“These are the best!” Fairweather declared as she reached down for another mouthful of biscuit.
“Mom” smiled, thin wrinkles appearing around her eyes. “We’re glad you think so.”
Copper Flash’s house wasn’t very roomy, but that was understandable given this city’s population density. The furniture was small and quaint, and seemed like it was trying its best to fit into the living room’s space. It did fit, but barely. Although there wasn’t much more stuff than I’d expect to see in any normal house, the cramped quarters brought everything closer together and made it feel full. It made me feel claustrophobic in addition to anxious.
We were all seated in the living room, with Fairweather and I facing Copper’s parents. His dad was a tall, slightly stocky unicorn with red fur and short yellow hair, and spoke with the smallest hint of worry. His mom was a skinny blue horse with a wood bead necklace and caring violet eyes. She apparently also liked to bake, for she had offered us all golden-brown biscuits.
I looked down at my biscuit. I’m sure a lot of love went into it, but I wasn’t very hungry. I pushed it towards Fairweather, who had just finished devouring hers and looked ready for another.
“Are you sure you don’t want another bite, dear? They’re whole wheat biscuits with honey: your favourite,” Mom said, smiling. She gently pushed up her shiny lime hair.
She must have been putting it politely; I hadn’t taken any bites. But, to convince her that I was her son, I decided to return some of her love. I bent down and bit into my biscuit, but didn’t move the plate from Fairweather’s reach. She “mm-mm”ed in thanks and dove right in. And I couldn’t blame her; the biscuit was actually pretty good.
“So, son,” “Dad” began. “How’s Vanhoover?”
I shrugged and nodded. “Good, I guess.”
“The weather there sounds to be lovely. We’ve heard that a lot from Carrot Sticks, haven’t we, dear?” Mom said, looking to her husband.
“Yes. Or, from his liaison, Aunt Patch, we have,” he said with a wink. “Speaking of which, she’s been very excited ever since Carrot’s wedding.”
Mom laughed. “Oh, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her more thrilled than your Uncle Soaker… ever. You should’ve seen her at the reception. When the band started playing the… the polka song…” Her speaking was interrupted by fits of laughter. “She started dancing around the chocolate fountain! And then, when Uncle Soaker joined her, and she twirled him around…”
Dad joined in. “She accidentally spun him right into the fountain!”
Fairweather burst into laughter along with my parents. I chuckled so I wasn’t the only one in the room not laughing. Even as the laughter subsided, I kept a small smile on my face to hide my uneasiness.
“That’s right,” Dad said, wiping one of his eyes. “I don’t think we saw you at the reception, Copper. Were you able to make it?”
“Um, no,” I said.
He scratched his head. “Oh. Why not?”
“I was busy,” I said, squirming a little. I dropped the only fact I knew about Copper. “I’m taking summer classes.”
“And how are those going?”
“Okay,” I said, but didn’t elaborate; I didn’t know how to. It was at that point that I realized this was a really, really bad idea. I had almost no knowledge of this pony or his family, and it wouldn’t be long at all before they found out who I really was. I began to check the clock, hoping I could use the excuse that I was running late for… something.
Mom nodded. After a short pause, she bent down and took a bite of her biscuit. Dad said, “Made any friends at the school?”
Fairweather wiped off her mouth and smiled. “He’s made friends with me! And Lucid and two other mares, too. They came with us!”
“Oh, my. That’s wonderful,” Mom said, smiling and twiddling her hooves as she looked at me. “Glad to hear you’re making friends.”
Fairweather paused politely for a moment. She nudged her plate a bit and said, “Um, may I have some more biscuits, please? They’re delicious.”
Mom smiled warmly. “Sure thing, dear. One moment.”
Mom left for a minute and returned with a plate full of biscuits, which she set in the middle to be within reach of all of us. Fairweather was really the only one who wanted to eat them, taking three with a swoop of her wing. Dad put one on his plate, though he didn’t take more than one bite of it.
“Did you hear about Clove? He moved to Manehattan,” Dad offered.
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Good for him.”
Mom agreed. “Found a job at the harbour, but we don’t know much else. Haven’t heard a lot from the Hitches, have we?”
“No, not recently,” Dad said. He looked down at the carpet and rubbed his neck.
Mom nodded and looked at the carpet, too. “Mhm.”
I looked away as well and browsed the room. A group of pictures on a fireplace mantle caught my eye. One depicted a young, happy couple with a small child, and another showed an older child smiling widely on a dock, and another showed an even older child with less of a smile. Copper and his parents… This was wrong. I shouldn’t have humoured his parents in the first place. I needed to leave.
