallion-skull which thus rested under his well quaffed jet-black mane reasoned out a few things. His pasta sauce/blood forehead-smeared mom was having a day. His adorable little-sis was having a really cruddy day and she was most def technically his older sister.
Also, this all meant that Adagio was probs older than his mom…
… Hot.
“So-nada,” Adagio began with a growl. “That. Was A. ‘No’.”
Aria Blaze swaggered up to Adagio’s left with stress in her small grin and touch of glaze in her plum eyes. “B-word, I just lost a bet and a bank of bits ‘cause of your dumb-a-S-S big mouth.”
On autopilot for all practice purposes, Love Tap attempted to chastise the irate duo before things got worse. “Girls, be way nicer to your little sister…” Her eyes unfocused. “Your presumably co-ancient little sister of mysterious origins I probably should have questioned.” Love Tap reminded herself that she owed her neighbor Princess Twilight Sparkle a visit and that said P.T.S. owed her several explanations.
Sonata rushed for some words or a choice sentence to defend herself and time seemingly obliged her by standing still. In her head, she was being chased by a mob, the old pitchfork and torch-wielding kind that had accused her of being a Witch. A fair cop, but still…
She was bruised, bleeding, splattered with blood that wasn’t from her body, and sprinting down a dark hallway between wrought iron cells containing forgotten but not quite gone shades. A tight-fitting outfit of chipped bones strapped and wrapped with leather. Reaching for a collection of ornate and polished skeleton keys, she slid a key into a waiting keyhole with the percussion of a dagger sliding between two ribs.
Speed was key, too slow and you were dead. Or worse, someone’s prisoner.
On the other side of the heavy bars was a treasure trove of weapons and tools to inflict pain. Cross-bows and bolts of old nicknames that pierced to the core. Flails of spikey memories that would be drop-dead embarrassing to her sisters. Spears, swords, axes… so many pointy things that would cut just as bad as she had been cut.
And then there were the explosive truths; fiery, full of shrapnel, and guaranteed to take everyone down with her.
Do not engage! If you use those to fight back, you will lose this family.
I am NOT this family’s punching bag or charity case! Sonata retorted. Get effing-fucked, Spooky Mod! I’m going to defend myself and then I will need some serious, SERIOUS HELP!
Request denied.
We’re all going to die here. Sonata thought as her heart joined time in stopping.
Aid starts now! Bumpers and damage controls in place.
Give.
Them.
HECK!
“‘Dagi Disaster, I know I screwed up, but at least it’s quality over quantity, you two-bit, over-perfumed slut.”
Once again, if pins wanted to drop silently, tonight was not their night.
Aria hissed out a chuckle. “Damn, ‘Dagi D. I’d usually just say ‘slut’ is roughly your handle, but Sonata’s packing some serious napalm.”
Grimacing, Adagio closed her eyes and brought a foreleg to her head. “Eff you,” she mumbled. The target of said curse was anyone’s guess.
“Shut your goddamn-HailMary,FullOfGrace,TheLoirdIsWithThee-mouth, ‘Ria Bee! You can shove your opportunistic black knighting up your a-hole, you self-censoring hypocritical effig-word b-hole.
Adagio’s long lashes beat like Monarch Butterfly wings.
Aria’s teeth clenched tightly as a death glare burned down her smug grin. “LT, I’m probably going to need a free pass on swears for a bit. That one fucking deserves my S-class game.”
Having found a suitable save point, Button bravely trotted into the increasingly busy room with a heart pounding in pure terror. “Mom, I’ve heard the word ‘fuck’ Onehundred and thirty-five times in the last week.”
“That’s okay, son!” Micro Chip called from the living room. “I prefer loneliness!”
“Snitch!” Aria hissed out at Button, a look of genuine betrayal on her face.
Button Mash looked up, emerald eyes moments away from shooting tears bullet-hell style in all directions. “Gibson’s room is next to mine.”
“Fudge!” Aria exclaimed. “Sorry, bro!” she said, taking the time to give Button the slightest of hugs.
“Uh… Snitch?” Gibson half-accused, half-scowling at Button then turning to Adagio with a questioning look.
Adagio sneered back. “Please don’t distract me with this petty nonsense. If you wanted to have him keep quiet, you should have bribed, threatened, or even talked to your brother.”
“Dear~!” Chip warbled out. “I am now sitting alone, awkwardly, in the living room with a contemplative look as smoke just about pours from my face orifices.” He informed. “Shall I take my mustachio-self to the dining room to share my awkwardness, contemplative look, and headsmoke?”
“That’s okay, darling~!” Love Tap sang back. “I’ll let you know if I need a hasty rescue~!”
“Message received~!”
Love Tap regarded the rest of her family. “Kids, I’m not entirely sure how to referee all this, but maybe the dining room isn’t the best place.”
I seriously can’t even clean a kitchen like a good girl without causing a family destroying cat-tas-trophy GAH catastrophe!
That was mayhaps too much heck. Though the prayer…
“I’m going to overflow!”Sonata closed her eyes and raised her forehooves up to the sides of her head.
Acknowledged. Closing N.O. portals.
“Sssshhhhhiiiiii-TRUCE!” Aria exclaimed. An odd mixture of anxiety and excitement having taken hold of her features.
Adagio’s eyes opened wide as she took in and let out a large breath. “We might need to get Sonata out of this house.”
Love Tap let out a huff. “Actually, I thought maybe the basement would work best for a ‘high energy discussion’.”
Adagio smacked a forehoof against her eyes this time, mouthing out a small “Ow” as the solid mass of said hoof stung on impact. “Aria, please explain to our idiot-stubborn host how potentially dire this situation is.”
“The house might get fucking demoed by a huge hand, or… I don’t know… angry hoof with teeth or something if we don’t get Sonata out.
“I-I’m going to overflow!” Sonata repeated.
“Wha-what?” Button and his mother uttered worriedly in unison.
Gibson’s amber eyes seemed to bounce down the hall as caught sight of one of the doors. “Yeah, let’s not go to the basement where all the expensive music instruments are.”
Sonata’s expression suddenly went blank, then the barest hints of concern entered as her mouth spoke in the whispery tone that wasn’t quite her own.
“Portals entrances not closed. This space has too many individuals of high N>O> levels.”
Aria Blaze’s smile widened from ‘slight’ to ‘scythe’. “Gibson, you really oughta get your guitar.”
“Uh, yeah, sure A.B.” Gibson replied, dashing down the hall like he was waiting for permission.
Aria switched her focus to Love Tap with a head tilt. “Plus, we might be fighting weird... robot representations of our, probs sexual, subconscious desires. So… I dunno. Get ready to kick and punch some big, freaky stuff, and maybe have a few effing bizarre conversations afterwards.”
The muscles around Love Tap’s cerulean eyes tightened as she huffed out deeply and inhaled a new breath. “...Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”