//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7 - Noise Compliant 
// Story: Empathy is Magic, Pt. 1 
// by SisterHorseteeth 
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Sunset heard the noise well before she rounded the right downtown street-corner to bring the tower from which it emanated into view.
It was a spire built in a Canterlite take on the glass-and-steel boxes that scraped the skies along the Celestial Coast. As absurdly-powerful as Canterlot’s Historical Preservation Society was, it could only resist the pressures of modern urbanization for so long. Height restrictions and cladding limitations were the best compromise they could muster. If it was covered in marble and gold and shorter than the Celestial Palace, there was nothing else they could do. The Crown’s legions of paper-pushers had to live somewhere, and real estate was at a premium on the side of a mountain.
This apartment tower was one of many that had popped up in the last couple decades. It was a whole deal between various gentry and some rich Cloudsdale jerk. Technically, each tower and its rent belonged to a different landowner, but the Cloudsdaler took a cut for managing the places and plastered his brand on everything. Thus, the Zephyr Heights “Community” of properties was born.
Sunset wished she didn’t reserve space in her memory for any of this, when it could have stored magical lore instead, but when you got dragged along to enough Courts of Day, your brain got clogged with all sorts of useless trivia about the Canterlite elite. Zephyr Heights was a frequent subject of tedious debates between nobleponies over whether it infringed on their exclusive aristocratic right to landlordship within Canterhorn Province and blah blah blah blah–
Sunset focused on the faint, harsh music drifting down from the twelfth-story penthouse of what was helpfully signposted as |Citrine Tower|. Each growling riff and screeching chord scraped the clutter off of her thoughts and gradually cleared her head.
Smolder seemed to like it, if the bobbing of her head was anything to go by.
Stepping into the lobby did little to shut out the sound, only dulling it. Somepony cheaped out on soundproofing. Every now and then, a particularly-violent strum would shake the dust off the ceiling.
Sunset walked past the receptionist, who, between the plugs in her ears and the magazine in her corona, failed to notice them enter. Nor did she seem to notice the writhing crowd of tenants and neighbors surrounding her desk and insisting she do something about the noise. As angry mobs go, though, they were pretty… listless? As though they were here out of obligation and ritual more than any hope that their demands would be met. Defeat was already in their eyes.
This must have been a regular occurrence.
Fortunately, Sunset didn’t need the receptionist’s help. Cinch had provided the apartment number, which… just so happened to be the same penthouse that insisted on sharing its music with the entire city block.
Sunset and Smolder packed into the rickety, gilded cage of an elevator, attended by an elderly unicorn tasked with telemanipulating the elevator up and down its track. He responded with nothing more than a grunt when Sunset told him to take them to the top floor, and moved his tip jar out of Smolder’s reach when he caught the dragon staring.
The music piped through the tinny speakers fought a losing battle against the penthouse noise and the grinding of the ratchets and pulleys as the elevator rose, foot by foot. Seeing as she had a couple minutes, Sunset popped the next candidate’s file out of her bag and gave it a look-over.
Cinch did not have a lot to say about Lemon. Her cover letter read as follows: |Lemon Zest is the first of the venerable and esteemed House Lemon of Canterlot to attend Princess Amore’s Crystal Memorial Preparatory Academy.| This sentence alone was packed with surprises.
Sunset double-checked Miss Zest’s photo. The wings were still there, and the horn still wasn’t. The Lemons were unicorns, not pegasi.
The Lemon family were also longtime supporters, financial backers, and famous alumni of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. Biomagic didn’t really interest Sunset, but she’d heard of their contributions to the field – and Sunset was pretty sure one of those CSGU students Celestia was trying to get her to befriend (right before the Incident) was a Lemon. That they’d send one of their daughters (even if she was a pegasus) to Crystal Prep, instead – was peculiar. Most likely, she didn’t have a head for magical theory.
There was more, but not much. |She is an undeniably-gifted musician| – further evidence she was the noisemaker – |and possessed of a very sociable demeanor.|
That was it.