“So, Copper, um…” Mom shifted and scratched her arm, quickly glancing at Fairweather. “By any chance, have you… Have you happened to find a girlfriend?”
Nope, this wasn’t going to end well. These two were starting to sound like my real parents. I shifted as well, trying to make it clear that I was uncomfortable. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Dad coughed. “Well, you know, Copper… We care about you.”
Mom agreed. “It’s just, you know… Do you think you’re going to spend the rest of your life alone?”
“No, stop. Please.” I rose to leave. The conversation had become too personal. This was something for them to talk about with the real Copper Flash.
“Okay, okay,” Dad said. “We’ll drop that and talk about something else. Just… please sit back down.”
Fairweather looked at me like I had crashed a wedding or something. I felt guilty and sat back down, staring at a random spot on the carpet to avoid everyone’s eyes. I stroked the carpet with my fingerless hoof. It was a little shaggy, and felt and smelled like it had been cleaned recently. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Fairweather looking between all of us, anticipating some sort of good outcome from our family reunion.
I couldn’t take any more awkward pauses. I stood up to leave, this time turning without waiting for their approval. “I really need to go.”
“Son, please wait,” Dad said, raising his voice a little. “We just… want to talk with you. Just—look at your mother, for Luna’s sake.”
Mom looked tired and in the early stages of crying, but she was looking at her husband, not me. She stood up. “Dear, please…”
There was no point in this charade if I was going to make family matters worse. Nobody was benefitting from that. “Stop. I’m not Copper Flash, okay?”
Mom frowned. Dad got up and said, “Wait just a minute…”
But before he got the chance to argue with me, I closed my eyes tight and became my changeling self. I stared at them, and they stared back, their mouths agape. And the air in the room stiffened.
Copper’s parents were speechless, and his mom was jittery. My heart beat like a train engine. To show my impatience for an apology, I took a threatening step towards the door. Eventually, in her mental search for words, Copper’s mom found one. “Copper…”
“No,” I said, frustrated. “I’m not Copper. It’s a complete coincidence that you found me here. I swear that on my life.”
But they kept standing there, saying nothing and looking at me up and down. And I felt terrible. My face was burning and I felt extraordinarily out of place. I wasted no more time in leaving. Without another word, I walked out the door and slammed it shut.
I took a deep breath out to cool off. What’s done was done. Oh, but I needed to change into a pony. I quickly became Copper Flash. I looked around at the busy street and picked a direction to walk in. I needed to go as far away from this house as possible.
“Cooper!” Fairweather’s voice called, followed by a door slamming. “Wait up!”
“It’s Copper!” I yelled, louder than I meant to. The volume hushed a few ponies that were nearby, including Fairweather. I didn’t apologize, but instead stared at Fairweather and waited for her to speak.
She took a step back. “C- Copper, I just… I thought you’d like to see your parents.”
“Those weren’t my parents!” I said. “I tried to tell you that. Don’t you understand?”
She looked down at the ground and pawed at it with her hoof. “I’m sorry.”
“Fairweather, please.” Frustrated, I stomped the ground and turned away. She had moved on from mere annoyance and had become a problem. I didn’t want to deal with her anymore. I wanted Lucid and Whole Grain and Wheat Flour. Reliable ponies who could take me seriously.
She looked nervously at me. “We can look for the others. Let’s do that.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll go alone. You can go back to your inn.”
She perked up. “But Copper, please-”
“No!” I said louder, in case she didn’t hear it the first time. “You can’t come with us. Go away and annoy someone else!”
She jumped a little in shock. The normally cheerful features of her face disappeared, and she looked… hurt. The wings on her back carried her slouching body away, and eventually out of my sight.
I glanced at the ponies around me looking on in silent judgement, but I turned and walked away. I felt guilty that I had hurt her feelings by telling her to leave, but it was something that needed to be done. If not me, then Whole Grain would have done it. And if not her, then Lucid. It was inevitable; with her behaviour, she was asking for it.
I walked around town, still upset that my time had been wasted, that the others’ time had been wasted, that I had to yell at someone, that I had pretended to be someone’s son… I was not in a good mood. And it didn’t help that there was all this carnival stuff going on around me. Games and food and chatter and laughter... I felt miserable among it. I just needed to find the others, and I’d be fine. And soon enough I’d be back home, out of this mess.
“Copper!”
And soon enough, Whole Grain found me. I spotted her easily and walked over to her. I figured I wouldn’t bother asking what had happened to her hair. It was covered in a dark purple substance, matted, and sticking out to the side a little. Scared of invoking violence with any sort of commentary on her hair, I stuck with, “Hi.”
