6. Changes
It is one’s responsibility as a friend to be supportive.
It is one’s responsibility as a friend to be honest.
“Friendship isn’t fair.”
Octavia shivered as a burst of wind blew through her open window, dropping the temperature of the room for a few seconds before the temperature enchantments reasserted themselves.
She could have closed the window, of course, but that would have meant sacrificing the view.
From her window Octavia could see the streets of the city of Canterlot, deserted and devoid of life, abandoned by the ponies in exchange for shelter from the cold and snow. It was a picturesque image, serene and placid, just barely noticeable behind the multitude of ponies making their way across the school’s main courtyard.
The winter weather raged on as if in defiance of the inevitable spring, which would bud and prosper in the coming months, its efforts wasted on the youthful ponies with more important matters to attend to than noticing the climate. After all, most hadn’t seen their friends since the ending of the previous semester, a fact which was remedied by a myriad of snowball fights and conversations.
Octavia watched as friends reacquainted themselves and as newly enrolled students eyed the campus and their peers with a mix of nervousness and glee at finally being allowed into Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. It was a curious feeling, one that the cellist remembered quite well, and one that she figured every new student went through as a rite of passage.
“I’m not ready to apply just yet, but come the next school year I’ll be taking classes right next to you – that is, if they don’t just give me the degree I need when they see what I can do with this lovely thing.”
The cellist groaned while covering her ears, a recently acquired reflex.
She cast another glance at the ponies outside, trying to imagine her lifelong friend walking amongst them. She found herself unable.
“I’m very glad that you liked that concert you went to as much as you did, and that you’re this passionate about this style of… music. But I don’t think this is what the school is looking for.”
“You weren’t what they were looking for either and you got the solo on that concert thing. Talent is all that matters and with this synth, I will earn my way in.”
“I’m sure you will, Vinyl.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you don’t have the talent to get in, it’s just that your choice in… music, it’s-“
“Will you please stop that?”
“Stop what?”
“Hesitating every time you’re about to say music.”
“I’m no-“
“Yes, you are. You really don’t think I can do it then?”
Honesty, or support?
“Fine, don’t answer. Your train is here anyway. Have fun in Canterlot with all your new friends who play ‘proper’ music.”
Octavia took a deep breath batting away the memories.
“And to think we almost made it through the entire Hearth’s Warming break without a fight,” she mused.
She wasn’t particularly worried; after all, a fight between the two happened often enough that it could be considered a normal occurrence. Vinyl would get over it and all would be well, as long as Octavia apologized first. With a resigned sigh, the cellist placed a sheet of paper on her desk, grasping a pencil in her mouth.
“You are not about to write something with your mouth.”
A sharp yelp filled the room as Octavia simultaneously turned and backed away from the voice, causing her to fall off her chair, after which she threw her deadliest glare at the pony perching at her window.
“And this is exactly why I love being a pegasus,” he said.
“I have a door, you know,” Octavia grumbled, picking herself off the floor. “You could use it sometime.”
“And give you fair warning?” Slant responded. “Not a chance. Besides, you don’t have a door. The school has a door, you’re just borrowing it.”
“Mental note, lock window shut,” Octavia thought to herself.
“Anyway, I thought I told you to use your hoof every chance you got,” Slant continued. “I guess that means that those letters I got were-“
“No, those were hoof written,” Octavia responded. “I’ve been doing just as you taught me, I just forgot for a minute. Speaking of the letters, why did you write so many? It was only a few weeks.”
“Why are yours always so long?” Slant said, shrugging. “Besides, you need the practice; I had to decipher your squiggles.”
“I just think it was a bit much,” Octavia pressed on. “Did you really miss me that much or did you just not have anything else to do but write letters?”
“I have two modes of interaction: either ignore, or this,” the pegasus said. “Just because you’ve bugged me enough to make the switch once does not mean I won’t switch back.”
“Fine, I’ll keep my complaints about your clinginess to a minimum,” Octavia said. “So, are you here for a reason, or just to make sure I wasn’t breaking your training regimen?”
“I was going to ask if you wanted to go eat dinner together, since we’re friends now and all,” he began. “But I’m starting to regret it.”
Octavia stared for second, eyes wide at the proposition. Slant looked away, concealing a small blush and an uncomfortable clenching of his teeth.
“You’re really not used to having friends, are you?”
“Fine, I’ll go eat on my own,” he shouted, fixing his jacket. “Not sure why I thought this was a good idea in the first place.”
“Oh, calm down,” Octavia said, suppressing a giggle. “I’m just teasing. I’d love to go have dinner with you. Just let me grab a jacket and we’ll be on our way.”