There was definitely something weird – perhaps even fishy – going on here. A pegasus from a noble unicorn family went to the top rival of the school her family pledged their loyalty to, after which her headmare had so little to say about her it was a wonder that she was even included in the dossier at all. She lived in the penthouse suite of an apartment whose management somehow tolerated a level of noise pollution from her that would have suffocated a siren.
Before Sunset could drum up any hypotheses, the elevator operator rang his bell. They had arrived.
As they stepped onto the 12th floor landing, Smolder turned around and blew a raspberry at the attendant. “I could’ve taken it if I really wanted to,” she insisted. The elevator operator just grunted and slammed the door shut behind them.
“Are you trying to get us banned from the premises over a hoofful of bits?”
Whatever Smolder mumbled in response was lost beneath the wave of sound that beat forth from the door. So close to its epicenter, the noise had cohered into the distorted wailing of an electrified guitar.
After it was clear Sunset wasn’t going to respond to her mutterings, Smolder leaned against the wall by the door, thumping her foot to the undrummed beat. “I had no idea ponies knew how to make real music.  This is awes– This isn’t half bad,” she hastily corrected. “Garble told me all you guys do is sing about being happy and making friends and stuff.”
“Yeah, well, what sucks is – lots of ponies do sing that sappy garbage. I don’t, but you’d better hope nopony feels a heartsong coming on in front of you.”
“What’s a heartsong?”
“It’s what happens when a pony gets so emotional that she comes up with an entire song to sing on the spot. The lyrics just appear in her head, right then and there.”
“Okay,” Smolder acknowledged, with a hint of nervousness to her voice.
“What’s really scary is when the heartsong comes on so strong everypony around her starts harmonizing in tune. Word of advice: if it does happen in front of you, just try to ignore it. If you try to say anything, you might just end up joining in.”
Smolder’s foot locked up mid-tap, and she got this look like a pony finding out a smidge too late that the abandoned train tunnel she was exploring was actually still in use. “Ah…”
Sunset snickered. “Yeah, harmonic magic’s crazy-powerful, and it doesn’t really care what any one pony thinks. Or one dragon.”
Smolder swivelled her head slowly towards the door. “…Is this going to turn into a heartsong?”
Sunset cocked her ear to what sounded like somepony banging two guitars together to find out what that sounds like, or just for the hay of it. “Doubt it. You’ll know if you start hearing, like, an entire band’s worth of music coming out of nowhere.” Sunset gestured to the door. “This girl’s profile said she’s a musician, so this is probably just a practice session that she’s decided to inflict on the rest of us.”
Though, as Sunset approached the door, she was stopped in her tracks. The smell of ozone, seeping from the seams around the door, brought Sunset back to the night of the incident, for just a fleeting second.
She shook that out of her head rather quickly, however. Pegasi worked with lightning and stormclouds all the time. Though, usually, that was something they did outdoors, away from any flammable buildings.
As Sunset raised a hoof to knock on the door, Smolder protested, “Aw, come on, let her finish.”
“Honestly? That could take ages, and I don’t think anypony’s even gonna hear me anyways.” Still, Sunset hammered the door with as much strength as she figured wouldn’t leave a dent in the wood.
No response came, other than a momentary synchronization between the guitar and the rhythm of her hoofbeats. The waves of raw sound continued to lap at their ears after she stopped.
Sunset didn’t have time for this. Already, the spiralling grooves of her horn spun up their cyan magic, but before the keyhole could begin to glow, Sunset tested the door handle and found it, unexpectedly, unlocked.
“Somepony isn’t protecting their hoard…”, Smolder observed, as they let themselves into the penthouse apartment.
Before Sunset could request Smolder not steal anything while they were there, the screech of the guitar pounded all the thoughts from her skull. The sonic blast had a battering force to it, like if it were only a little bit louder it would strip the flesh from her bones. Smolder, for her part, banged her head to it.
Summoning two aural (in both the magic and audio senses of the word) plugs and jamming them deep into her ear canals, Sunset took in the penthouse foyer… and its smell. There was more than just ozone.
