//------------------------------//
// Uh-oh... 
// Story: Three Little Visitors 
// by Daniel-Gleebits 
//------------------------------//

Three Little Visitors: Pt 12


The boundaries in Sunset’s mind were set, the lines drawn, and the goals now written in stone. Admittedly, for a while after Adagio’s little declaration of eternal mistrust, Sunset had been suitably distressed. It seemed to her that her world had suddenly become a complicated web made out of knots forged by the many instances of given and betrayed trusts all around her. Her trust in her friends, in Principals Celestia and Luna, and those that they, Aria, and Sonata had in her, contrasted starkly with the refusal of trust by Adagio, the betrayal by Chrysalis, and worst of all, the betrayal Sunset was committing.
“I wouldn’t call it a betrayal,” Twilight said, twisting her fingers.
Sunset exhaled. “What would you call it then?”
Twilight hesitated. “Um… necessary omission?” 
“So, not so much betrayal, more like, lying.”
“I didn’t say that,” Twilight said quickly. 
“You didn’t have to,” Sunset sighed. “I suppose it’s just the price for helping them. To make sure they’re safe, I just have to betray their trust, the one thing that I most want from them. Seems like a fair exchange, right?”
Twilight didn’t say anything for a moment or two, but then leaned over and pulled Sunset into a hug. Sunset hadn’t been expecting the hug, but she felt too heavy and full of tingling doubt to be properly surprised.
“You’re doing a good thing, for good reasons,” Twilight whispered. 
“But I’m lying to them in order to do it,” Sunset countered.
“Only two of them,” Twilight said in false humour, pulling out of the hug with her hands on Sunset’s shoulders. “Look, I know I told you that I didn’t agree with you not telling them, but I think that Aria might be right in this. If Adagio has some interest in the pendants, she might do herself harm with them. Real harm. There’s no shame in keeping from someone a thing that might hurt them.”
It didn’t matter what anyone said, however; Sunset continued to feel heavy and unsatisfied with the path she had set herself. It wasn’t just that she was disappointed in herself for the course of action she knew was the only option available. Adagio’s declaration weighed her down with equal force, if not more. It hurt her more than she liked to admit, in a tender spot still stinging from her time as evil-queen-bitch extraordinaire. Trust had always been an issue.
Shoving these feelings into their box deep down in her stomach, she drew a vitalizing breath and turned to Twilight with a more confident smile.
“Shall we get on with it then?”
Twilight tentatively agreed.
The device that Princess Luna had given Twilight was a fairly complicated piece of magical machinery. Most simple spells merely require an exertion of will for direction, and a font of magic for the will to act upon. In the case of more complex spells, multiple individual lines of will must converge in a specific way, rather like trying to concentrate on several thoughts at once in a particular order, or trying to remember detailed memories in the precise chronological order. It was a difficult prospect for most.
The icon that Luna had given them was a TP imaging template, a charm imbued with an imprint of a magical user’s abilities. Technically speaking, the charm could have been used to move the moon, control weather, and all of the other abilities that Princess Luna was capable of, but these abilities would have been pale imitations of what the real Luna could have done. In order to boost its operational power, Luna had sacrificed a complete imprint of her TP in order to create a more concentrated form of her dreamscaping ability.
“It’s really quite ingenious,” Twilight had said once she’d finished explaining all of this. “The level of concentration involved, and the sheer magical knowledge to do such a thing; I’d only ever expect it of a Princess.” She beamed for a moment or two, and then suddenly looked rather abashed. “Well, I didn’t mean… I don’t think I could do it, it’s just…”
Sunset halted her stammering by giving a brief laugh. “You don’t give yourself enough credit, Twilight,” she said, grinning. “You could totally do something like this. You’re much better than me at using it.”
“That’s not true,” Twilight said, frowning. “I think that you’ve just had bad luck with the memories you select.”
“Perhaps,” Sunset said, not really bothered with arguing the point. She looked down, and took a breath. “Here we go.” 
