The sun rose over the Macintosh Hills to shine down on a wholly unremarkable valley in which nothing stirred but a lone stagecoach trundling along a dusty, otherwise deserted road. Within this stagecoach the Great, Powerful, and Road Weary Trixie looked out at her surroundings. A dilapidated barn, an abandoned mine shaft, a broken road sign, she thought as she passed each of the respective objects in turn. And, oh, you have got to be kidding Trixie, a tumbleweed? She turned from the window to the map she had pinned to the wall. “North Neighverbrook,” she muttered. “As far from anywhere else in Equestria as you can get.” She sighed heavily. “The sacrifices Trixie is willing to make for her trade.”
At least, she thought as she pulled into the village at last, stopping at the bustling town square where all the local ponies went to conduct their daily business, they should be easy to impress out here in the middle of nowhere. And it's been less than a week. Word of Trixie's recent...unpleasantness...won't have traveled here yet. Probably. And with that in mind the Great and Powerful Trixie burst from the carriage with a bang, a flash of blue, and more than a little silver smoke, provoking the intended oohs and ahhs from the assembled townsponies. Even easier than Trixie thought. “Thank you,” she said, a smirk on her face. “This afternoon and this afternoon only, the Great and Powerful Trixie will be gracing this town with a show. You don’t want to miss this. Tell everypony.” Disappearing back inside the stagecoach with a puff of smoke and some inspired pyrotechnics to a round of applause, Trixie settled in for some much needed mid-morning beauty sleep.
Several hours later she awoke and stepped outside to find herself not in the center of town but rather in a decidedly ugly patch of untilled soil that was ringed with barbed wire and full of weeds. “Ex-cuse Trixie!” she said, eyes narrowing to slits. “Just what in the name of Celestia are the Great and Powerful Trixie and her stagecoach doing on this princess-forsaken spit of dirt?”
From a nearby shack she heard a frantic rustling and the sound of muffled cursing before a disheveled young stallion with a cutie mark in the shape of a gold star emerged, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Uh, howdy, ma’am,” he said in an accent that the Great and Powerful Trixie might charitably describe as rustic. “I’m Fivepoint, the deputy here in this town, and I, uh, I suppose you’re wonderin’ what your vehicle there is doin’ here.”
“Clearly,” she replied with all the venom she could muster.
“Well, y’see, ma'am,” he began, shifting from side to side. “it was parked illegally in the middle of town, so it’s my job as deputy to tow it back here and put it in the impound lot and-” he cut himself off as he slapped a hoof to his face and groaned. “Oh, gosh, how rude of me, I shoulda let you outta there already. Hang on just one second-”
“Don’t bother,” spat Trixie. Concentrating every last bit of her magical energy into her horn, she envisioned the spot of land directly in front of her on the other side of the barbed wire fence. With a gasp and a sudden rush of dizziness she teleported to freedom, pleased to see through the spinning of her head that the jaw of the rube in front of her had gone slack.
“That, now that was amazin’!” he stammered. “I ain’t ever seen anythin’ like that before.” There was a pause as the gears turned visibly and oh-so-slowly in his head. “Say, I ain’t seen you around town before. Would you happen to be that showpony everypony’s been talking about today?”
“Precisely,” she said. “Now Trixie doesn’t suppose you could let her stagecoach out of there, could you? She would hate to have to put on her show without the aid of several props inside.”
Fivepoint coughed. “Wish I could, ma’am, but I’m afraid there’s a fifty bit fee to get any vehicle out of the impound lot.”
“Very well,” said Trixie, “Trixie shall retrieve the money from her carriage.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. “Afraid I can’t let you do that ma’am,” said Fivepoint finally, shrinking under her gaze. “Only law enforcement officials are allowed in the fenced in area. Regulations and all, y’know how it is. Mayor would have my head.”
“But Trixie was just in there,” she hissed.
“Yes, ma’am. A regrettable mistake, ma’am.”
“Trixie would like to talk to the sheriff,” she said after a long and carefully considered pause.
“I, uh, I’m afraid he’s on vacation, ma’am. So the actin’ sheriff would be, well, it would be me.” He coughed.
Another pause. “Fine,” she said, though her tone said just the opposite. “Trixie shall be seeing you again soon.”
---
“Come one, come all,” called Trixie from atop a stage set up in the center of North Neighverbrook, fireworks whizzing by above her head. “Come and witness the most incredible, most amazing, most unbelievable feats of magic you’ll ever see in your lives! Don’t be the only one in this town to say you missed this once in a lifetime chance to see the one, the only, the Great and Powerful Trixie practice her art!”