It was a clothes-on-the-floor sty. A pig would demand cleaner lodgings. Interspersed with the knee-ripped jeans and flaking band tees were a number of Crystal Prep uniforms that Sunset sincerely hoped hadn’t been lying there ever since Lemon graduated.
There was a conversation pit in the middle. Besides being a tripping hazard for anypony who couldn’t fly, the piled takeout boxes on the coffee table promised infinite rewards to those brave ants who, marching in trains, carried unnoticed grains of rice and uneaten veggies off to their hidden home beneath the floorboards.
Planters of all shapes and sizes were nailed into the walls and strung from hooks drilled into the ceiling – presumably by the tenant. From these baskets of wet dirt spilled leafy ferns, the occasional flower, and viridian vines of all girths and curlinesses down the grimy wood-panel façade and onto the green-stained, dirt-flecked shag carpet. There was even a jury-rigged sprinkler system, currently misting the plants with water from an unseen reservoir and driving the humidity up to sauna levels in the summer heat.
This… kinda tracked with Miss Zest being a Lemon? The Lemons were Equestria’s pre-eminent lemon cultivators – an exception to the earth pony norm – so an interest in botany was predictable. Sunset didn’t see any lemon trees here, though. Just fruitless vines.
On the opposite side of the foyer was, apparently, a recording booth built into the apartment. The soundproof foam was doing nothing to dull the racket… mostly because the door to the booth hung wide open.
Through its window, Sunset saw the pegasus she needed, laying atop a dark, gray cloud. She strummed her junglefowl wings across the metal strings of a sorta-Z-shaped guitar, which was plugged into that cloud by a winding, black cord. A pair of pink headphones dangled limply around her neck, its own wire flopping around just as uselessly, dislodged from wherever it might have been plugged into the storm.
Her grapefruit coat and lime-green mane were not colors often sported by the Lemon family, whose family colors tended strongly towards the yellow (duh) and favored splashes of pink and blue. “She doesn’t look like a Lemon,” Sunset observed.
Smolder broke from her blasé delivery to shoot Sunset a what-are-you-even-talking-about look. “Yeah, she looks more like a pegasus than a fruit.”
“That’s not what I meant.” A pause. “Okay, that’s sorta-kinda what I meant, but–” Sunset shook her head. “Nevermind, I can tell from the cutie mark that this is who we’re here for.” The strummer’s haunch was marked by a halved citrus fruit, green of rind but yellow of flesh. “I’m just trying to figure out why she’s not yellow.”
Lemon hadn’t noticed her visitors yet. Her eyes were tightly shut in the bliss of creation. Sunset would have to get her attention up close.
But before Sunset could cross the room and get the guitarista’s attention, the unicorn was mauled by an enormous, bloodthirsty timberwolf.
Without thinking, she lobbed as big of a fireball as she could muster in the split second between noticing the beast and it tackling her to the ground, but the shot went wide, and set a nearby patch of carpet alight in brilliant blue flames.
The wooden wolf’s claws dug into her pelt, its mouth scratching her throat with a tongue as raspy as sandpaper. It was the most her forelegs could do to hold its jaws a mere inch away from her jugular.
Smolder’s fuchsia fire soon joined the conflagration, but none of it seemed interested in licking the bark of Sunset’s assailant. The dragon seemed to just be lighting things on fire for the hay of it.
Everything stopped (except for the rock, which did not let up for a moment at any point) when a bank of thick fog rolled into the apartment, smothering the flames, while somepony hollered (her voice straining from exertion), “Bonsai! Get. Your. Butt. Off! Of! Her!”
To Sunset’s bafflement, the timberwolf obeyed, scampering over to the new pony’s side, where, without the slightest hint of fear or hesitation, she gave it a pat on the head.
“Good boy.”
She was a pegasus – though not the pegasus they had come for – and yet, somehow, by some Celestial provenance, she was another of the candidates on Sunset’s list. If the gamboge goggles and steeled fierceness in her equally-orange eyes didn’t give it away, then the deep, purple cloud (or perhaps an indigo flower) on her side, with a violet center and a bolt of blue lightning for a stem, was all Sunset needed to identify this new mare as Indigo Zap.