Holding up the charm in her right hand over her left palm. In her open left hand sat a scattering of red shards, and several strands of orange hair. Sunset closed her fist, and shut her eyes. She began to concentrate.





As before, the sensation of an entire world rushing around her without her actually moving at all surged by. She opened her eyes, and did not breath; there was no need here. For the past few weeks she had grown accustomed to the tried and true feeling of her rushing surroundings as she was propelled to her destination.
Unlike the shadowy surroundings that had flown passed her whenever she had been cast into the swirl of memory, Princess Luna’s charm did a far better job of organizing everything, like a desktop on a computer. Perhaps conforming to her preference, or maybe that of Princess Luna’s, Sunset stood in a corridor the colour of a summer evening, bathed in purples, oranges, and gold, as though the solid surroundings were translucent, showing the brilliance of open sky beyond. When the corridor ceased moving very abruptly, the doors solidified into sharper focus. 
Sunset looked around. As always, the corridor resembled something out of the Addams Family, with stairs, doors, walls, and even the lighting branching off around her as though gravity no longer applied. She looked at the doors that she could see, and recognised several at once; they led nowhere useful. The strange or unfamiliar ones she was tempted to search, but knew from experience now that it was probably futile. The shards were a shattered reflection of what had once been a mind; distorted and fragmented. Complicated as minds were, a broken one had to have more twists and turns in it than any other, and so therefore Sunset surmised, would be more difficult to penetrate. 
By the same token however, by the limited material Sunset had read on magic relating to the mind, a living mind was more adaptable. It could sense the presence of the invader, and try to act against them. Sunset didn’t know what memories stored in a magical medium might do, but she doubted that the broken pendants could put up much of a fight, if any. In this she was quite wrong, although she did not know it.
With these things in mind, Sunset made her way into what she judged to be the deeper areas. She found it rather amusing now to walk off one floor onto a wall, and feel whatever strange sense of gravity held sway in this realm hold her to it. She ignored doors of all sorts; big ones, small ones, grand ones, simple ones, interesting ones, dull ones, colourful ones, dark ones. She pressed towards one of the shadowy areas where the evening sky beyond turned liquid and dark like spilled ink, wanting to discover the doors that lay in those places, where she thought the more painful, personal memories might be buried away.
On a hunch, she tried a thin door made of warped wood. From the outside the gaps in the planks were black as the night, but when the door was opened, the corridor flooded with a flickering, orange light. 
The room that she stepped into had an unpleasant sweetness in the air, like perfume covering up something stale and rank. A wall sconce gave off the fiery radiance enveloping the room. A single piece of furniture surrounded by dark stone walls sat in the middle of the room, a small person with large, dishevelled hair sitting on its edge with her head bowed. Sunset neither needed nor wanted to see this memory. Adagio’s bare back and the red marks on her upper arms and waist told Sunset all that she would ever wish to know. It nauseated Sunset to realise that she was losing track of how many memories like this she’d come across. Just as she was about to leave, a man entered the room, drying his hair with a cloth. 
Sunset’s hand clenched around the charm. As always whenever she felt the tell-tale doubt in her mind, she knew that the memory wasn’t quite as it appeared. The two figures in the room flickered, changing like a blinking light-bulb into very different forms. Adagio’s thin, human body vanished, replaced by an equally starved looking filly, lying broodingly on the edge of the bed. The man shrank and broadened, his athletic bipedal form changing into a four-legged creature with brown hair and curling horns. A ram.
“Another excellent session,” he said casually. Anyone listening to him might have thought he’d done nothing more than play a card game, or visit a club meeting. From a pile of rags on the floor that Sunset took to be clothes, the ram took a small purse of coins and laid it gently on the bed next to Adagio. Sunset bit her lip as she watched the ram nuzzle Adagio’s mane, the little filly shuddering at his touch. 
With a sound of disgust, Sunset forced herself to turn away, and slammed the door behind her.
