…and the evil witch agreed to give the husband some of her flowers for his wife to eat, but in exchange, he had to agree to give the witch their first-born foal. And the husband agreed, um, which was a very bad idea. When you’re older, don’t ever agree to give somepony else your children, all right? Unless it’s only a temporary thing, like a summer flight camp, but I just wanted to make sure you understand that slavery is immoral.
What? Oh my. Um, I’d have to talk to Rarity about that. I’m sure she didn’t mean to sell you! Wait, she was how old at the time? Oh my.
No, Scootaloo, adoption isn’t the same thing at all.
Please, girls, I’m just trying to tell you the story here. The husband and his wife eventually, um, had their foal, um, in, um, the usual way, and they named her Rapunzel and gave her to the evil witch. But the evil witch shut little Rapunzel in a tall tower, where she grew into a beautiful young mare with very long hair and a lovely singing voice. Every day the witch would come to her and say “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” and Rapunzel would let down her hair, and the witch would climb up and sit in the tower with her and listen to her singing, and…
Fluttershy looked up and gulped at the sight of three identically stern young faces. They were all in bed, so that was something, but they didn’t look very sleepy at all. Oh, why had she agreed to this? Children really were more difficult than animals.
“You’re doing this all wrong,” said Apple Bloom.
“I am?”
“Yeah! You’re supposed to make us think the story is kinda about you, even though the original was about some other pony we’ve never heard of.”
Scootaloo raised a hoof. “Actually, I’ve heard of her! Her name was Rapunzel, and she was locked in a tower, and—”
“Right,” said Sweetie Belle. “But you’re supposed to, uh, deconstruct and subvert the formulaic expectations derived from our preexisting familiarity with the core narrative, while simultaneously modeling off of and contrasting your own lived experience to provide an additionally compelling hook for retaining viewership.”
Fluttershy stared at Sweetie Belle in terror. “I don’t think I know how to do any of that.”
“No, it’s easy!” said Apple Bloom. “I mean, you’re perfect for this! You’ve already got long hair, just like Rapunzel!”
Sweetie Belle nodded. “And you don’t meet a lot of other ponies, just like Rapunzel!”
“Yeah,” said Scootaloo, “and you like to sing, just like Sapphire Shores!”
“Rapunzel.”
“Gesundheit.”
“The point is,” said Apple Bloom with a voice that could corral sheep, “this story is supposed to be about you! You just need to think of some funny way to change her name, like, uh, Rapunshy. Or Shypunzel. Or Shypunshyzelshyflutter. Or something.”
Fluttershy shivered. Portmanteaus, Twilight had said names like that were called. You made them when you thought there were a couple of ponies who’d be so cute together that even their names had chemistry. Flutterpie. Appledash. Things like that. Also there seemed to be something of a nautical component, and she was not looking forward to being put in a ship with Rapunzel, even if she existed, which Fluttershy was reasonably sure she did not.
“But it’s a story,” she said, somewhat desperately. “Wouldn’t it be awfully disrespectful to take somepony else’s story and just change things around like that? Especially if I was trying to make myself the main character?”
Scootaloo shook her head. “Nah. I mean, all the other girls have been doing it just fine! We even ran into Trixie yesterday and she told us all about how all her friends had their cutie marks swapped but she saved the day and then Princess Celestia turned her into an alicorn.”
Sweetie Belle turned to her and frowned. “I wasn’t so impressed by that one. Didn’t you notice she didn’t have any wings?”
“Well, duh. It was just a story she was making up.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You see?” Scootaloo’s face was all smugness and early onset acne. “You’ve gotta tell us a story about Flutterashyzel, just like everypony else, or this won’t turn out right at all! Come on, Fluttershy, don’t you want to be a trooper?!”
“Oh, yes!” And no. Absolutely not. Fluttershy had no wish to be a ‘trooper,’ which she thought sounded awfully militaristic. On the other hoof, if all the other girls really were telling bedtime stories with themselves and their lives mixed into the characters, then Fluttershy certainly didn’t want to disappoint anyone by not following suit. “But I don’t know if I can write something like that.”
Apple Bloom turned to her companions, who all nodded solemnly. “I was afraid of that,” she said slowly. “I reckon we’ll just have to write it for you.”
Several minutes later found the crusaders clustered around the only table Fluttershy still owned after the group’s last several visits to her cottage. It was painted all over in ugly blue and yellow stripes, and it didn’t match any of her other furniture at all, but for better or worse, it appeared to be indestructible. At the moment it was covered in blank sheets of paper while the crusaders argued among themselves and Fluttershy crouched worriedly by Angel’s bed. Angel was awfully patient, but he did sometimes get a little antsy when there was a lot of noise while he was trying to sleep, and she would have felt really awful if he’d suddenly decided to attack anypony.
