“So how are things going, then, Octavia? Before earlier today I hadn’t seen you for a while,” Harp asked. As he spoke he stood up and grabbed a rag from the kitchen, returning within seconds to start cleaning up the juice he had spilt when Octavia punched him.
“Things are going alright, I’d say. Meeting Vinyl has been a strange experience, to say the least. She’s an enigma, really. Would you believe that she can speak with an accent even thicker than mine?” Octavia chuckled. “I think that’s perhaps the thing about her that has surprised me the most.”
As she spoke Harpo had cleaned up the vast majority of the juice, leaving for the kitchen again to deposit the soaked rag. He returned with some paper towels which he generously applied to the spilt juice on the floor, draining the last of it.
“Her accent, you say?” He whistled, sitting down again and seeming impressed. “When you really go at it you almost sound like that Fancy Pants, but Vinyl had a thicker and heavier accent than that? Damn.” He trailed off, leaning back in the couch in silence. “Do you like her?” He asked then, suddenly.
Octavia was thrown off guard by the question, all but spitting out the juice she had been in the process of drinking. She gulped hard in an effort to get it down without spilling it all, coughing slightly at the end. “Excuse me?” She managed between coughs.
“Do you like her?” He repeated, turning his head to look at her. “And here I don’t mean as in ‘she’s a nice pony’ or anything vague like that, but really like her?”
She put the glass down with a sigh, leaning back in the couch as well, eyes closed and front legs crossed on her chest. “I don’t,” she said, opening her eyes to the ceiling above. “She’s nice, yes, but I don’t like her that way. As it is I want her to be a friend and nothing more.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
Octavia nodded, looking at him through the corner of her eye. “Yes. I’m sure.” She sighed and directed her gaze at the ceiling again. “You should know by now that affection, love, or liking somepony isn’t something that’s born out of mutual interests. Friendship can come from that, but I don’t think any form of relationship stems from only that. So no, I do not like her. I do, however, want us to be friends.”
“Friendzoned~!”
“Shut up, Harpo.”
“If you kiss me.”
“I’ll have to suffer your voice, then.”
“Damn! So close.”
Octavia laughed, glad to be with Harpo again. Truly he was one of her more extraordinary friends, being quirky in every sense of the word, and reveling in it. He was funny, but also highly intelligent, although he rarely showed that side of himself. But most importantly of all was that he was reliable and kind. He was the kind of pony you could go to on a bad day, and he’d help you in whatever way he could; be it to give you an ice cream or lend an ear.
“You know, believe it or not, I’m actually thankful that you’re as stubborn as you are.” She let out a happy sigh, closing her eyes with a smile on her lips. “You helped me a long way. Even with your antics, you’ve done a lot for me in the past.”
“Such as?”
“Been a royal pain in the butt, but a fun one.” She righted herself to sit up straight again. “I don’t know where I’d be today if it weren’t for you.”
“I know where you’d be,” Harpo said, an impish smile on his lips. “With my mother.”
“Of course I would have. If you hadn’t tried to befriend me, then I’m sure she would have, age difference be damned.” She shook her head, amused at the thought, realising that the statement was much more true than she gave it credit for. Harpo’s mother was indeed an odd woman, and was even considered a friend of many other ponies than just those of similar age. If she recalled correctly it was not at all uncommon, for foals barely ten years old to come by for a glass of juice and to talk about their day, or whatever else they wanted to talk about.
She was even known for sometimes making small arrangements and events for the younger ponies in the neighbourhood. At least she did when her popularity with the youngsters become apparent to her. She had thoroughly enjoyed the first time, is what she had told Octavia, and continued with saying that it should be a thing she did every second month. And she did. Octavia didn’t know of a single day where Harpo’s mother had missed the Play Day. She smiled fondly at the memory, remembering the first one she had attended, and how she loathed it.
“Equestria to Octavia?” Harpo waved a hoof in front of her face, a knowing smile on his lips as he did so. “You were gone for several minutes there. Whatcha thinking about?”
Octavia was shaken out of her reverie, blinking rapidly in an effort to clear her mind of the fog the memories had left behind, blocking her view only momentarily. She shook her head, mane whipping around with the rapid motions. She had to focus for short while before she registered what it was Harpo had said, at which she scrunched her nose up in an expression of quiet contemplation.
“I was just thinking about your mother and the play days she arranged once every two months,” she said. “Does she still arrange them? And are they still successful?”
“As successful as ever,” Harpo said, reaching out for his glass of juice only to realise that it was now gone after spilling it earlier. “And I’m still helping her every now and then. Not just with the play days, mind you, but other stuff as well… Shopping, mowing the lawn, cutting the hedge, and so on. You know, stuff old mares usually need help with.”