Not taking her eyes off the intruders, the new pegasus dispelled the fog with several flaps of her kingfisher wings. Taking a moment to slick back a mane of electric cerulean with a peach-colored hoof, Indigo then strutted into the recording booth, bucked the captive cloud into its constituent vapors (dropping its flailing percher to the ground), and shouted, “Hey! Lemon! You got guests!”
The guitarist rose to her hooves, calmly opened her citrine eyes (so there was some yellow, but not enough to convince Sunset of any relation), and waved at the duo of intruders.
“Hey, what’s up?”, she asked, trotting over to flop into the couch ringing the conversation pit. She didn’t seem to notice the scorch marks all over the room. “Is this another noise complaint? ‘Cause like I keep telling everypony, if I play my music any quieter, it won’t be mine anymore.”
Sunset shook her head. “Nope! We don’t even live here.”
“Eh. Wouldn’t be the first time somepony down the block got their barding in a bunch about it.”
Smolder hopped onto the opposite side of the couch, though while Sunset did follow her into the pit… she took one look at her seating options and decided to remain standing.
“Nah,” Smolder said, shaking her head, “keep rocking, pony. That was almost dragon-level hardcore. Almost.”
“Sick, thanks!” Lemon pumped her hoof in the air, recognizing the compliment beneath the draconic superiority complex. Or just failing to notice the latter. “But, so, wait a minute, what’s this actually about?”
“Yeah!”, agreed Indigo, circling around the pit like a seabird hunting for fish, “I also wanna know why you two thought you could barge in here and start shooting fireballs at Bonsai.”
Lemon shot up in her seat, bearing an expression of shock and betrayal. “You tried to set my dog on fire?! Why?!”
“Your dog? That bloodthirsty hound?!”, Sunset exclaimed. “Look, I don’t know how you ‘tamed’ that thing, but you need to keep it on a leash! It nearly” – Sunset turned to look at this ‘Bonsai’ – “ripped my… throat out…!”
What she distinctly recalled as a hulking, long-fanged caniculus of hateful bracken and callous natural magic, twice as long and four times as heavy as the bulkiest stock of earth ponies – turned out, in fact, to be a panting runt of a mutt about the size of Smolder, its barken tongue lolling out of its mouth and its sapling tail wagging as it followed the circling kingfisher.
“Nah, are you kidding? Bonsai was just playing with you!” Lemon turned to Bonsai and stamped her hooves on the couch. “C’mere, boy. You hurt?” The stunted timberwolf slipped away from Indigo and into her forelegs, licking her face. “No? No… You’re fine. That’s right, you’re A-O-Good.”
Without warning or explanation, Lemon Zest let out her best canid howl, which Bonsai eagerly joined in. It was a sound that curdled Sunset’s blood on a base, instinctual level, but nopony (nor anygon) else seemed all that bothered.
When the howling (and the broom handle thumping against the ceiling of the floor below) stopped, Lemon turned to Sunset and said, “Well, no harm, no foul.”
The way Bonsai turned to Sunset and let out the briefest snarl seemed to indicate it thought otherwise.
“And that explains all the burnt carpet,” Lemon continued, with a chuckle.
“Yeah… Sorry about that.” She wasn’t sorry, but they needed to smooth things over. Sunset gave Smolder a ‘your turn’ look.
Smolder just cocked a brow at Sunset, then rolled her eyes when comprehension dawned on her a second later. “Look, this is my first time in your pony land, so I don’t know how you do things, but setting things on fire is a cherished dragon past-time. I just thought we were making ourselves at home.”
Lemon guffawed so hard she fell off the couch. “That’s bananas, little dudette! All good, though!”
“Still,” Sunset noted, prepared to break out the Crown’s checkbook, “I can’t imagine you’re gonna get your security deposit back.” You know, if all the other stuff Lemon did to this place didn’t already. 
Lemon waved it off. “Ahhhh, deposit, schmeposit! My folks own the place! Real old money, you know?”
They’d have to be, to own property in the city like this. House Lemon fit the bill… and now that she thought about it, Citrine Tower was named after a yellow gem.