“First things first,” Apple Bloom was saying. “What kind of a name is Rapunzel, anyway?”
“I think it’s supposed to be a kind of food,” said Scootaloo. “Like last time I heard the story, someone said that she was named after whatever the husband took from the witch. So maybe it’s a flower or something?”
“I’ll go look it up!” said Sweetie Belle. “Hey, Fluttershy, do you have a dictionary?”
“No, I—” Fluttershy looked up and sighed. Sweetie Belle had already run off. At least the other girls were still at the ugly table. “You see,” she said timidly, “rapunzel is just another name for—”
“Oh, I bet it’s an apple!”
Scootaloo looked at Apple Bloom suspiciously. “Why an apple?”
“Well, there are so many of them! Do you know how many different relatives I’ve got? And they’re practically all named after kinds of apples or else stuff you make outta apples. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Rapunzel in there somewhere.”
“All right, I guess that makes sense. So does that mean the witch was actually an apple seller?”
“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that part.” Apple Bloom crossed her forehooves on the table and frowned. “Like, what makes her an evil witch anyhow? Does she ever cast a spell or anything? I bet even Sweetie Belle is more magic than this witch lady!”
“Thanks!” Sweetie Belle appeared at the head of the stairs, something or other balanced precariously on top of her head. The other girls exchanged devious grins before waving up at her.
“Hey Sweetie Belle! Did you find your soulmate?”
“What? No, I was looking for a dictiona—ohhhhhhh.” She scowled. “Very funny, you guys. No, but check it out, I found all these weird magazines under Fluttershy’s bed! In this one there’s a mare who—”
Fluttershy raced up the stairs with the grace and urgency of a cruise missile. “GIVE ME THOSE,” she screeched, and grabbed the stack of very private magazines off Sweetie Belle’s head as she passed by. She skidded to a halt in the upstairs hallway, barely avoiding a stack of out-of-use birdhouses, and turned back to face Sweetie Belle with her face scarlet. “Just,” she said breathlessly, “just forget anything you saw in there, okay? It’s not right, not right at all…”
Sweetie Belle nodded carefully. “You mean it’s immoral, like slavery?”
“Yes! Just like that.”
“Is that what the whip was for?”
Fluttershy burst into tears.
The sheet of paper in Apple Bloom’s hooves was covered in writing on both sides and at all possible angles, none of it incredibly legible and much of it crossed out, but she looked pleased nonetheless. Fluttershy smiled as she held her cup of tea to her lips. They were good girls, really, and it was good to see them feeling so industrious. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d actually been told any time she had to have them in bed. Surely they’d be done with their story soon, and she could read it to them and they’d fall asleep and everyone would be proud of her for how well she’d handled the situation, especially after she’d promised Sweetie Belle enough candy for her to promise not to say anything to anypony in the entire town.
“So we’re all agreed?” asked Apple Bloom. “The witch ain’t a real witch and she ain’t evil or anything, because she and the husband sign a legally binding contract signing over his firstborn foal in exchange for all the rapunzel apples.”
Sweetie Belle nodded happily. “Right! And the husband can’t be evil either, because when Rarity sold me for a barrel of hatpins, she never got in any trouble for that!”
“Didn’t you come home again like the very same day, though?” asked Scootaloo.
“Yeah, the boat sank for some reason. Do you girls think cargoholds are bad places to start fires?”
“There are bad places to start fires?”
“Girls!” Apple Bloom pounded the table and they all jumped, including Fluttershy, whose tea leapt out of her cup and splashed on her nose. She whimpered. “Can we all just focus here? I’m trying to battle starrytypes and you two are just talking about fire again!”
Scootaloo looked plaintive. “But fire keeps me warm in cold winter nights!”
“Why can’t you just go inside?”
“Maybe some of us don’t have hundreds of thousands of apple-related relatives, okay?!”
Fluttershy tensed at the sound of an argument developing, and wasn’t at all looking forward to having to intervene, but fortunately Sweetie Belle got there first. “Why,” she asked slowly, “would an apple seller own a tower?”
Apple Bloom shrugged. “I dunno. Storing apples, I guess?”
“But you wouldn’t put your slave girl somewhere that you already needed to put apples in! That’s overstocking.”
“Oh, yeah, huh.” Apple Bloom looked down at her impenetrable mass of notes. “Okay, so maybe it was an apple tree? Rapunzel could be forced to live on top of an apple tree.”
“I thought we were saying she wasn’t evil.” Sweetie Belle brightened. “Oh, but maybe Rapunzel’s hooves are just sensitive to dirt! I bet if I asked Rarity she’d say that she’d rather live in a tree than on an apple farm!”
Apple Bloom scoffed. “Feh. Sensitive hooves, now there’s a fatal flaw for our hero. What gives you sensitive hooves, anyhow?”