“It’s the right guy,” Sunset muttered to herself. “Brown hair, well built, green eyes.” This description, along with a distinctive looking blue cloak, had been given to her by Aria, who had described the man with whom Adagio had left with before returning with the pendants. Sunset had come across numerous memories of him representing years of encounters, mostly either like the memory she had just witnessed, or visiting the hovel where Adagio and the other two had lived. It was perhaps lucky that she couldn’t interact with the memories, since every time she saw him she was visited by a vicious desire to snap his neck.
But he was long dead, and quite beyond her reach.
The next door caught Sunset’s eye because it was very tall and square, like the entrance to a temple or ancient government building. Pulling it open, she found herself dazzled by the bright light of a glorious sunny day.
“Come on! We don’t have all day!”
Sunset blinked, and found herself in a semi-busy marketplace, or some form of city centre. A great square surrounded by pillars hosted a labyrinth of stalls crowded with customers and loud salespeople declaring their wares. After looking around for a moment or two, Sunset found Adagio, Aria, and Sonata, half-hidden behind one of the pillars. Sonata looked worried, and carried a brown leather bag, whilst Adagio seemed to be up to something mischievous; she had a look on her face like she was about to enact a long-planned-out scheme.
“But Adagio, if I don’t get this delivered soon—“
“Then go!” Adagio snapped. “Fine. But you don’t get any of the cakes when we’re done.”
“That’s not fair!” Sonata wailed. “I love cake!”
“Good to see some things never change,” Sunset couldn’t help muttering. She side-stepped an elderly woman shuffling passed her, even though the woman would have just phased through her.
“We do all the work, and you still get some of the prize?” Aria asked scathingly. “Now that’s unfair.”
Adagio folded her arms and looked coldly imperious. Sonata seemed to quake beneath the glare.
“We completely understand if you don’t want to be punished,” Adagio said, turning away from Sonata. She let out a little sigh and went on in a bored tone. “It’s not like we needed you for this anyway.”
Sonata turned bright red. “Fine!” she hissed. “I’ll help. But I get an extra cake.”
“Fatty,” Aria sneered.
Sonata patted her thin middle in response and looked defiant. “You’re just jealous that you can’t make the sloshy noise after you drink water.”
Aria rolled her eyes. “Who’d ever be jealous of something stupid like that?”
Sure that the girls wouldn’t go far for the moment, Sunset took the opportunity to look around more closely. At the principal entrance to the market was the milling crowd that was par for the course in ancient cities, but opposite this was a tall, warehouse-shaped building held up by decorative pillars, and emblazoned by intricate looking designs. The pediment above the main entrance was decorated by classical men and women stretching their bodies in unusual ways towards the centre, where a shining something blazed out in all directions. The memory altered again, and the figures in the pediment flickered to pony-form for an instant before flickering back to human.
Just as Sunset was about to look back at the kids, she noticed the people coming out of the temple; several tall men and women all wearing the same blue cloaks. Each cloak bore an intricately designed image of the shining something on the pediment, although since they were much closer, Sunset saw that the something was simply a geometric shape; a heptagon surrounded and connected to a larger heptagon.
The sacred shape, Sunset remembered. Thought to embody the principal elements of the world.
This symbol, as Sunset knew, was the emblem of the Lotus Society. She had never seen it used for some reason in all of the accounts about them, but small descriptions and references to it had been discovered. Old ruins thought to be their libraries and centres for gatherings were old and crumbling, and so the symbol had never actually been seen by living ponies, although Sunset had read that some authorities believed that some of them had been intentionally defaced.
Sunset’s surroundings suddenly began to change. The Lotus members vanished, and distant parts of the landscape did too. Sunset turned to see the girls hurrying off around the plaza. If she remained and was caught outside the memory’s border, she’d find herself back in the corridor, and so she stepped quickly after them.
