"What can you say about Paprika Blues?" I gave the crowd my rhetoric and expected no rebuttal. It was a funeral procession, after all, kinda rude to interrupt the mare at the podium. The few awkward participants in this sad little corpse-party-sans-corpse awkwardly coughed and somberly looked on.
"You could say she was weird. A bit touched in the head. Loud, and overtly-critical. Eccentric to a fault."
The crowd furrows their brows at me. They're hooked, moving onto the true statement.
"But you'd be missing the forest for the trees. You could inspect Paprika in all her strange little details, and only when you looked at her head-on would you realize she was like the music she loved. Chaotically harmonic. Passionate. Loud. Full of crescendos and decrescendos, and wild splashes of color. If Pinkie Pie had met her, they'd have been best friends, and this funeral would be way more lively."
One stiffled laugh breaks out. I'll take it.
"But the truth of the matter is, she was my best friend. My sister, my partner in crime, and so much more. And every day, I had the.. absolutely wonderful opportunity to witness her put color and life into the corners, nooks, and holes-in-the-walls of this city with her joy of life. And I think I can speak for everypony here when I say that Manehattan lost one of her brightest shining lights this week."
It takes every muscle in my body to not cry. Inhale, exhale, this speech is over soon, I think to myself. I make the mistake of looking up to the perfect, clear sky. It wasn't raining at all today, and it's not what Paprika would have wanted.
She would've wanted it pouring right now.
She loved the rain. Every chance she could get, she'd hang around on the edge of rainstorms and watch it all fall onto the city. She'd dance in the puddles and reach her apartment soaked. She always talked about the rain being a great inspiration for her art. The idea of raindrops cascading onto ivory piano keys and playing a perfect symphony in the chaos never left her mind.
"I.. will miss. Paprika.. Every day. And if I had the chance, I'd fight hoof and tooth to get her back.".
Thick swallow down a tight burning throat. "But I can't. None of us can. That's the fact of life, and Paprika wouldn't want any of us to sit here and stagnate in mourning. She'd want us to see her as a whole life, how much vivation she had, and to smile at how much color she painted onto the streets of this city. And I hope ..!"
Almost there, Maggie. Steady breaths.
"I hope wherever she is, she's resting well and enjoying the arts they have to offer. May she rest in peace."
There's a solemn bowing of heads and polite applause as I clamber off the podium. Some heads look up at me as I move away from the procession, but what else is there? The cops didn't even find her body. There was nothing in that stupid casket to say goodbye to. So I left the scene.
This suit had gotten too damn tight, but it's a rental. I fade through the alleys of this city to the boutique where I got the thing, The mare running the Saddle Row shop asks if anything was wrong with the getup, and I just say, "It was for a funeral. It did its job perfectly."
I pay extra in the tip and make myself scarce before she can offer her condolences. That's the last thing I need right now.
The second I make it back to my apartment, I'm in another argument with Sugar Dust. I don't even have the heart to put any effort into it, and when she says she wants to break up, I say, "Sure! Buck it! I'm moving out, update the lease yourself!"
I pack one saddlebag full of the most important things and wander the streets. I hadn't really digested the fact that I had just made myself homeless, but it didn't matter. Sugar made it clear that she wasn't gonna be there for me, so why bother.
I can wander this city for hours. It's a therapeutic thing for me. I end up at a longue that Paprika frequented to play her improvised jazz piano sessions. Sometimes she played with other musicians, sometimes she didn't.
When we all graduated from Manehattan U, Paprika attempted to climb the ladder and book exhibits or performances with higher crust establishments. She got the buck every single time. Her radical attitudes made her less than ideal material for what was considered "proper art", according to the snobs.
I didn't think it would douse her spirits like that..
I leave the bar. Try not to think of her. Move on, dammit.
Everything reminds me of her. I pass by the orphanage we grew up in together, alongside Trixie and the rest of the class. I wonder what they're up to. I wonder if they know she's dead.
As if right on cue, Miss Stable Upbringing emerges from the entrance and canters to me to give me a hug. She offers some condolences, as is custom, but I don't have room to store them anywhere. I politely drop them on the ground when she isn't looking, but I accept the hug. You can never have enough hugs.
I pass by the ramen shop, a little hole in the wall place where some Kirin have made a quiet living. It was the last place Paprika was seen publicly, before we took her back to Sugar and I's apartment. She was drunk, and we didn't want her to risk going back home in a thunderstorm.
Not enough precautions, I guess. She was gone in the morning and never found.
I find the back alley where Paprika tried to fly for the first time, and fell into a dumpster, ticking off some geezer. I wonder if flight's all she cracked it up to be. For all I know, it's what killed her.
I find a clump of feathers in the alley, blue, just like Paprika's.
Wait.
Those ARE Paprika's. They have the little subtle flecks of lavender at the tips. I'd recognize those things anywhere.
I hurry to them and stop when I realize something is.. wrong.
They're disjointed, twitchy, something horrific I can't even properly describe. Constantly jittering out of place, stretching and displacing in the same spot. Like the very reality the feathers were made of were breaking down.
I decide to not grab them with my teeth. I scoop them up in a paper bag and wonder what my next options could be.
"I'm sorry, but I refuse to study the thaumaturgical makeup of these feathers."
"Why not."
"They look.. wrong. Like chaos magic, but worse."
I'm silent.
"Please leave, Miss North."
None of the professors wanted anything to do with what looked to be potentially fatal magic. They shooed me away and called security for good measure.
Don't need to tell me twice.
Chaos magic, huh?
It's difficult, invoking a chaos god. It's even more difficult to ask a favor from such a guy.
"You have your fun yet, Discord?"
"Pffhahahahaa! No!"
Currently, he had enchanted my compass cutie mark so that the dagger-shaped needle actually worked. He also enchanted the rest of me to rotate in alignment with the needle, causing me to flip around in place as he juggled extremely powerful magnets.
"Truly, you live up to your name!" He kept cackling.
"Y'know, you and P'rika would've gotten along great."
"Oh? Who's this P'rika?" He stops juggling, thank Celestia. I'm stuck at a seventy-two degree angle, but I'll live.
"Don't think you would've heard of her. Paprika Blues. Musician and comics artist from Manehattan. She loved freeform jazz."
"A comedian with good taste? Truly she is already chaotic. Where can I find this mare?"
"You can't. She went missing. Police called the search off last week and declared her dead."
I open up the paper bag.
"This is all that's left of her. Wouldja happen to know what's making them do.. that?"
I show him the feathers. He hums, he hems, he haws. And then he has the balls to say this to me.
"While that is a lovely inspirational piece, I'm afraid I can't say that's my own work."
He picks one up with some comically long tweezers. Examines them.
"Honestly quite painful looking. Not much fun in pain, unfortunately, unless you're the masochist type. I would've suggested the Storm King, if he weren't dead."
He inspected the feathers closer with some novelty sized microscope.
"From what I can tell, this is almost- no, it *is* otherworldly magic. I can at least give you the address for which reality it came from - but I can't send you there. Not in one piece, anyhow."
He gave me a slip of paper that read, "#|¢[ÆÑ €@4Ī±". No idea what it meant. Or how to pronounce it.
"My advice? Find somepony with experience in punching holes through realities. That's not my bag, but it's definitely someone's."
And then he was gone. I was back on the streets of my city. I turned around, and the alleyway I met him in never existed.
If not him, then who?
I wander once more, and see somepony performing at the annual Midsummer Theater Revival.