Things were starting to make just enough sense to annoy Sunset. All evidence pointed towards it being true that Miss Zest was a Lemon. So why didn’t she look like one?
At the mention of vast wealth in combination with financial apathy, Smolder instantly started looking around the room for something Lemon Zest would apparently not worry about losing, but Indigo’s glare stopped that train of thought on the tracks.
“Besides,” Lemon continued, “me and Indigo set my pad on fire all the time.”
Indigo shrugged. “It happens. Now, let’s get back to the point: who are you and why are you here?”
“Right, hi, I’m Sunset Shimmer, Royal Student (and assistant to the acting Princess).”
The hostility evaporated from Indigo’s body the moment Sunset uttered her titles. She took a seat beside Lemon and started fishing for something under the coffee table.
“And this” – she gestured towards Smolder – “is Smolder, envoy of the Dragonlands.”
Smolder waved.
Indigo popped back up with a business card between her flight feathers, blinking. “That. Is a hatchling,” she observed.
“I’m nine!”, the hatchling protested. “That makes me a drake!”
“Alright, she’s family of the envoy,” Sunset explained, trying to move along. “Anyways, I’m here on behalf of Princess Cadance with job offers for both of you. I wasn’t expecting to bump into you here, Indigo, but it saves me the trouble of figuring out how I’m gonna get up to Cloudsdale.”
“Hold up, you were looking for me, too? Cool. Great! Good.” She set the card back under the table like she was trying to hide it. “And yeah, that’s some sweet timing, ‘cause you wouldn’t have found me there, anyways.”
Weird. The dossier had indicated that Indigo Zap was currently employed as a flight-camp counselor for the summer, helping teach young pegasi how to fly – and that she commuted to work from her family’s cloud mansion, also in Cloudsdale.
“Really? What happened?”
“I’m on leave.” Indigo smirked, but her expression went sour. “You know that freak storm we had? ”
“What freak storm?”
“The one that hit the entire Province when the sun stopped moving?”
She was probably talking about whatever unscheduled rainfall had drenched the streets of Canterlot while Sunset was making her move for the mirror portal. “I was, uh… indoors, the entire time. I might have heard thunder at one point” – though thunder didn’t really explain why that rumble that interrupted her encounter with Flash Sentry shook the entire palace – “but that was it. What’d I miss?”
“Ugh. Lots. The long and short of it is: we don’t know where it came from, but this storm showed up all at once, completely out of nowhere, from the Everfree Forest.”
“I thought unpredictable weather was the norm in the Everfree.”
“Well, yeah, but not this unpredictable. We got ponies watching the woods for that sc– that stuff,” she self-censored, remembering there was a child present, “so they can deal with it when it leaves the exclusion zone. That’s why the pros willing to put up with nowheresvilles like Hoofington and Ponyville make the big bucks.”
Indigo went to kick her hindhooves onto the table, but, spotting some kind of beverage stain, she opted to sling a throw pillow down, first.
“So, like, this really came out of nowhere. Clear skies over the forest one minute; then the next, boom: enormous rainstorm all over Canterhorn Province, already crackling with lightning.
“And nopony could bust it, either. Believe me; anypony with an ounce of civic pride gave it their best shot. We’re talking everypony from rickety old retirees to Sunshine Scouts, Celestia bless them.” She beamed with pride. “My dad’s leashed to an oxygen tank and he was out there.” Her smile fell. “It didn’t do squat. Cloudsdale had to spark up the extreme weather sirens and issue a shelter-in-place order. They haven’t done that since before I was even born.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah, now imagine actually being in the middle of it. See, some of the foals at camp snuck off and actually tried flying in the stuff, so guess who had to go save them.” Indigo’s wings curled to point her pinions right at her chest. “And I do that, and bring them back safe and sound, and it’s fine. Or it should be.
“But now, one of the brats? Her fam’s totally ungrateful. They think I endangered the fillies, just because they went behind my back in the middle of an emergency.” Indigo sighed, with just enough of a groan to suggest there was a lot more to the story than she was telling. “They want an investigation into my conduct, even after I hoof their kid back to them without a hair out of place on her little rainbowed head.