As the memory progressed, Sunset found herself wondering why it was buried so deeply; there was nothing startling, odd, or violent going on, nothing but an ordinary day. The three of them slipped amongst the buyers and sellers, evidently heading for some destination on one edge of the market, and then Sunset saw it. A tall, narrow stall covered by a faded blue awning stood boxed between a vegetable stand and a stall selling pear-shaped jars. Perhaps owing to its narrow dimensions, the stall’s wares were piled high to the make-shift ceiling. Even Sunset, who knew full well that she couldn’t interact with her surroundings, found her mouth beginning to water at the sight of cakes stacked as tall as the proprietor. That is, until she got close enough to see the insects buzzing around them. A large and imposing woman sat to one side idly swatting the flies away.
In watching the stall, Sunset had narrowly missed where the three girls had disappeared to, and jumped a little as she found Sonata rushing over through the crowd without the other two in sight. Sunset saw the genius of the entire plan as it unfolded, like in some sort of movie. Whilst Sonata pretended to give the vendor a message from her satchel, which turned out to be just a blank piece of parchment or reed paper, the other two appeared on the awning, straddling the wooden planks holding it in place, and plucked five or seven cakes from the top tiers. As Aria made to move back down the side of the stall however, one of the cakes broke in half, and fell squarely onto the vendor’s head.
The man didn’t follow himself, but his bad-tempered wife who’d been swatting the flies broke into a sprint after them, brandishing the thin stick she’d been using and shouting after them. The girls seemed to lose the woman after having knocked over two elderly people, leapt over and destroyed a fruit stall, sent an official looking person in an important looking hat into a public pond, and crashed into the three Lotus members who were speaking to some of the crowd.
Sunset scowled as she recognised Adagio’s patron, the Ram. He beamed as he saw Adagio stumbling away from him with the cakes in her arms. His companions, two venerable looking people with an aura of learning tinged with abstraction, regarded them with austere curiosity.
“This is the girl of whom you spoke?” the other man inquired, squinting at Adagio.
The Ram readily agreed. Taking Adagio’s free hand, he pulled her closer. The older man and woman peered at her probingly. Sunset didn’t understand why Adagio didn’t try to pull away; she’d reacted far worse for far less whilst living with her. A closed expression came over Adagio’s face, and her gaze remained fixed on the stone floor.
“Hm,” the older woman said, bending down slightly. With strong fingers she took firm but careful hold of Adagio’s chin to lift up her face. “Yes,” she said quietly, running her hands across Adagio’s features. “Yes, you have an intelligent girl here. A great deal of versatility and creativeness. A fine choice.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the Ram murmured, in what Sunset scathingly considered to be a sycophantic tone. 
The older two seemed to have no more to say, and ignoring Aria and Sonata as though they weren’t there, inclined their heads before departing. The Ram was grinning widely, as though he could barely contain a secret excitement. He knelt down to Adagio and took hold of her shoulders.
“They approve!” he hissed. “It shalln’t be long, and then everything will be alright. I’ll take you away from that woman’s house.”
Adagio said nothing to this, but if the Ram had looked closer into her face, he might have seen the tightness there. As he prepared to leave as well, Adagio seemed to force herself to speak.
“Can they come as well?” she blurted. 
The Ram turned, and seemed to notice the other two for the first time. He eyed them with a little frown, and then flicked his eyes back to Adagio.
“Perhaps,” he said, his mouth twisting into what might have been meant for a smile. 
When he departed, a loud voice shouted “Come ‘ere, you little robbers!”, and the cake seller’s angry wife came bulldozing her way through the crowd. The memory began to fade as the three of them set off again, with people, sound, and details everywhere beginning to vanish. Sunset stood there, awaiting her return outside of the door, wondering to herself.
What did that mean? she thought, referring to Adagio’s question. Why would Adagio want the Ram to take her away from place they lived? Why not just run away?
Sunset’s spine tingled slightly, as she suddenly became aware that her surroundings weren’t re-solidifying into the three-dimensional labyrinth. She stared around into the dark with an unaccountable feeling of nakedness and vulnerability.
“Who are you?” 
