Ah, Las Pegasus! Now that’s the city for a professional magician.
Forget the pokey podunks around the Mountain, never mind the sanctimoniously hip ‘sophisticates’ on the east coast. Out west on the hem of the San Palomino desert, that’s where you’ll find ponies who truly appreciate a good show when they see one.
Flair and fireworks, brass and flash, noise and color — ponies in the Peg eat it right up and howl for more. The city is built as much out of glitz and glamour as it is of brick, stone and cloud. The tourists who keep the whole mad place alive want bright big spectacles to gape at while enjoying their frozen bananas; the more glitter and scarves and flashing lights you can wave in their face, the better.
So what if some of Trixie's stories may be creatively embellished? Nopony needs reality mucking up a good story! So what if she brags and blusters and struts her stuff? That’s what show biz is all about! So what if she unleashed the power of a basically legal artifact and sort of temporarily conquered a small town in a fit of slight megalomania? Just the sort of grandiose, mythic gesture they like from a stylish conjurer!
Although the larger resorts on the Skyward Strip above had failed to provide Trixie with bookings, her traveling wagon and an empty lot down in the groundward part of the city were enough to draw crowds ten times what would fit in any of Manehattan’s trendy little clubs. And they loved her.
After the humiliations inflicted on Trixie by small-minded ponies in the cultural wasteland of middle Equestria, with its insulated gossip networks spreading slander about hard-working performers, just to stay on the good side of their ever-so-precious, ever-so-gifted, oh-now-I’m-a-Princess-too-by-the-way little —
After the setbacks of recent months, that is, it felt good to perform again for an enthusiastic audience. The renewed flow of bits was nice, of course, but all the gold and gems in Equestria cannot compare to the joy of a crowd who love your performance as much as you love giving it. Trixie’s hooves may have been treading the planks in a simple field of packed dirt, but her heart was once again on top of the world.
And that’s why what happened was so monstrously unfair.
Trixie’s eyes snapped open, for all the difference it made in the overcast depth of the night. Her pulse drummed urgently in her temples, her breath was cold dust in her throat, but she didn't tremble; paralyzed with unreasoning terror, she couldn't.
Images from the dream stayed relentlessly with her, even as the nonsense logic connecting them dissolved. An audience of ponies, melding together in an unholy agglomeration of glittering eyes and howling mouths, rising in a gelatinous wave of flesh to overwhelm the stage. Trixie herself, employing some bizarre magic to swell in size and monstrosity, roaring and lashing back at the audience-thing. Caught between them, a defenseless pony who somehow was also Trixie, yet wasn't; her dream-perspective, flowing loosely between victim and monster, knew the endangered pony had a purple coat and a darker violet mane streaked with pink.
It wasn't the content of the dream, however, that held her locked stiff as steel, but the aura of horror, sourceless and immune to rationality. The palpable fear pervaded the cramped interior of her wagon berth, making every shadow a fathomless gateway, every soft tick of the wood a warning of creeping danger. Awake and alert, she knew perfectly well that it was impossible for the audience-thing to rise suddenly up at the foot of her bed. She knew equally well that it was there, just waiting for any slightest move or sound from Trixie as the signal to pounce.
She managed to slide her eyes to the side enough to see the glowing enchanted face of her wall clock. Just a little past four in the morning.
Oh, not again, she thought, too parched and frightened to moan aloud. Three nights in a row, and not for the first time in the past several months, her sleep had been broken by these ruthless nightmares. Not the same dream each time, but variations played on similar themes: Trixie on stage, simultaneously menaced by and becoming a host of unspeakable monstrosities, and that accursed Sparkle always close at hoof, sometimes a victim, sometimes a mastermind of supernatural villainy.
Mustering her courage, Trixie made a convulsive movement, risking destruction to roll onto her side and drag the sheet over her head, tucking it carefully to leave a little breathing tunnel around the tip of her muzzle. Safe under the armor of linen, she froze up again, scalding tears trailing down her cheek as she realized there would be no more sleep until the terror loosed its grip.
With a tiny cautious motion of her head she wiggled until she could see out just a little, to watch the safe, pale blue glow of her clock. Painfully aware of every dark alcove inside her wagon, especially the dreadful chasm beneath her bed, she understood with fearful certainty that even this slight peek gave the darkness a chance to notice her, and that the tiniest sign of motion in that darkness would drive her beyond madness. But the clock, with its happy design of stylized dancing ponies, was her friend.