“So while the camp owners figure out if I did something wrong when I saved a little filly from getting electrocuted, I’m on a little crash-vacation here at Lemon’s. Get to visit all my besties.” She tried to smile, again, but couldn’t really work it up.
Sunset could relate. “Feels like even if you do everything perfectly, you can’t win, huh?”
“You know it.” That got an actual smile on her face. “Just goes to show that ponies with more than one mane-color are nothing but trouble.”
Squinting at Indigo (and the streaks of cyan in her mane, the little hypocrite), Sunset flicked her red-and-gold forelock to the other side of her horn. “Excuse me?” 
Indigo flinched. “Ehhhh– Excuse you for what?” She turned to her friend. “Lemon, did you say something?”
“Nope!”
“What. A. Mystery. Well, hey, why don’t you get Sunset Shimmer here something to drink?”
Oh! An apology bribe? Sunset wouldn’t say no.
“Great idea!” Lemon leapt out of the pit and strutted around the corner, lost in some groove only she could hear. Her voice echoing from an unseen fridge, she called out, “I’ve got lemonade and limoncello!”
An alcoholic apology bribe? Even better.
But before Sunset could voice her preference, Indigo scolded her pal. “She’s on-duty, L. What do you think?”
“Gotcha!” After a few seconds, a shuddering groan of disgust wafted over to the living room. “…Don’t gotcha!”, Lemon wheezed. “Woulda gotted ‘cha a week ago, though! So, uh, we got limoncello!”
“Look, just…!” Indigo glanced at Sunset, inquisitively raising her brows.
“Well, I was interested in the limoncello, but I gotta admit, I’m kinda scared of it now, too.”
Indigo nodded and hollered, “Just give her one of my rainbeers, L! It’s fine!”
Eventually, Lemon came back, and even though it was she who did all the footwork, Indigo took the credit. “Here you are, Sunset Shimmer.”
“Nice.” Immediately, Sunset just popped the tab on her can of what the barely-legible graffiti-style label called |Electric Cockatrice Lager|, and took a sip.
Predictably, for a beverage brewed by and for pegasi, it was a bit weaker than regular beer. Pegasi were literal lightweights by nature: hard to fly with dense bones, hard to hold onto fat when you fly everywhere. Sunset might start feeling a little tingly, but just one can wouldn’t be enough to flush Sunset every color of the rainbow like rainbeer was supposed to.
It was also way too hoppy, but that was more the fault of the ‘craft’ label on the brew than the ‘rain-’ part.
Smolder crossed her arms. “Don’t I get one?”
Very carefully, Sunset avoided spitting her drink directly into Indigo’s face. Forcing the foam down her throat, she gasped, between coughs, “Aren’t you nine? I think Cadance would kill me if I just let you have one, squirt. Envoy or not.” Sunset wiped her lips on her fetlock. “You’re gonna have to figure out how to sneak these on your own.”
Drinking ages were all over the place in Equestria, since they were set on the levels of counties and airspaces.
Earth ponies didn’t believe in drinking ages, on account of their average body sizes and (comparative) harmlessness. They were strong, sure, but they couldn’t lift houses off of their foundations with their minds alone, or go careening into a mountainside at sixty miles per hour. Thus, airspaces like Cloudsdale stuck to twenty-one, while unicorn-dominated counties veered closer to eighteen. It seemed a little backwards when Sunset thought about it, but she wasn’t complaining.
Canterlot’s Chevalon County bumped it up to twenty, because Celestia wanted to be everypony’s nanny and also because it had the nation’s premier schools of magic in it.
The point was, Smolder was eleven years below the local drinking age.
Smolder crossed her arms and pouted. “Ugh, and I nearly thought you were cool.”
That almost made Sunset feel bad enough to ask for another beer. Almost. Sunset was not lying that she feared for her life if Cadance were to find out.
When she did not, Indigo clapped her hooves and said, “So this job. It’s what Cinch was checking in on us about, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. We need coordinators for Princess Cadance’s coronation ceremony, and Headmare Cinch referred Cadance to you two. Any ques–”
“I’m in,” Indigo declared.