Sunset’s heart skipped a beat. She swung around, staring wide-eyed into the darkness. She felt her eyes begin to sting, and a seemingly loud ringing in her ears from the deafening silence. And then she nearly fainted as a monstrous yellow face blazed out of the blackness.
“I rem... ber you!” the face roared, and then blinked out of existence.
Sunset found herself breathing hard, forgetting that she didn’t actually have to breath in the dreamscape.
“Am I in the memories still?” she asked aloud, trying to control her panic. “I still have Luna’s—“
“You can’t win!” the face shouted, reappearing in front of her. “I’ll beat you! You thin...ou can out-sing me? I’ll rip you to—“
Sunset stumbled backwards as the face vanished again. 
What’s going on? What— 





“Sunset!”
“Ah!” 
Sunset leapt back and fell out of her chair.
It took her a few moments to get her bearings, but after looking frantically around for a few moments, she found that she was back in her room. Luna’s charm lay on the floor next to her, and the shards were scattered around it, along with the strands of Adagio’s hair.
“Are you alright?” Twilight asked.
Sunset looked up at her, breathing hard. Twilight’s face was pale, her eyes wide.
“I... I’m fine, I—“ she stopped herself.
“You were muttering to yourself, and shaking and sweating. I thought you were having some kind of seizure.”
Sunset just stared at her for a few moments. She felt as though she were still in the dreamscape, as though she weren’t actually in her body. Experimentally, she reached a hand towards the fallen charm, and picked it up with trembling fingers. She ran her thumb over the smooth stone and metal.
“No,” Sunset whispered eventually. “No, I mean...” she paused. “I think... I think that these might not be as dead as we thought.”
When Sunset had explained what she’d seen, Twilight buried her face in her hands and groaned aloud.
“Is there anything that can go wrong that hasn’t?” she demanded. 
“I got deeper than before,” Sunset said. She chewed at her thumb nail and stared at the floor, but she wasn’t really seeing the floor. “The head... sea-horse thing... whatever. It didn’t seem like it could hold its form. Like a film with half the reel burned away.”
Twilight thought for a moment. “Perhaps it was just another memory? Maybe damaged by the pendant breaking?”
“It could have been,” Sunset said doubtfully. “It was more like... no. No, it saw me, responded to me. It was like I triggered something. Maybe I went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to, and it awakened some part of the stone still alive.”
“Well,” Twilight said slowly, gingerly holding a shard up to eye level. “That is what these things are meant to do, I suppose. But I didn’t think after taking this much damage it could...” Her sentence tailed off. “Well what do we do, then?” she asked after a short pause.
“We keep going,” Sunset said firmly. “I know we’re getting close to seeing what happened. What happened to the three of them, how they got the pendants. I just know it’ll explain what’s happened to them.”
“Sunset,” Twilight said, in a tone that made Sunset look up at her, startled. “I think that we’ve done enough for today.”
“What?” Sunset gasped.
“I think we should call it a day,” Twilight said, evidently trying to sound cheerful. “I mean, as you said we’ve done so much, and...” she paused. “Maybe we should take some time to think about—“
“Take some time?” Sunset asked, incredulous. “We don’t know that we have time. The whole point of this is to find out if they’re in any danger from the effects of the apotheostones. What if they continue to get younger, or—“
“Sunset, please stop shouting!” Twilight interrupted, glancing at the door. 
Sunset stopped, and then swallowed. She hadn’t noticed how dry her mouth had gone.
“Sunset, I know you’re concerned for them,” Twilight began in a more soothing tone. She laid a hand tentatively on Sunset’s bandaged one. “It’s just that I think that you might be letting your emotions get the better of you.”
“What are you talking about?” Sunset asked, giving her head an impatient shake. “I just want to—“
“Sunset, you’re pale, shaking, and sweating. You’ve just had a frightening experience after witnessing what I can only assume to be some very troubling scenes. And you want to dive straight back into all of that without any plan of action?”