“Hey, we found you. Don’t mind this,” she said, referring to her new age ‘do. She took a quick glance behind me, then above me. “Where’s Featherbrain?”
“Feather… oh. Fairweather. I… She left.”
“Just like that?” Whole Grain smirked, but became serious as she saw my expression. “You told her off, didn’t you?”
I nodded grimly, scanning the crowd around us.
“You did the right thing,” she said, using one hoof to push back a bit of the substance from her face. “She’s not worth it. She’s playing a game with us all the time. Can’t give a straight answer, always wants to have her fun.”
“Yeah,” I said. I ducked to avoid a wayward beach ball. “She’s not worth the trouble.”
And she wouldn’t cause us any more trouble, either. It lightened my mood a little, knowing I had lost a careless member of our group and found a responsible one.
She motioned for me to follow, so I let her lead me through the crowd. It was easy not to lose track of her, for her hair was shining in the sunlight. She didn’t lose track of me, either; she would glance back every once in a while and make sure I was still there.
“So, ahem. Human,” Whole Grain began, still not in full understanding of the word.
“Yep,” I replied.
She continued to speak while searching the crowd. “You have a family?”
“Yes, yes I do,” I said.
“So… Mother? Father?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, a mother and father, and a sister. That’s my immediate family.”
Whole Grain shook her head and continued to walk.
“What?”
She squinted at me. “You’re just saying that so you can pretend we have something in common.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t actually have a sister.”
“No, I do have a sister,” I insisted. “I haven’t seen her in a while, but yes, I do have one.”
She sighed. “Why haven’t you seen her?”
Even though the reasons weren’t terrible, I didn’t feel comfortable elaborating. “We’ve had some differences, so we just don’t speak to each other anymore.”
“You abandoned her?”
“No, not abandon,” I said. Gosh, that sounded awful. “No, we just… drifted away.”
Truth be told, I hadn’t seen my sister in years, ever since graduating high school. I hadn’t gotten along with her for a long time, I guess because of our personalities. She was fickle and naive, and I was more realistic. It’s part of the reason I live alone; not many people get along with me.
“I grew up being thankful for the family I have,” Whole Grain said. “We have our differences, too, but I’d never leave her for it. Haven’t left her side since we were fillies in an orphanage.” She bit her lip. “Speaking of which, we were adopted.”
I nodded. “Mm, yes.”
Her pace slowed slightly, and she looked me up and down. “You knew?”
“Yeah. Wheat Flour told me.”
A steady stream of ponies cut across our path and forced us to stop. She looked at me as I stood beside her and waited. “Did she tell you about the changelings, too?”
She hadn’t said anything about changelings. “What do you mean, ‘the changelings’?”
“Oh,” she said, wiping off some of the purple substance trickling down her forehead. She watched the ponies walk past us. “We were attacked by changelings when we were fillies.”
“Oh, okay.” Well, that would explain Whole Grain’s strong dislike for my kind.
She cleared her throat before continuing. “It was a while ago, when we were at the orphanage. Some changelings tried to drag Wheat Flour away. And I tried to fend them off, but… I was too small back then.” She let out an angry snort. “I didn’t want that to happen ever again, so I prepared. If Wheat Flour hadn’t been the one to lead you home, I wouldn’t have held back.”
The stream of ponies kept going by, but I stared past them at nothing in particular. From the way she had spoken more than a single terse sentence at a time with me, I didn’t feel as intimidated by her as I had in the past. I glanced at her, seeing her expression had become less hard. Not soft by any means, but less “demise-wishing” and more into “mild dislike” territory.
She didn’t hate my company anymore. And I felt like I had accomplished something, however small. Back in the human world, this didn’t mean much. Tick someone off, and that’s their problem. But now that I was sort of relying on someone, and her problem was my problem, it was a good feeling to not be on her bad side.
“Shall we?” Whole Grain asked.
I snapped out of thinking and looked at her. “Huh?”
She motioned to the path before us, clear of ponies. Embarrassed, I nodded and walked forward. She did the same.
Before long, we reunited with the other half of our group. Lucid and Wheat Flour were standing at the base of a tall flagpole, and they waved at us as we approached. Lucid was unusually cheerful when he saw us, smiling from ear to ear.
“There you are!” Lucid exclaimed. “We finally found you. Where’d Fairweather run off to?” He gritted his teeth as he noticed Whole Grain’s new hairdo. “And, ahem…”
“Got too close to the jam wrestling competition,” Whole Grain stated. “And Fairweather’s not joining us anymore.”
I felt the need to justify that. “She’s the reason I got separated from you guys.”