“Just like that?”
“I’m out of a job ‘til the investigation’s done, and ‘coronation coordinator’ sounds pretty boss on a resumé, so. Yeah.” Indigo turned to her fellow pegasus. “You should sign on, too, L.”
Lemon looked up, having distracted herself scritching Bonsai’s belly. “What? I don’t know…”
“It’s not like you’re doing anything,” Indigo asserted.
So that’s what |Self-Employed Musician| meant as Lemon’s occupation.
“Still, like, hosting some super-formal dress-and-tie kind of event… It just sounds like kind of a drag. –No offense,” Lemon hastily assured Smolder.
“Pff. None taken. Trust me, it all sounds super boring to me, too, but, I dunno, maybe you could make it less boring? Show these ponies how to rock.”
Lemon thumped her hoof on the table. “Aw, you know what? I got some bangers in the wings. Sure, tag me in, so long as I get to call dibs on music!”
“Granted!” That, of course, meant the other pegasus would probably be stuck with weather, but Indigo had already demonstrated she knew her way around it. Sunset gave Smolder a grateful nod for the assist, and sighed with relief. She was more than halfway done. “Then I think we’re done here. We’ll get back in touch once we’ve worked out more of the details.
The pegasi acknowledged her with a “Sick!”, and a “Baller. Thanks again!”
As Sunset climbed out of the pit, she checked for ants on her hooves. “Time to go, Smolder.”
Indigo waved a wing. “Peace.”
“Byeeeee!”, Lemon called after them. “Say goodbye, Bonsai!”
The timberwolf howled again, putting a fearful start to Sunset’s step until the door was shut behind her.
The elevator attendant’s change bucket was conspicuously already hidden before they even entered.
Since she’d been blindsided by Indigo’s arrival, Sunset hadn’t had a chance to read what Abacus Cinch had to say about the unexpected pegasus. Pulling Miss Zap’s file from the back of the folder, Sunset took a look at her longer-than-Lemon’s cover letter.
|At Princess Amore’s Crystal Memorial Preparatory Academy, athleticism is held to be of equal importance to intellectualism.| Sunset snorted. |By cultivating soundness in both mind and body, we create students equipped to handle any and all situations thrust upon them.
|Indigo Zap is the definition of adaptability, versatility, and reliability. In addition to captaining our swim team, Miss Zap volunteered her talent and expertise towards any vacancy which arose in our athletics program, whether filling in for an absentee athlete or assisting our hard-working coaches. She has fully internalized the Shadowbolt philosophy: “Loyalty through Discipline and Success through Sacrifice”.|
Of course, a pony who achieved success without sacrifice kept more to her name, in the end.
|Miss Zap’s entrance examinations were quite the demonstration of her commitment to these beliefs, even before our coaches and instructors consciously instilled them within her. As the first of her recently-established family to aspire to such a prestigious academy as Princess Amore’s, there was nopony on which she could rely to prepare herself for her entrance examinations, save for herself. Despite an unfortunate flight accident which left her wing sprained, the day prior to testing, Indigo reported to the testing grounds with neither delay nor any petition for excuse. Not only did she insist on completing all tests despite her injured wing, she passed with all flying colors.|
And she probably delayed her full recovery by another two weeks in the process.
|It is my firm belief that there is no duty in Equestria for which Miss Zap is not perfectly-suited. She is among the pinnacle of pegasus-kind.|
As compared to Lemon, who certainly didn’t get that kind of compliment.
As they left the building behind, the rumbling of the guitar sparked up above once more.
Unprompted, Smolder said. “You know, for ponies, those two were alright.”
Sunset grunted her vague agreement. One of them had to be at least slightly useful. She wasn’t sure if it was the obnoxious slob with the important family connections or the social climber with an eagerness to please her superiors, but it had to be at least one of them.
Tossing her empty beer can in the vague, general direction of what was probably a trash can, Sunset led Smolder onwards to the next pony on the list, her burdens eased by the gentle buzzing in her sinuses and horn.