Twilight let her words hang in the air for a little while. Sunset had no reply, and through a lack of anything to say, was forced to consider that she had a point. Even though she knew what she was doing was right, she couldn’t pretend that it was the smartest way to go about it; she was jumping headlong into it. And how well had anything she’d ever done spontaneously in her life gone? It almost always came back to bite her.
“Alright,” she said. “We’ll leave it till tomorrow. But we at least need to talk about how to do it before then.”
Twilight readily agreed, breathing a discreet sigh of relief. As she made her way to the door however, Sunset heard a crash behind it. Opening it, she found Aria half lying, half sitting on the floor, rubbing her bandaged arm and gritting her teeth.
“Are you alright?” Sunset asked, holding out her hand. “What happened?” 
Her cheeks glowing, Aria glanced irritably at a set of pencils on the floor near to the door. Sunset understood in an instant. Once she’d waved Twilight off and closed the door, she gestured discreetly for Aria to come into the bedroom with her. For a moment, she thought she caught Adagio directing a sideways look at them, but when she got a good look, Adagio seemed to be engrossed in playing a shooter game on Sunset’s laptop.
“I don’t have any shooter games,” Sunset muttered. She made an impatient noise. I’ll have to lock my laptop if she’s downloading things.
Whilst these thoughts occupied her, Aria sat sulking on the bed, still rubbing her arm. Sunset looked at her, and then shot a look at her own bandaged hands. What a pair we are she thought with a smile.
“Aria,” she began quietly. “What were you doing behind the door?”
Aria said nothing, but didn’t look at Sunset.
“Aria,” Sunset said warningly. “You said yourself that we can’t let Adagio know about the pendants.”
“Why can’t you just tell me what you’re doing?” Aria hissed. “Even if I can’t see it, why can’t you tell me?”
“I will eventually.” Sunset looked sadly at the girl as she folded her arms as tightly as she dared and looked moodily away. She sat down next to her and bumped her shoulder. “I promise that I will tell you, once we’re sure nothing is wrong. Come on, I already feel bad about lying to Adagio and Sonata, I can’t have you mad at me too.”
Aria’s lip quivered at this, and she bumped Sunset back.
“Fine,” she said. 
“So no more listening at the door?” Sunset asked, eyeing Aria askance. Aria made a proper show of promising, but Sunset made a mental note to keep an eye out anyway. “Okay then, go get ready for dinner. We’re having pizza today.”





As grown-up as her children generally acted, they were still children. Not an hour after eating, all three of them were seated on the couch with Sunset, snoozing as the one show they all agreed was good rolled its ending credits. Lifting Sonata gently off her lap, and laying her down on the arm rest, Sunset stood up as carefully as she could, trying not to disturb any of them. Looking down at them, she felt a warmth in her chest at the sight of their small sleeping bodies.
She was doing it for them. Whatever scruples that she had with what she was doing, she reminded herself that she was doing it for them.
In her room, she shut the curtains. There was no real reason for doing this, for no one could see into her room this high up. Sitting at her desk, she picked up the charm, and the little bag of shards. She had no plan, other than simply confronting the entity inside the broken pendant. If possible, she’d negotiate with it, and if not, she’d get out and await Twilight’s discussion of the problem. But she had to try.
She held up the charm, and prepared to hold it over the shards and hair, when the door creaked. She looked quickly towards the door, and saw a shadow disappear from the other side. Standing up quickly, she set down what she had and rushed to the door. She walked slowly out, and stood over the sofa. Aria lay with her eyes closed, her breathing slow and heavy. Sonata was still splayed over the chair arm, drooling all over it. Adagio was nestled in the corner of the cushions, her arms folded and her hair dishevelled. 
Sunset narrowed her eyes. She watched Aria closely for a few moments, expecting to see her flinch, open an eye, or give an unconvincing yawn. She did none of these things. 
Sunset scratched her chin a little. She found herself... disconcerted. 