It wasn't until nearly six, when Celestia's mercy began pouring light around the cracks of the wagon doors, and the chorus of birdsong rose to prove that the living, sane world was still outside, that Trixie was able to close her eyes and catch a few thin, fitful scraps of sleep.
Far too soon, Trixie jolted from shallow dozing to the sound of hooftaps on the wagon's rear door.
The loyal clock declared, with regret, that it was almost noon. Freed from her terror by monster-banishing daylight, Trixie groaned in fully adult irritation as she dragged herself off the mattress and folded the bed up against the wall.
The knocking repeated, along with a cautious voice. "Miss Trixie? You up?"
Trixie yanked the door open a touch more forcefully than she meant, making the brown-coated earth stallion outside jump back startled. Crabby as she felt, she didn't want to take it out on him, so made an effort to keep her voice and expression neutral as she rasped out, "Yes yes, Trixie's awake."
"Good, good..." said Two Bits. His brow wrinkled and he tipped his head, looking Trixie carefully up and down. "You, uh... you feeling all right?"
Trixie blinked. Bitsy was a Peg local whom Trixie had never exactly hired as such, but who had sort of drifted into position as a publicist, ticket agent and general assistant. Like herself, the earth pony was a born hustler, slick and polished from shiny dapper jacket tail to wax-curled moustache tip. Genuine concern rarely made it all the way to the surface.
"Uch, is it that bad?" Trixie asked, turning to the mirror on the door. It really was. Her mane was in a frightful bed-mussed spray, a minor nuisance, but the dark circles under her eyes and the listless sag of her features made her look centuries older. It would take some of the more expensive cosmetics, and large, immediate supplies of coffee, to refurbish in time for the first matinee.
"Well..." Bitsy's eyes flicked back and forth, searching out diplomatic words. "You look a little under the weather, honestly."
Trixie didn't have the energy to scoff, only to nod in sullen agreement. "No... Trixie didn't sleep well. Not sick. Just tired."
Bitsy nodded, giving her another long look before shrugging back into slick business mode. "Okay, if you say so. Tell you what, I'm gonna make a donut run, you take some time waking up, huh?"
"That would be good. See if they have any of those scrambled-egg taco things left," she said, lighting her horn to grab a hairbrush. The coffee was a fundamental assumption, not worth mentioning. Bitsy snapped a jaunty salute and trotted off, leaving Trixie alone with the mirror. It didn't have a lot of sympathy for her.
She closed the door and shuffled around the boxes and small piles of clothes that carpeted her wagon interior, making her way to the 'dressing room' alcove, where a small counter with an inset basin sat beneath another mirror, rimmed with magelights. This one was no more merciful.
The basin water was filmy with yesterday's soap, but she dipped the brush in it anyway for the first assault on her wayward mane. She wasn't about to go outside to the well looking like a tinsel rat nest. While brushing, she complained under her breath to whatever inanimate objects might listen.
It just wasn't fair. She was a grown mare, she shouldn't have to be fearing the dark and monsters under the bed like a schoolfilly. If she had to suffer nightmares, they should at least be about... money, or health problems, or failed romances, things like that. Grown-up things.
And the dreams, however strongly they affected her, just didn't make sense. The recurrent stage setting? Stage fright simply wasn't in her vocabulary. If anything — if — it was quite the opposite; she was always much more at ease up on the boards than down on the ground with everypony else.
Monsters? Her Ursa Major story may have been exaggerated, but she had encountered dangerous creatures in her travels, such as regular bears and wolves. She respected the danger but didn't particularly fear it; her ability to scare most animals away with simple illusions, or even to defend herself with a staff, had been proven.
Aside from which, she had stood eye-to-eye with a real Ursa and survived. After seeing its thigh-wide razor fangs flash and feeling the cool, ozone-stinking wind of its breath rush around her, there really wasn't much outside the caverns of Tartarus that could top it. So perhaps just a little fear of monsters there, but not beyond reason.