“I dunno,” said Scootaloo, “poor diet? I mean, if she never eats anything but apples…”
“I’ll show you how sensitive apple farmer hooves are!” yelled Apple Bloom, and in the ensuing splintering of wood Fluttershy sighed and mourned the loss of her final table.
Fluttershy watched the slow cycle of the hands on her clock in despair. She didn’t know when she was supposed to have gotten the crusaders into bed, but it was definitely past her bedtime. And yet the girls showed no signs of stopping. Sweetie Belle lay on her back amid the wreckage of the table, quills tucked behind both ears to make her look ‘professional’ and ‘distinguished.’ Apple Bloom looked for all the world to have been bound in a paper fort, surrounded by increasingly illegible notes and partial outlines as she struggled to write down everything Sweetie Belle was saying. And Scootaloo was leaning against one wall, deep in thought about Fluttershy wasn’t sure she wanted to know what.
“But don’t forget,” Sweetie Belle said, with one hoof pointed illustriously toward the ceiling, “this is all about Fluttershy! So we gotta work some of her life story in there! So I’m thinking the husband and his wife are pegasus ponies, and the apple seller is an earth pony or something, to symbolize how she came down here instead of living in Cloudsdale!”
“Earth pony, got it.” Apple Bloom scribbled vigorously before looking up again. “But wait, didn’t she get bullied or something?”
Fluttershy gathered her courage to answer, but Sweetie Belle got there first. “Oh yeah! So maybe the apple seller needs to be a pegasus too? And the prince can be an earth pony and bring her out of Cloudsdale by getting her down from the apple tree!”
“Now hold on!” Apple Bloom threw her own quill at Sweetie Belle, but it lodged in her mane without any obvious effect. “Apple sellers ain’t bullies!”
“There are a lot of apple sellers out there, Apple Bloom…”
“And none of’em are bullies! Applejack says so. It’s in the blood.”
“Well, okay.” Sweetie Belle shrugged amiably. “Maybe the husband and the wife can be the bullies. Do we even know anything about Fluttershy’s real family?”
“Um, actually…”
Apple Bloom shook her head. “Nah. Total mystery. Okay, so Fluttershy comes down to the real world, which is to say an apple tree, and then… well, who’s the prince? Does Fluttershy know any stallions?”
Fluttershy smiled weakly. “Well, there is…”
Sweetie Belle ignored her. “Spike, I guess? Oh, and then he could burn down the tree with his magic dragon breath!”
“I thought we were done setting stuff on fire.”
“Technically we hadn’t started yet…”
This seemed to be the cue Scootaloo had been waiting for. She stepped away from the wall, tossed her hair dramatically, and said with the voice of someone who has just thought of something truly brilliant: “Why does he even need to be a prince?!”
The other girls stared at her blankly. Finally Apple Bloom waved a hoof vaguely. “It’s, you know, traditional! That’s what princes are for. Saving folks, and I guess marrying’em afterwards.”
“Yeah,” said Sweetie Belle, “but Rarity tells me that sometimes they’re just real big jerks. What did you have in mind, Scootaloo?”
Scootaloo grinned around at them all. “A princess! That’d make the point that girls are just as good as boys at stuff like fighting dragons and rescuing girls named after apples! And she’d need to have some cool actiony colors, like a blue coat and a rainbow mane, and she should be a pegasus, and—“
“I like it, I like it!” Sweetie Belle rolled over onto her front to return Scootaloo’s grin, her eyes ablaze with triumph. “I don’t know if Rainbow Dash would really want to be called a princess, though? She could be a knight, I guess.”
“Rainbow Dash?” Scootaloo tried to look innocent. “Who said anything about Rainbow Dash?”
Apple Bloom emerged from her stack of papers with several still trailing from her mane. There were snapped quills all around her, and Fluttershy made a tired mental note to stop at Quills and Sofas sometime soon. Maybe they’d even be selling tables? That would be useful. “This is great!” said Apple Bloom. “We’re really, what’s it called, subversing the saddish quo with this stuff! Hay, if it weren’t for the husband we wouldn’t have any stallions at all, but I guess you kinda need them to have foals with.”
A feeling of vast dread settled over Fluttershy. She knew exactly what was coming next.
“No you don’t!” said Sweetie Belle, all too happily. “If you’ve got a couple mares, I think all they need is some really tight black clothes and a whip…”
There was a shawl around Fluttershy’s shoulders as she marched miserably into the cool night air. Her friends had made it all sound so easy! Pick a story, fiddle with the character details a little bit to make it more interesting to the crusaders, tell them your newfound creation, and sit back and look at the happily sleeping little darlings. But she’d failed at the fiddling part, and now the little darlings were anything but asleep and she was walking out alone in the dead of night and leaving them totally unsupervised. No, that wasn’t quite true; Angel was supervising them. She smiled. They’d be fine.