It’s probably not safe to do it alone, she thought. Not if Aria is still trying to sneak peeks.
After a little deliberation, she thought also that it might also be dangerous to leave the shards and charm in the apartment. She hadn’t considered that telling Aria to wait might cause her to take matters into her own hands. 
With this disturbing thought in mind, Sunset made her decision; she put on her coat, locked the shards and charm in the blue box that Rarity had given her, and set off into the evening streets. Within a few minutes of diligent walking, she reached Rarity’s shop, and ignoring the closed sign on the entrance, knocked upon the door. There was no reply, as Sunset supposed was to be expected. Pulling out her phone, she sent a quick text, and within seconds received one back.
“Darling?” Rarity asked curiously after unlocking the door. “Dear, what’s all this?” She wasn’t looking at the box, but Sunset’s face. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Sunset replied. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just...” Rarity trailed off, and then shook her head. “Nothing. I suppose you want to see Twilight about something?”
“No,” Sunset said, holding up the box. “Nothing like that. I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind holding onto this for me.”
“Rarity?” called a male voice. “Who’s at the door?”
Rarity sighed the sigh of a person whose patience all but ran out a long time ago.
“Just a visitor, father!” she called over her shoulder. “You can put your rifle down!”
“How did she know I was—“ the male voice said, much quieter.
“Dear, you never put the thing down,” said a bored sounding female voice.
A certain amount of incomprehensible grumbling followed this, and then a thud from the floor above as something heavy was set upon the floor. Rarity meanwhile took the blue box Sunset was holding, frowning slightly.
“It’s the pendant shards and Princess Luna’s charm,” Sunset explained. “I don’t think it’s safe to leave them in my apartment right now.”
“Why?” Rarity asked, surprised. “I told you, Sunset, I highly doubt that anyone could get into this box. Even with tools.”
“I know,” Sunset said uneasily. “Don’t think I don’t trust your judgement, it’s just that I...” She paused. “I’d just feel better if you held onto it for tonight.”
Rarity nodded, a troubled look in her eyes. “Of course,” she said quietly. “Twilight can just bring it back with her tomorrow.” She smiled reassuringly, and Sunset bid her goodnight. 
On the way home, Sunset felt as though a significant worry had been lifted from her, which surprised her; she hadn’t consciously considered the issue of Aria’s interference as being of any significant concern to her. Feeling the lightness of her heart however gave her to wonder if it had indeed been a heavier weight on her mind than she’d thought.
She stopped at a minimart to pick up some small groceries she remembered that she needed, and proceeded home with the expectation of turning in early. The small dream began to crack however when she reached the vestibule to her apartment.
“Oh,” said Old Jim, upon looking up from his magazine.
Sunset looked at him. “Something wrong?”
“No, it’s jest...” he shook his head and swiped his screen. “It’s probably nothing.”
“If there’s a problem, I’d like to help,” Sunset prompted.
“It’s probably just my eyes acting up again,” Old Jim said breezily. “I thought one of them girls of yours was with you.”
“One of my girls?” Sunset asked, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“One of ‘em came runnin’ out a little after you left yourself.”
Sunset’s heart did a back-flip. “What!?” she gasped. “Which—Who—When did—“
She broke for the stairs, Old Jim blinking rapidly at the barrage of questions. He leaned around the corner after her and called “S-Should I call...” he let his sentence tail off.
Sunset mounted the stairs three at a time and almost skidded to a halt in front of her door, and hammered on it. When it didn’t instantly open up, she reached for her keys and fumbled them from her pocket. Before she could match it to the lock however, Sonata opened the door.
“You’re here!” Sunset exclaimed, taking Sonata by the shoulders. She looked around. “What the—“ she did a double-take at Aria, who for some reason was on the floor, and then looked properly at Sonata. Her eyes were puffy, red, and brimming with tears. “What’s wrong? What—“ she looked around again. “Where’s Adagio?”
Sonata gave an enormous sniff and began to cry loudly.


- To be Continued