From every direction they came. Young, old, male, female, pegasus, unicorn, earth pony; they were all in attendance. They came in pairs, they came in threes, they came as whole families, they came alone. It made no difference. Within ten minutes the entire town, or so near enough as to make no difference, had gathered to watch the showmare perform.
The Great and Powerful Trixie began her show out of sight of the audience with the usual display of colored mist and lights set to music full of pomp and energy. Simple, she thought as she heard the familiar unsound of a crowd falling silent. Striking a dramatic pose, she cleared the smoke from the stage with a single gust of summoned wind. “Watch in awe,” she cried, sticking close to her script as always, “as the Great and Powerful Trixie performs magic beyond your wildest imaginings!”
She began as usual with conjuring, a surefire crowd pleaser. Creating first one, then a dozen, then a hundred red roses from thin air, she gathered them into one magnificent bouquet before hurling them into the air and zapping them with a bolt of powder blue magic, showering the entire audience with the petals. The silence of the crowd was broken with a collective gasp, and she couldn’t help but grin. To have them all eating out of her hooves so early in the show and so easily, props or no props - yes, North Neighverbrook had been a wise choice.
The rest of the show went off without incident - a relief after the Ponyville debacle, though the Great and Powerful Trixie would never admit it to anypony, including and especially herself. Afterwards, she sat aglow on the stage, awash in the adoration of her audience. Still smiling the same grin that had appeared on her face as her show began, she continued puffing herself up in front of the townsponies, signing autographs and telling a series of ever more self aggrandizing tales of her exploits, most of them made up on the spot and the others, of course, heavily exaggerated. Conspicuously absent from her normal repertoire of stories was the one about her defeat of an Ursa Major. Somehow it didn't seem appropriate.
She could not hold their attention forever, however, and the crowd began to disperse, slowly at first, only a few ponies leaving at a time, and then more and more quickly as the evening wore on. Soon there were only a dozen or so left to hear her stories and shower her with their admiration. Eventually, whether they had been called home by their parents for supper, had plans with a friend, or had simply decided they had spent enough time with the showpony, they, too, had to leave, and there remained of the crowd of hundreds only a single young mare.
“Wow, your show was amazing!” she said, eyes shining. “Can I...Can I invite you over for dinner tonight? I’m sure my family would love to have you over, and hear what it’s like to live on the road, and-”
“The Great and Powerful Trixie has other engagements. She thanks you for your patronage and asks you to please run along,” said Trixie, cutting her off abruptly.
“Oh. Okay,” said the other, disappointment writ heavily on her face. “Well, thanks for the show, it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen!”
As Trixie watched her leave she felt her smile drop and her shoulders sag involuntarily. The most exciting thing she’s ever seen, eh? The thought led her soon to memories of David Clopperfield, who many years ago would have gotten the same high praise from Trixie herself. A magician never reveals his - or her - secrets, she remembered him saying on what had seemed like a daily basis. Except, of course, to his pupils, he would always finish with a wink and a laugh, a laugh that Trixie had always joined in on. But he did, reflected Trixie, he always did, to anypony who cared to listen. Not the secrets of his illusions, no, and not explicitly, but still he told his secrets. She sighed as the mare who had invited her to dinner disappeared from view.
So it was that Trixie found herself alone on the stage with nopony else in sight and nothing to break the silence but the sound of crickets. Trixie had never liked crickets. She gathered up the bits that had been tossed on stage during her performance into a small bag she had looped around her neck, surprised by the sheer number of them. The town’s famous gem boom, though it had long since passed into the history books, had apparently left North Neighverbrook considerably more prosperous than Trixie expected. More than enough to pay that damn fee, she thought. Good. Trixie hates staying in these tiny villages longer than necessary.
---
“You’re kidding Trixie,” she said, wishing a painful death upon Fivepoint, who at that exact moment would have considered such a thing preferable to continuing the current conversation much longer.
“Afraid not, ma’am. The mayor’s office has to approve the paperwork releasin’ your vehicle from impound and it’s closed this time of night. Bureaucracy, y’know, what can y’do?” he said, laughing uneasily.
“So what you’re saying,” said Trixie, slowly so as not to lose her composure, “is that Trixie will not only have to spend the night here in North Neighverbrook but she will have to do it outside of her stagecoach.”
“That would be about the long and short of it, yes.”
“Trixie doesn’t suppose there’s a four star hotel in this town?”