She waited for a response, but received none. Still, the pegasus visibly calmed down and made his way to Octavia’s doorway where he waited for her to get ready. After donning a comfortable jacket and running a brush through her mane a few times, Octavia glanced at herself in the mirror before leaving her room with Slant following behind.
“So, what were you about to write?” Slant asked. “It can’t have been a letter to send back home; you just got back today.”
“Actually, it was,” Octavia answered. “A friend from back home and I got into a bit of an argument right before I left. Well, she got angry at me while I said nothing, but for us it’s the same thing, really. Anyway, I just need to apologize to her for how I handled things and she’ll apologize for losing her temper.”
“Sounds rehearsed.”
“By this point it might as well be, but it works for us and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said smiling. Octavia turned to face Slant after hearing what sounded like a gagging noise, but the pegasus showed nothing suggesting as such, except for his smirk. Deciding not to press the issue, she changed the topic. “So, how sad are you now that your punishment is over?”
“A surprising amount considering that it means nothing while I’m at school, with the lack of social functions and the like,” Slant admitted, his smile disappearing from his lips. “This was the best Hearth’s Warming break I’ve ever had.”
“It sounded like it from what you wrote about it.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Slant said. “I got to miss both the pageant and the after party. I never get to miss those two events because of ‘family expectations’ and such other nonsense, meaning I usually spend the holiday being forced to make idle chitchat with ponies who want to be me or want me dead. And I got to miss it!”
“We just have to make sure we get you grounded right before summer break then,” Octavia said, giggling. “Maybe you could assault another noble.”
“Nah,” Slant said, shaking his head. “After meeting Major they might just give me a medal next time instead of grounding me.”
“Oh, right, you did tell me the conference was going to be yesterday,” Octavia said. “How did it go?”
“Well, they didn’t expel him or anything,” Slant responded. “He’s on probation, as am I, though for him it means more seeing how he’s about to graduate. As I told you, they won’t kick us out, but they did threaten to cancel his curriculum and keep him an extra year.”
“It’d serve him right,” Octavia mumbled tersely. “So, did he bring me into it?”
“No and I’m not sure why,” Slant responded, shaking his head. “I didn’t want to tell you this because I didn’t want you to worry, but I’m not sure I could have fooled them into believing our story if he told them you beat him up, given the state I was in and the… severity of his injuries.”
“So all he had to do was say the word and I would have been thrown out?”
Slant nodded.
Octavia bit her lip in thought.
“So is there anything I should be worried about?”
“The matter has been decided, so no,” Slant responded. “He told them that I did it, so that’s what’s in the book. Any change to his story will now seem like a lie, meaning you’re in the clear without any repercussions for your actions. Well, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Yea,” Slant said, in such a somber tone that Octavia had to remind herself to keep walking alongside him. “My parents were really curious about you since I went through so much trouble, and physical injury, to help you out. They want you to come over for dinner sometime.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“They’re going to make a big deal out of you being my first real friend, so yes,” he said. “Don’t worry, though – I’m going to make sure to postpone that sad event for as long as I can.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Octavia said with a smile. “Maybe we should go there tonight instead of eating here at school. If I recall, you live very close by.”
“For starters, we’re already here,” Slant said, rounding the corner. Immediately the sounds of chatter and ponies eating filled the room, pulling at Octavia’s attention. “Also, eat hay.”
“I wasn’t aware they served hay at this school,” the cellist responded. “I was under the impression that it was too common a food to serve at such a fine institution.”
She struggled hard against her impulse to laugh as Slant glowered at her and walked away towards one of the lunch lines.
“This semester is going to be different from the last one,” she thought to herself as she followed the pegasus. “I cannot wait.”
Analogy Assignment #5: Write about a story or saying that serves an analogy to a life experience of yours.
A good friend of mine once told me about some of the annoying things about videogames, one of which was the frustration at “figuring a game out.” She told me that with a lot of games, once you got good enough at them or you figured out the trick to passing them, they lost all replay value, and that there were few things as sad as finding out that your favorite game had lost all of its appeal because it ceased to be a challenge. Well, I might be paraphrasing, but I feel like I captured the sentiment well enough.
She also told me that a way to experience that feeling firsthoof was to pass a level at a “hard” difficulty, and then play that same level at an “easy” difficulty.
I have never been much for gaming myself, having lacked the bits or the interest for such things, but that conversation has been stuck in my mind as of late, and I do finally understand what she meant. There’s something lacking when one drops the difficulty level.
Now, don’t get me wrong. At first, it is great. The feeling of coasting through things that used to stress you out or outright stump you is exhilarating and euphoric at first. For example, learning to write by hoof, shaky as my penmanship still is, allows me to better keep up with my classes, meaning I do better with less studying. Another example is the fact that my performance at the Hearth’s Warming concert has assured that short of completely falling apart during my next examinations, I will be fine until at least the next year, letting me relax during my music classes. Even some of my money troubles have gone away, replaced by a new cello, strings, and other necessities – gifts from a few sponsors.
