The sun rose slowly over the washed-out spectrum of colors that made up the Rainbow Forest and its formerly-hidden city of Bridlewood.
However many moons ago - it may have been ten, it may have been ten thousand, no one cared to remember - this city of wood and dirt was morose, with listless, impotent unicorns shuffling from anywhere to nowhere and laying limp upon the shop counters and the slides, pondering the point of their existence.
But today, with the return of magic, the foals skipped and skedaddled, yelped as their accidental levitation made them slide across the air like ice and crash into trees, crystals, and other ponies, and mildly singed each other and unlucky adults with unpracticed magic - though no brains were fried, at least not more so than they were already.
At its entrance, where once hung dozens of signs selected by paranoid and hostile creatures, hung only one last straggler.
BEWARE
OFDOGcHompaPOTammuS
But there was no such thing as a cHompaPOTammuS - at least not that the unicorns knew - and with a sigh and a swish of a horn, this final, wayward guardian was cut into countless pieces, floating away in the rising sun like the dust of a slain vampire, and - as we all wish we might with bad memories - quickly forgotten.
But the chatting adults and laughing foals stopped to stare in wonder as Izzy Moonbow, once the only smile in a world of frowns and even today the faithful slayer of an outdated Cerberus, took her turn to shuffle soullessly along the clumsily-strewn cobblestone, paying no need to the hum of the crystals, the chatter of the birds, or the song of the wind in the now-well-kept bushes.
She greeted no one, and answered no greetings. She went straightaway home, opened her door by hoof - for she was so accustomed to so doing, and so taken with thought, that she never thought to use magic - and entered, pausing only to close the door behind her with her behind, as its wood warped with the season and it sometimes took a hefty push to close completely.
She shambled past the rotating music machine she had fashioned without magic.
Past her newest spaghetti portrait, which frowned at her. (It frowned at everyone.)
And up the spiraling stairs, which had been shaped over countless moons by hoof and horsepower.
She collapsed into her hammock, which twisted and deposited her on the floor alongside her five or six pillows.
And there she stayed, tapping at the floor and sighing.
It had been a whole week since she had first learned of the Harmonoids, and she couldn't stand it anymore.
She'd been telling herself she hated their catchy songs and their slick outfits and their big cute eyes. Their terrible dialogue and their bad jokes that everyone only laughed at after they were explained. Actually, no, she really did hate those last two things.
But she really super hated their constant use of "Best Friends" (capitalized) and the trademark icons everywhere and the constant shilling and the fact they sprung up out of nowhere the instant the three great cities reinstated mass commerce.
Or maybe she was just ticked off that she couldn't talk to any of her friends about anything but Harmonoids, like somebody had come in and sucked their brains out and left only an obedient consumer in their place. Only Sunny seemed to recognize that she wasn't into it, but as soon as Hitch came skipping over to rant about how great Honest☆ was, the two of them chatted away.
Like Izzy wasn't even there.
"This is the worst week of my having-magic life," she said to no one in particular. That was only a few moons, of course.
She couldn't even complain to her fellow unicorns - they'd never heard of the Harmonoids and had no idea what she was talking about. There were no fancy digital displays out here. Most unicorns didn't even have indoor plumbing and they thought of an electrical grid as a demonic hive mind that would suck up their souls. (To be fair, Izzy thought the same thing when the concept was first explained to her.) Naturally, they lacked refrigeration either, which was part of why it was forbidden to keep Windigo's milk - that forbidden substance non-unicorns were free to refer to as "mayshine" or, even more harrowing, "illegal mayonnaise".
If only there were six of them! Then there'd be two unicorns, just like the Heroes of Harmony. Probably. But no, there were only five, and Izzy was the only unicorn who'd dared to leave the forest like that one kid in the legends who didn't have a fairy, so Izzy had no fellow unicorns to seethe and hate Harmonoids with.
Worst of all, "Harmonoids" sounded like something you went to see a doctor for. Actually, Izzy reasoned to herself with a thoughtful pout, that was probably nowhere near the worst thing about her current situation, but it was still bothering her to think about. She wished she could stop thinking about it so much, but she had grown up doing a lot of thinking because she had little else to do, and she found it difficult to stop. Heck, she was still stuck on whether or not beetle farts were part of Maretime Bay's signature scent.
Izzy sighed out her nose with tears in her eyes. Was she being the unreasonable one? She was the only one of her friends who disliked Harmonoids. Sunny casually liked the music, Hitch projected his righteous heart schtick onto Honest☆ and may have been hiding a passion for fashion, Pipp's Pish timeline was full of the stupid things, and Zipp seemed to be bashfully exploring her sensitive side through her weird AFV things.
They all seemed to be aware of the obvious "corporate brand" nature of Harmonoids, but they... didn't mind? Izzy scowled, starting to feel a fire burning in her heart. She liked to be open-minded, but this was something she couldn't understand. How could anyone willfully abide Big Beeswax?
It might seem odd for a unicorn, who grew up in an isolated hamlet with no coherent businesses to speak of beyond sole proprietorships like shops and food vendors, to have any particular opinion of large corporations, or indeed to know what they were. But Izzy, as the one unicorn who'd most made it a habit to explore beyond the fringe of the Rainbow Forest, had learned very early on in her travels that Big Beeswax ate forests. They drilled big holes in the ground. They belched nasty muck into the environment. And they probably left their mayshine out for weeks. They were evil.
And while they were at it, they used some kind of non-magic spell to protect themselves from comeuppance. She shuddered at the phrase: legal mumbo-jumbo. "Bingbong," she whispered to herself, for fear her very thoughts might invite the Prince of Lies to come claim her house with his silver tongue and turn it upside-down with his chaos magic.
She hesitated, second-guessing herself once more. As earth ponies and pegasians, Sunny, Hitch, Pipp, and Zipp ought to be much more intimately familiar with Big Beeswax than she was. They lived next door to them, so to speak. They should know better than her, and they weren't concerned.
Izzy started to cry, and thought again: Am I being the unreasonable one?
Then she jumped up in a huff. "No," she said aloud, "It's the happy ponies who are wrong."
Izzy had always been a pretty good guesser, and she felt that, unlike mayshine, she only got better every day. She was banned from the Bridlewood lottery a week or two after the magic came back, and nobody played cards with her anymore. They thought she was either peeking or counting the cards, and she was miffed because she'd never even thought of counting the cards and that would probably have been a lot more reliable than trying to read them through the backs like those ponies with the tiger-striped shawls on the TB.
And Izzy Moonbow, She Who Bets Not For She Knows Already The Outcome, had guessed five minutes in that these Harmonoids were no good.
She rushed back downstairs. "It's time for Izzy's Big-Beeswax-Buster Kit! Not patented because patents are evil!"
She began singing to herself as she kicked a lump of wood, which quickly unfolded into a table with a rather shrill, unfittingly metallic bwow-wow-wow-wow-wow! sound.
She stuck her head into one of her baskets, shaking her unicorn butt in time with her own now-muffled singing.
I just want you to be happy
Do you want to be sad?
Or am I doing it wrong?
Why are you mad? Why am I mad?
There are no sadder things than --
The butt froze, and she pulled her head back out in horror.
"Was I just singing Linking Lonely Hearts," she croaked with a pale face - and indeed she had been. "Izzy Moonbow, you mustn't get on stage with the enemy... Geez, that song is such an ear worm..."
She stuck her head back in, now silent.