“Well,” said Fivepoint, hesitating, “we don’t get many visitors here, y’know, so-”
Trixie groaned. “Fine. A three star hotel?” Fivepoint said nothing, unable to meet her stare. “Two?” More silence. “If you think Trixie is going to spend the night in some flea-bitten, one star, garbage dump of a hotel-”
“Oh, no, no, no, of course not. We don’t have one of those, either.”
“Well then, what,” said the Great and Powerful Trixie, nostrils flaring, “do you propose Trixie do?”
“Well as the town deputy part of my duty is welcoming strangers to town,” he began.
“No,” she said.
“And I feel right awful about all that I’ve had to do today,” Fivepoint continued, closing his eyes so as not to see the death glare being directed at him.
“No,” she repeated, louder than before.
“And so,” he said, determined to finish, “it’s only right for me to offer up the spare room in my house to you for the night. My wife and I’ll cook up a hot meal and we can relax, get over this whole unpleasant business, maybe talk a little. I am sorry, ma'am.” He frowned. “I mean, it must be hard out on the road, nopony around but yourself.”
Trixie stiffened. “The Great and Powerful Trixie needs no company, least of all that of a presumptuous, incompetent, gutless, sorry excuse for a public servant like yourself. And you will stop calling Trixie ma'am.”
Though it was about the response he had expected, Fivepoint still winced at its harshness. “All right,” he said, sighing. “Suit yourself.”
“Trixie shall,” she sniffed, marching imperiously out into the quiet country night.
---
Some minutes later, teeth chattering and stomach aching, she began to rethink her decision. It was not that she regretted it, of course. She couldn’t stomach the thought of another hour in that stallion’s company, let alone a whole evening. Truth be told, however, a warm meal was exactly what Trixie wanted most at that moment. “No matter,” she said to herself. “One night going hungry is hardly something Trixie can’t handle.”
As she walked along the town’s main and only road she looked to her left at a row of squat, close-set houses, each boasting windows aglow with candlelight and chimneys puffing thin columns of smoke up into the starry night sky. Her thoughts turned once again to Clopperfield. The stallion never spent a night in a hotel in his life. Always staying at a fan’s house, just like one of these. Oh, they loved it, she remembered bitterly. Loved seeing that their idol was just like them. He loved it too, the old fool, almost as much as he loved the drink. She reached into the bag hanging around her neck, feeling the bits inside absentmindedly with her hoof. ‘Til the money ran out, at least. A respectable showpony, a master of illusions can’t let herself be just like them, or she becomes merely a clown performing tricks, and all that carefully cultivated awe disappears. There’s no bits in this world for clowns, and even less respect.
She continued walking, shivering in the cold, and as she passed by the outskirts of the town a light breeze blew the smell of a hundred fresh-cooked suppers into her nostrils and the sound of a hundred contented conversations into her ears. She wondered briefly how many were about her and her show. He taught Trixie how to live this life and by his own failure he taught her how to sustain it. He deserves Trixie’s thanks, she supposes, she thought as she conjured an opaque bubble of light blue magic to block out the somehow unpleasantly idyllic sights, smells, and sounds of North Neighverbrook and pressed on.
Some fifteen minutes outside of the town proper she found her destination: the old abandoned diamond mine left over from the Great Neighverbrook Gem Boom of 826 A.N.M. like an ancient temple of a lost civilization. Shivering, Trixie sent out a pale blue light through her horn into the darkness. There she found nothing but rocks in all directions. “Hello!” she called into the depths, receiving no answer but the predictable echo of her own voice. Good, she decided, stepping into the rough, gaping mouth of the vast cavern and sealing the entrance with a bubble of magic. Trixie shall not be disturbed. She walked deeper and deeper into the cave along a seemingly endless track of winding minecart tracks rusting quietly in their disuse until at length she arrived at a dead end, the deepest part of the mine.
There she lay at last, pulling an aura of magic around her like a woolen blanket and goose down pillow to combat the cool, damp air and the hard, unforgiving stone. Trixie yawned and stretched, secure and satisfied in the day’s work. Her show had been profitable, her stagecoach, though impounded, would be released back to her in the morning, and her reputation had escaped North Neighverbrook untarnished, heightened even. Still, she could not help thinking just before sinking into a dreamless sleep, Trixie does wish she had a warm meal.
---
Thank you so much for reading. Please don't hesitate to offer any feedback you deem fair, be it praise, criticism, or even death threats. Especially death threats, in fact.
...Please don't send me death threats.