“She’d kill you for saying that,” Octavia remarked with a poorly hidden smile. “Either that or throw you down Tartarus itself, and then adopt Cerberus.”
Harpo mirrored her own smile, although it was his laughter he attempted to hide. The attempt failed and he let out a loud bout of laughter, clutching his stomach. “T-That sounds exactly l-like her!” He exclaimed, wiping a tear from his eye. He spent another moment snickering before he managed to regain control of himself. “She’d make Cerberus her lapdog,” he continued. “Then she’d take a seat in her throne made of skulls, or something, morbid old lady that she is.”
“Careful, she might hear you.” Octavia poked him playfully, her teasing smile still present.
Chuckling, Harpo leaned back in the couch, abandoning his joking expression in favour of a more serious one, if still light hearted and kind. “That she might. And I’m fairly sure he already has.” He returned Octavia’s poke. “But enough about my old lady. What about you? Got any plans for today? And tomorrow?”
“I’m not sure. Aside from my training tomorrow, and perhaps a few hours practice with my cello then not really. I don’t have any plans. Why do you ask?”
Harpo shrugged in a nonchalant way. “Nothing, really. Just asking to have something to talk about. It’s not like we have an overabundance of topics to chat about. I mean, you obviously don’t want to entertain the idea of you and Vinyl getting together, and I have very little to talk about anyway—Already told you all there is for me to say, after all.”
Octavia gave him a small knowing smile. Try as he might he couldn’t hide that small telltale twitch of his ears every time he told a lie, or at least only a half truth. “You’re doing it again, Harpo.”
He looked up, surprised. “What? What am I doing?”
She pointed at her own ear, flicking it just like he did; like any pony would if a fly was annoying them.
His face fell, ears falling flat against his skull. “Damn that tell,” he mumbled.
“So what is it you actually want?” Octavia continued. “You didn’t just ask for the sake of wanting to know.”
“Well… I.” He was rubbing his hooves together as a colt who had just entered his teenage years would, when asking someone out for a date. “I kind of want to try to learn Martial Arts too. S’not like I want to go around beating ponies up—you know that—But I just, well... “
“Hmm?” Octavia smiled sweetly at him, like one would to a foal when they’re trying to prompt them into telling them something. That said, there wasn’t much difference between Harpo and a normal foal. Only difference was on the outside. On the inside there were very few things about Harpo that most wouldn’t consider childish.
“I want to get into shape. Like, I’m not fat or overweight, but I want to actually get a somewhat good looking body instead of just—” he waved a hoof at himself, a dissatisfied look on his face as he did so “—this. I don’t have the discipline to go running or training myself, but if I have a weekly appointment then I have someone who depends on me to show up, and will be disappointed if I don’t.”
Octavia leaned forward slightly, examining him with a curious gaze. “So you want to work out, is that it?” Harpo nodded. “Well, I have training tomorrow so I could take you with me if you wanted. The fee is a one hundred and twenty bits a month, or seven hundred and twenty bits for a season of six months. You can go with just a pair of shorts, but if you want I could take you shopping for a uniform.”
“Uniform?” Harpo took on an expression of mild confusion. “Why, and what, is that?”
“It’s a two-piece made up of a pair of loose pants, and a jacket which is held together by buttons down the front, and a cloth belt around the waist to signify your rank. They are used by martial artists for practice and tournaments. The colours on, or of, the belt signifies how adept you are at your given martial art.”
Nodding to himself, he stored the information somewhere in his mind for future use. “Alright. And what are the colours? And what colour are you, for the record?”
At this, Octavia smiled. A proud little smile. “The colours, unlike in Karate and such, don’t go from white to black in Kung Fu, with white being the lowest and black the highest, etc. Instead all the belts are black, but your rank is shown by a red stripe on each end of the belt, with one to three stripes: No stripe is equivalent to a white belt in karate, one stripe is yellow and green belt, two is yellow and brown, and three is also brown, although that’s only seniors. The last is where the entire border, or edge, or the sash is red, and that is what you’d usually call Black Belt, which also means that they are considered an assistant instructor.”
“That’s impressive,” Harpo said, a low whistle following. “And what colour are you, then? Green? Blue?”
Octavia chuckled. “Not quite. I’m actually the equivalent of a Black Belt. I’ve trained for somewhere close to nine years, perhaps ten—I can’t quite remember. I’ve been trying to get my first dan, but it’s not easy. I’m currently training to become a Sifu which is a fully fledged instructor, after which I’ll have to train for the ten Dans.”
“Black? Seriously? Wow. That is amazing. I guess I should ask, though, what style is it? I don’t know a lot about martial arts but I at least now that there is more than just one set of techniques and such.”