The feeling is indescribable, and it lasted for about three weeks.
Then it became a routine – the same routine I’ve always had, but without the challenge. It’s actually kind of funny to think about, that the stress was all that made things interesting, but I guess it’s true since that was all that ever changed. Now it’s all the same, predictable, boring.
Much like a game I keep replaying despite knowing how to beat it.
“Okay, that seems like enough time.”
Octavia looked up to face the professor as did the rest of the class, with the exception of Slant, who was, much like always, still writing away with his quill.
“Anyone want to share what they wrote?” the professor asked.
The cellist read over her entry, contemplating sharing it with the class. In the end she decided against it, finding the entry to be far too personal. With the silence growing and with the lack of volunteers, the professor turned to his main lifeline in the class.
“How about we start with you, Slant?”
A smile spread across Octavia’s face, her ears perking up in anticipation. After all, thrashing Slant’s work was still her favorite class-time activity, with Slant purposefully leaving something in each assignment for her to pick up on as both a challenge and a game. Her anticipation, however, turned to disappointment when the pegasus did not begin to read.
“I would professor,” Slant began. “But… you might want to look at the clock.”
“Oh my, is it that late already?” the professor exclaimed. “It seems I let you all write for far too long this time. No matter. We’ll just read over them first thing next class period, meaning that if you hadn’t finished writing or had yet to start, you have time to get your work done.”
A few ponies shifted uncomfortably before the professor dismissed the class.
Octavia waited for Slant at the door.
“And with that, I’m done for the day,” Octavia said readjusting her saddlebag.
“Lucky,” Slant commented. “I’ve got two more classes today, and one of them is a three-hour one.”
“I take it you won’t be at the room tonight, then?”
“No, I should be done with everything long before our usual meeting time,” he responded. “Why? Is something wrong?”
“Not really,” Octavia said. “Just want to talk to you about this thought I had during class today, about how everything just seems to fall into a routine and how boring it all gets.”
“Leave it to you to find a way to complain about a lack of stress,” Slant said, dismissively. “Fine, we’ll talk about it, but right now I need to get to class.”
Octavia waited for Slant to walk away before making her own way back home, distracted by her thoughts.
“Am I just making a mountain out of a molehill?” she thought to herself. She then turned around a corner, doing her best to ignore the rest of the students which were walking a bit too close to her liking. “I mean, there’s always that saying, ‘no news is good news’.”
“Excuse me.”
“And it’s not like being under constant distress did anything to stop me from falling into a routine last semester,” she mused. “If anything, it helped me cope with the fear of being kicked out.”
“If I could just have a moment.”
“But I can’t really be blamed for wishing that something would change every once in a whi-“ Octavia thought but stopped as she accidentally bumped into another pony. The impact was enough to break her train of thought long enough to notice that she had knocked him down.
“I am so sorry!” she began. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was lost in thought, is all. I really did not mean to knock you over.”
Octavia helped the unicorn up, taking a good look at him for the first time. He looked to be a year or so older, with a light green coat, a dark green mane, and a brown quill cutie-mark. He also wore a sheepish smile.
For a second, Octavia forgot how to breathe.
“It’s quite alright,” he began. “I kind of put myself directly in your path, so there was no way you weren’t going to crash into me. I figured that was the best way to get your attention, seeing how everything else failed.”
The cellist stared for a moment, lost for words. Her attention shifted between trying to form a response and trying to feel her own heartbeat, which had either stopped completely or was beating at too rapid a rate for her to notice.
“You wanted my attention?” she asked finally.
“Yea,” he said. “I was at the Hearth’s Warming concert, well, most of us were, and you made such an impression that you’re still being talked about whenever the subject of music comes up. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that you were amazing and that I cannot wait for your next performance. I would have told you so sooner, but I hadn’t seen you around until just now, which is why I didn’t want to miss this chance. Oh, and I think we should hang out sometime, if you want, that is. Otherwise, that’s totally cool too.”
In her mind, Octavia had a plethora of words and phrases at her disposal. And yet, she found herself unable to use them. She was even having trouble focusing on what the unicorn was saying. All that she could focus on was the faint feeling in her gut, his eyes and his smile – both of which were waiting for an answer.
“Yes,” she responded quickly. “That sounds nice.”
“Awesome,” he said. “I have to head to class, but I look forward to hanging out with you some other time. “
“Sure thing, some other time,” Octavia said. “Oh, and thank you… for the compliment about my performance.”
“No problem,” he said. “See you around.”
Octavia watched as he walked away, unaware of those ponies walking past her in either direction, and solely focused on how lightheaded she suddenly felt.
“So much for routine.”