“Oh, well then. If that’s so, then her leaving is fine.” Lucid then turned to me, like he had been waiting to tell me the most exciting news in the entire pony world. “Have you seen these?” he asked, pointing to one poster out of dozens tacked on the flagpole.
I walked up to the poster and perused it. It was colourful and read “Fairflanks Annual Talent Show” across the top. I shook my head.
“Read the line in the middle, right there. ‘First prize: 50 bits’. 50 bits!” He tapped his hoof below the line, which was underneath a picture of a silhouetted pony singing into a microphone. “That’s enough to last us to Canterlot and back. The show just started, but they may still let us in.”
Wheat Flour looked at me. She was sweating noticeably more than the rest of us. I guess Vanhooverites were more affected by heat. “I told him it wasn’t a good idea.”
I snorted. “I’m not a singer.”
“No, not a singing act,” Lucid said. “Comedy! All you need to do is change into Celestia—that’s the princess, you remember. Then, stand up there and repeat everything I whisper to you. That’s all.”
No. I had not had good experiences on stage. “That’s ridiculous. I’m not gonna do it.”
“Oh, come on,” Lucid said, smiling and putting an arm around me. “I’ll tell you everything you need to say. All you have to do is stand up there and repeat it! Convincingly, of course.”
I gave it one more second of thought, then shook my head. “No. I won’t. There has to be another way to get money.”
“Sawyer’s right. We could find other ways to earn bits here.” Wheat Flour moved to my side.
Lucid’s smile faded as he tried to reason with me. “You’ll only have to be on stage for five minutes at most, so—”
“No! It’s stupid,” I said, pushing his hoof off of me. “Can we leave already and quit wasting time?”
“We’re short on money, Copper,” he said with finality and a sigh. “I don’t know if you realize that. We need food and places to sleep, and although we’ve been lucky with that so far, we can’t take our chances. We don’t have a multitude of options here. This was all I could find, and you’re our best chance.” He sighed again, probably to further convince me. “So what do you say?”
I took another look at the picture of the singing pony and mulled it over. Chores would’ve been one thing; I could handle walking in a wheel for a couple of hours. But the only thing Lucid could come up with was performing on a stage in front of hundreds of ponies, with a one in umpteenth chance that I’d get first place, and that’s assuming that I’d survive the performance. I closed my eyes, frustrated.
Whole Grain nudged me. “Do it. We need the bits.” She turned and began walking towards a well nearby. “I’ll be right back.”
I rubbed my temple with my hoof and turned to Lucid. “If this really is all you could find, then…”
~ ~ ~
“Name?”
“Copper Flash,” I said with a sigh.
The silver pony behind the registration desk wrote it down, holding the clipboard in his hoof and the pencil in his mouth. His dexterity astounded me, unless he was just scribbling incoherently. “Where d’ya live?”
I hesitated, but Lucid spoke up for me. “Right here in Fairflanks.” I looked at him, momentarily confused, but he whispered to me, “Remember, you’re still Copper.”
“What’s his act?”
“Professional celebrity impersonations,” Lucid said.
“Ah, neat,” he said before jotting something down on his clipboard. “Always a hoot to see one of those, ‘specially a good one. Word of advice, though—if you’re aiming to win, don’t impersonate the mayor. Historically, nopony who impersonates her has ever won. Just lettin’ you know.” He smiled.
I nodded. “Thanks, but I have another pony in mind.”
“Good deal.” He set his clipboard down next to a short stack of paper. “The show is already underway. They’re about halfway through the list now, I think, so you’ve still got some time to warm up.” He removed one piece from the top of the paper stack and stuck it onto my hip. “Number fifteen. Backstage is thataway. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” I said, as Lucid followed me to the backstage area. We passed by the venue, which was much like a regular theatre, but entirely outdoors; everypony was sitting on the grass instead of in seats. A broad, blue curtain served as the backdrop to the performance, which at that moment was a teal pony playing a large tuba thing.
We walked around the crowd of people that were soon to be watching my every move and silently judging me. They were distracted by the pony on stage, so the watching and judging wasn’t happening to me just yet.
Whole Grain and Wheat Flour had decided to watch the show in the audience. I waved to them as I passed by, and they waved back, smiling in support. That made two faces in the whole audience that I recognized. It was comforting, but only a little. A crowd almost entirely made up of strangers is still a crowd almost entirely made up of strangers.
“This won’t take long, right?” I whispered to Lucid, careful not to distract anyone from the pony on stage.
He nodded. “Right. You’ll only be on stage for five minutes. It’ll all be over soon.”
Oof. That sounded like something said to a person about to die.
…And it was unsettlingly appropriate.