And Twilight freaking Sparkle? Trixie wan't afraid of her. Even 'hate' would be too strong a word. Trixie just didn't like her. Really, what Trixie hated was the way everypony else fawned over Miss Purple Pants, marveling over just how wonderful she was, as though she hadn't been given everything on a silver platter: born and raised in the Canterlot gentry, taken personally under Celestia's wing, heaped with every honor and groomed like a show dog to the royal elevation she had, according to the headlines, attained. None of that, Trixie was gracious enough to admit, was Sparkle's fault, but it wasn't to her credit either.
In any case, Sparkle personally was... just profoundly innocuous. Purple-dyed vanilla pudding in a fancy Canterlot dish. There was nothing about her to inspire the kind of bone-deep terror that shadowed Trixie's dreams.
Trixie snorted and shook her head, letting her silver silk mane tumble forward along her cheeks in preparation for the second brushing assault. Dreams. A pack of nonsense. Perhaps Trixie simply needed to pay better attention to her diet. More fresh vegetables and grass, fewer fried sugary dough things, at least before bedtime.
By the time Two Bits returned with a large grease-stained box of, well, fried sugary dough things, Trixie had made all essential face repairs, restored the sheen and curl of her mane, and recharged, to a degree, the bold shine of her persona. Resolution dissolving before the scent of sugar glaze and cinnamon butter, she made a promise to her metabolism that she would find something mostly green for dinner as she dove into breakfast.
Sadly, there were no tacos.
The ground city of Las Pegasus, beyond its modest central strip, lacked the grand gaudy architecture of the cloud city hovering above it, but it did have a great attraction amid the San Palomino border scrubland: the cloud city hovering above it. Beneath the broad, gently misting canopy of the Skyward Strip, even at the height of summer, ponies could gather on the treeless lot to watch Trixie's performance without suffering the desert heat.
With twenty minutes left before the first show of the afternoon, a fair-sized crowd had already gathered, perhaps fifty to sixty ponies at five bits a head — two, for foals shorter than Trixie's raised hoof on the plywood sign by the ticket table. The lot was on the edge of development, where Trixie needed only a permit from the city, not a rental of the land, to park her wagon and stake out audience space with a simple fence of dowels and banner-laden twine. And a second permit, from a different office, to sleep in her wagon there, but even that was cheaper than renting a space closer to the center of town.
"That's right folks, seventeen minutes to go for the most astonishing spectacle of the modern age! Come and see with your own eyes the wonders of Equestria, brought to life for you by the mystifying, the enchanting, the Dark Overmare of Ponyville herself, the Great and Powerful Trrrrrixie!"
Bitsy's fast-talking cousin, perched on a soapbox dais beside the ticket booth, was good. Trixie didn't even have to write that spiel for him. Passers-by were not thick on the ground — hoof traffic passing the lot consisted, for the most part, only of those tourists who followed one of the side streets off the central strip to see if there was anything interesting out that way, which there basically wasn't — but the barker was doing a good job of waving them in with sweeps of his old-fashioned straw hat.
Other relatives and cronies wandered the crowd with trays and carts, or called out pitches from lotside stalls, peddling refreshments and souvenirs, juggling, dancing, offering games of chance. Of course it was obvious that Two Bits was using Trixie's show as a convenient source of gigs for his family and chums, but he wasn't fleecing her; she got a fair percentage of the sales, and the advantage of a lively encampment, with an attractive fairground atmosphere.
Flat on her back below the stage, with only a narrow strip of carpet to protect her mane from the bare dirt, Trixie growled and spat curses at her stupid new wagon. The old one, a marvel of dramatic mechanics, was made to spring open into a full-sized, ready-to-use stage, complete with mechanical music and firework fanfares, all at the pull of a cord. But that one had been taken by cruel fate, smashed to splinters by a certain great star-beast.
The new wagon had a side wall that folded down, making a simple stage. It was otherwise just a box with wheels. To put on a proper show she had to park it and build the real stage setup around and under it, using big clunky folding rigs of wood and iron that were a pain to pack for travel. And before each performance, Trixie had to crawl like a bug under the stage in order to rig the firework fuses.
She refined the setup after every show, doing the mechanical work herself whenever she could afford the materials, so the new wagon was getting more tolerable all the time. But it was still a long, long way from replacing the old wagon and its many tricks. Trixie reminded the wagon of its inferior status, in less than polite terms, as she sweated over the twining and placement of fuse cord.