“It’s a branch of Kung Fu called Hung Gar,” Octavia explained. “It’s been nicknamed Zombie Style by some—but mostly called Tiger and Crane style—because of how rigid some of the movements are. You may end up looking like a zombie, basically, if you practice it at high levels. Granted,” she continued, letting out a short peal of giggles, “not all of the techniques zombify you.”
“So I get to be a zombie ninja? Sweet!”
Rather than deign herself to reply to such a childish idea, Octavia just shook her head amusedly, the smile on her lips having widened just a bit as they spoke. At most she shared her interest in music with what few friends she had, but now she also got to share her training with Harpo. These past two days have been quite good to me, it seems. “So did you want to go shopping for that uniform? We can go get it, then walk about a bit and go for an early dinner if you want.”
“I think I’d like that. It doesn’t cost too much, I hope? I can afford the monthly fee for the training itself well enough, but I’d rather not spend too much money on something if a pair of shorts would be enough.”
Octavia shook her head. “It’s only two hundred bits or so. Perhaps more if you want a really high quality piece.” She took her, now empty, glass and went into the kitchen, quickly washing it and setting it on the counter. When she returned to the room Harpo was already by the door, ready to go.
“We need to swing by my place for my bits first, then we can go down and shop. Sound good to you?”
She nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
The trip down to the main shopping district was an uneventful one. The afternoon sun pelted them from above, unrelenting and unnaturally cheery as opposed to what one would expect. It was as if you could feel the happiness oozing from every particle of light hitting them. Even if it were Celestia’s way of showing the world that she was happy, two ponies with little to no ties to the nobility couldn’t possibly know. At least not when the only ties Octavia had were the few private concerts her agent managed to find for her.
Octavia wasn’t even sure what Harpo actually did for a living. They had been friends for quite a number of years by now, and he had never told her very much about himself. That wasn’t to say that he was an enigma to be figured out, or a total unknown. No, she decided. He was just a normal pony that didn’t talk all that much about himself which, given the circumstances of how they had met, wasn’t much of a surprise. He had focused on her most of all, trying to get her to talk and stop pushing him away whenever he tried to get close.
I guess a better word would be selfless. He doesn’t talk about himself unless asked, but… Curse this curiosity. It’s what almost made Vinyl mad at me earlier. She glanced at Harpo as they walked, making sure to keep one eye on the road and one eye on him. “Harpo?” She asked, earning a questioning glance from the purple stallion. “What exactly do you do for a living? Outside of playing the harp, that is. I don’t think you ever were that much into playing for anything but the orchestra.”
The stallion actually chuckled at that, making Octavia scrunge up her face in confusion. She was about to ask what was so funny when he eventually spoke.
“You don’t know how much an orchestral musician earns, do you?” He asked.
“I gathered it was something around thirty thousand bits a year, perhaps a bit more for those who had played there longer or showed exceptional skill. First Chair’s, and so on.”
Harpo adopted a knowing and, if possible, somewhat amused smile, as if he knew something funny that she didn’t. Judging by the fact that his smile only widened, when Octavia gave him her estimate as to the yearly wages of an orchestral musician, she could say that he did indeed know something.
“Far from it. I actually earn one hundred and thirty thousand bits a year.” He grinned as Octavia’s jaw all but hit the ground. He stopped walking as she did, smiling smugly at her shocked expression.
“That’s fifty thousand more than I do on a good year! How in the name of Celestia’s bloated sun-covered butt are you cashing in that much?!” Octavia was all but shaking in part frustration and disbelief, legs squared against the ground and body rigid as she faced him, almost pushing him against the brickwall behind him. She didn’t even register the shocked gasps coming from the surrounding ponies, elicited from her outburst.
Harpo, on the other hand, just chuckled awkwardly. “Yeah… I earn a bit more than you, but it’s all okay, right? I mean, I actually work to earn it.”
Octavia was flabberghasted, having to shake the stupefied expression off of her face. She carefully brushed a hoof through her mane, trying to regain as much composure as she could with the movement. “Alright… You do. But how?”
The smug smile had entirely evaporated by now, replaced instead by a more reserved smile. “I work for the Royal Canterlot Orchestre. The starting salary is one hundred and twenty thousand bits a year. I’ve played with them for a year by now and earned a little raise.” He spoke in a quieter voice from before, jerking his head forward and resumed their walk, Octavia following. “It pays a lot more than just scraping up solo performances as you’ve done until now. Eeh… No offense intended, of course. Sorry.”
“None taken.” And it was the truth. Octavia wasn’t offended by the unintended jab at her career as it was, but was instead more interested in the prospect of it. By no means vain or greedy, Octavia still enjoyed the prospect of a higher paycheck and a more solid work schedule and, if truth was to be told, was very quickly entertaining the idea of applying for the Canterlot Orchestra.