Long legs of shadow flickered across the canvas sheet that curtained the side of the stage. Trixie turned toward the motion, only to get blasted in the face with sunshine as Two Bits raised the curtain and bent to peek into the crawlspace. Her scowl, scrunched up against the light, was of monumental ferocity, but peering into his own shadow Bitsy was spared a clear brutal view of it.
"You all good to go, Miss T?" he asked, employing one of the allowed nicknames. Trixie flapped a hoof at him.
"Of course Trixie is good. She can do one of these low-key matinee shows in her sleep," she declared, before sabotaging her point with a cavernous yawn. Rolling her eyes, she added, "Another half-cup of coffee and Trixie will be ready to flatten these rubes."
"Fan-tastic. Curtain time in ten minutes, then." He dropped the curtain, blinding Trixie again with the sudden shadow.
"Ten minutes. Fannn-tastic," Trixie growled to herself, stifling another yawn as she finished with the firing timers.
Trixie will admit that stage magic and sleep deprivation are not the wisest combination. On the other hoof, making mistakes with stage devices risks merely injury and embarrassment, whereas canceling a show just because one 'feels tired' would be unprofessional.
Trixie employs in her act a blend of unicorn magic and effects produced by mechanics and chemistry. There's a game the stage magician can't win: unicorn audiences think it's cheating to use devices for 'fake' magic; earth ponies think it's cheating to use fancy horn magic in place of clever engineering and skillful sleight-of-hoof.
(Pegasi don't care how an explosion is made, they just never think it's big enough.)
Some choose to specialize in pure artistic magic, others focus on the material craft, but Trixie is among the majority of professionals who employ whatever best suits the show. Even the non-unicorns make use of potions and enchantments, along with clever and marvelous applications of their more subtle natural magics.
It is true, as some in the unicorn arts community would point out, that if Trixie's act were focused purely on horn magic, she would have been fine to perform that afternoon. Devices have no response to one's intention or emotion; they don't do what you will them to, only what you've made them to do.
If, for example, one misses her mark and stops with her hoof against the base of the firework rack, instead of the small discreet lump further upstage against which she's supposed to put her hoof to make the trick work, the mechanical device cannot do anything to correct for the error. Illusionary fireworks go wherever the caster wishes them to, while gunpowder fountains just shoot sparks where they're pointed, even if there's a flapping cape in the way.
But it is true also that none of it would have happened if Trixie had been a banana. There's no real point in discussing what could have been.
Fortified by the prescribed half-cup more of coffee, Trixie sprang onto the stage in a cloud of smoke, feeling perhaps not her peppiest, but more than ready to take on the show. At the climax of her introductory spiel, she flipped back her cloak and spread her forelegs wide in perfect time with the first fountain of sparkles. If all had gone correctly, the audience would have been cooing in wonder, having seen her thick fabric cloak transform to a pair of sweeping, shimmering ethereal wings. Not the most jaw-dropping illusion in her repertoire, but a good dazzle to start off the show.
Instead, they were pointing and gasping in alarm. The cloak was still draped over her shoulders, not whisked away by the hidden gimmick. And the cloak was hot, very hot, it was burning; Trixie jumped but the flames followed her, they were licking up the edge of the cloak, and spreading onto the hair of her leg, she was burning! And then her other foreleg was swinging over air, as she had jumped all the way to the front of the stage, and she was still on fire when she tumbled off.
It all gets very jumbled after that.
Trixie remembers what happened, in general, but the memory is of confusion. Scraps of incident floated by in a blurry context soup: spectators screaming, fire extinguishers spraying, sirens wailing, an ambulance ride, a gurney, a bed. Trixie's leg, blackened and blistering, screamed for her attention far more effectively than anything happening around her. Doctors murmured. The ceiling moved around. Trixie's cloak was replaced with a green paper gown. A nurse hovered up to the green bed and dealt Trixie a sudden sharp thin pain in the shoulder.
"What was that?" Trixie asked, eyeing the retreating needle suspiciously.
The nurse gave Trixie's hoof a comforting pat. "Just something to ease the pain and help you sleep."
"Help me sleep?" Trixie's voice came out thinner and weaker than she'd like.
"Mm-hmm, that's right. You just relax now." The nurse smiled warmly and slipped away, drawing closed the green curtain around Trixie's bed as she went.
Trixie dropped her head to the pillow, feeling it grow heavier already, black swirls of unconsciousness seeping up around her like ink spreading in water.
"Oh, no..."