“Do they accept applications?” She asked suddenly.
“Who?”
“The Royal Canterlot Orchestra, of course. Do they accept applications?”
He rubbed his chin as their walked, his gait becoming somewhat awkward on just three legs. “I can’t say, and I honestly don’t know. You would have to contact the conductor, I think… Or something like that.” He grimaced. “Although he’s very strict and you’d have to be incredibly lucky to have him so much as even consider you. And no, that’s not a jab at your skills, just a warning that he’s a very strict pony.”
“So I should just not bother sending in an applications?” She asked, ears falling back against her head.
Harpo was quick to rectify himself, stopping up to wave his hooves in front of him, an apologetic expression on his face. “Oh. No no. You should apply! It’s just that he only wants the very best, so if you do apply you should be prepared to play your absolute best for an audition.” He fell back down on all fours, resuming their walk. “Sorry if I sounded like I was discouraging you. I didn’t mean to.”
Octavia followed him, ears going erect again at the news. “So just play my best?” A smile dared make its way to her lips. “That should be easy enough… Well not easy, but I should be able to do it without too much of a hassle.” Her smile twisted into a grimace. “I just hope it’s good enough for that Mr. High and Mighty conductor of yours.”
“I’m sure it is,” Harpo chuckled, stopping shortly after as someone caught his attention. “Are those nunchucks?”
Octavia followed his eyes, seeing the same nunchucks he did in the window of a store across the street. “It is, and that is the shop we’re looking for. Come.”
“I want a nunchuck,” he said as he followed Octavia across the street.
“No you don’t.”
“Why not?” He sounded almost pouting.
“Because of that guy.” Octavia stepped into the store, pointing at a young colt trying to wield a pair of nunchucks and only succeeded in knocking himself in the back of his head.
“Point taken,” Harpo murmured. “So what are we looking for?”
“A uniform ,” Octavia replied, nodding at an employee approaching them.
She was an average unicorn mare in every sense of the word, if a bit more muscled than the usual pony you came across. She wore an easy smile and kept her stance relaxed, like someone who knew exactly what they could do. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”
“Yes. We’re looking for a uniform for my friend here,” Octavia began, gesturing at Harpo who waved at the employee.
“Aha. And what kind of uniform? Judo? Jiu Jitsu? Karate?” This question was directed at Harpo who had just set his hoof back on the ground.
“I, uuh.” His eyes found Octavia’s a pleading look and request for help passing from him to her.
“Just a standard uniform for Kung Fu,” Octavia finished for him. “He’ll be starting training with me from tomorrow, so if you have anything for that?” She let the question hang in the air, patiently waiting as the employee thought it over, undoubtedly going through entire catalogues of information.
“I think I have just what you’re looking for,” the mare said, beckoning for them to follow as she made her way deeper into the shop. They arrived the back end where Octavia spotted several shelves filled with what looked like thick, white robes, and thinner pieces in both black and white
The unicorn mare went over to the shelves and lifted down a package with her magic, presenting it to Octavia and Harpo. “This is a standard uniform kung fu in black. Nothing spectacular or special about it. It’s sturdy and—” she looked Harpo over with a critical gaze, seemingly measuring every inch of him in the span of a single second “—should fit you.”
As the mare spoke, Octavia looked the package over with a gaze at least as critical as the one Harpo was subject to, only restraining herself from reaching out for it through more effort than she cared to admit.
“I think it’s fine,” she said after a while, satisfied with it. “Do you have anything to say, Harpo?”
“I don’t actually know all that much about it,” he admitted, scratching his chin with a hoof. “Honestly, if you say it’s good to go, then I’ll buy it. How much is it?” He added, looking at the unicorn.
“One hundred and ninety bits,” she told them, now leading them towards the register. “It’s not made specifically for grappling, and is just a standard issue. It can withstand some grappling, however, but too much and it will be torn.” She held up a paper bag in her magic, the uniform hovering above it. “Will this be all, or is there anything else you’d like?”
“That will be all,” Octavia said, nodding in thanks. “Thank you.”
“And thank you for coming by. Have a good day,” the unicorn said, giving them a small wave as they made their way out of the store.
“So now what?” Harpo asked as they made their way out onto the streets again, paper bag held in his mouth. He had forgotten his saddlebags.
“I guess we go eat dinner and then head home?” Octavia suggested. She looked at him “Unless you want to do something more?”
Humming through the handles of the bag, Harpo let his gaze travel skywards. “Not sure. I think I’d be okay with just dinner. Where should we eat, then?”
“Let’s go to the Salad Superb,” she answered instantly, turning a corner to bring on the proper way before Harpo even had a chance to reply.
“Alright then,” he said, following her without complaints. “Salad Superb it is.”