And if she was lucky, Angel would be fine too.
To Fluttershy’s great relief and convenience, her friends all seemed to be gathered in Sugarcube Corner. Perhaps it wasn’t as late as she’d thought. A general chorus of greetings—to say nothing of several delicious smells—greeted her as she entered, most audibly “Fluttershy! Have a seat, girl!”
Fluttershy smiled gratefully and slid in between Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash. “Um, hello everyone,” she said, waving one wing distractedly. “How are you?”
Rarity laid a calming hoof on Fluttershy’s from across the round table. “We’re doing fabulously. But how about you? Wasn’t tonight the night you, well… read to the girls?” Fluttershy nodded. “How did that go?”
“Oh, um, well. It was going perfectly—”
Twilight Sparkle burst out laughing.
Fluttershy, joined by everyone else, stared at her in confusion, and after a few seconds she seemed to notice. “What?!” asked Twilight. “I was laughing at Fluttershy’s joke. She said perfectly, but she was using the imperfect, and… yes I’ll just be quiet now shall I?”
This suggestion was met with a series of solemn nods, and a red-faced Twilight sank down a few inches behind the table, though Pinkie patted her kindly on the head. Or at least she did pat her, but it was always hard to judge Pinkie Pie’s reasons for doing things. Fluttershy smiled softly. “Um, but like I was saying, things got a little out of control. They weren’t happy with my story, and now, well… they’ve decided to put on a play.”
“A play?”
“Yes. Of the story. Um, they asked me to bring you this invitation.” She extracted the paper from under her wing and laid it out on the table, where the other mares frowned at Apple Bloom’s hoofwriting, which might perhaps have been described as ‘workmanlike’ by a very generous observer.
“Ratterflupunzshyel,” read Rarity, very slowly, “a story of forbidded love and femininism.” She looked back up at Fluttershy. “Is this just the four of you, then? Or should we be expecting some of your animal friends in supporting roles?”
“Um.” Scootaloo had approached Fluttershy as she was leaving, asking if they could use any of her animal friends in their play. Fluttershy had carefully answered that they might try to recruit any animal that didn’t run away from them, but they were on no account to give chase. She sighed and crossed her feathers for luck. “No, I think it’s just the four of us.”
“Well,” said Twilight, having apparently decided to rejoin the conversation, “I think it sounds fantastic!” She grinned at their skeptical expressions. “I mean, I’m sure the play itself will be terrible. But it’s fantastic that they’re doing creative stuff like this, don’t you think? Rarity, I thought you said Sweetie Belle had gone off playwriting?”
“Oh, well,” said Fluttershy, “she said that Rarity told her that she was prone to theatrics, so she reconsidered.”
Rarity’s cheeks turned an interesting shade of pink, and Applejack took advantage of her sudden coughing fit to turn to Rainbow Dash. “Whaddya reckon, RD? Let’s all be sophisticated ponies and have us a night at the theater, eh?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.” Rainbow Dash groaned and stretched her wings, narrowly missing slapping Fluttershy in the face. “I bet the squirt will love to see me there. But it’s not my fault if I fall asleep, got it?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Twilight, and shared a knowing smile with Pinkie Pie of all ponies. “Nothing those girls do is ever boring.”
Fluttershy stood offstage, shielded from the audience by what she was completely certain were the curtains from her bedroom window glued inappropriately together. She shook her head. At least Applejack and Rarity had offered to set up a small fund for damages suffered during this whole storytelling experiment, and even Rainbow Dash had chipped in a few bits when they couldn’t seem to find Scootaloo’s family to talk to. That had been odd. Oh well, maybe another time?
In the meantime, though… Fluttershy looked at the script in her wings and frowned. It was in Sweetie Belle’s hoofwriting, which was much easier to read than Apple Bloom’s and suggested there had been a role change while she’d been away at Sugarcube Corner. Or maybe several. “Rapunzbelle?” she asked, reading from the script’s header.
Sweetie Belle nodded. “We had to move some things around while you were gone. Now I’m the girl who gets imprisoned on the tree, and you’re the narrator. And the husband. Oh, and the wife.”
“Wait, both of them? How—” She stopped herself just in time, having a nasty feeling she knew exactly what Sweetie Belle would have answered if she’d gone through with the question. “Um, won’t it look bad if I’m just reading from a script?”
“No, it’s okay! This is what’s called a ‘reading.’ I had just enough time to make one each for you and me and Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo’s going to make it up as she goes along, because she feels really in tune with the role or something. Don’t worry, Fluttershy, this is going to be great!” She spun around and screamed at the top of her lungs, “PLACES!!!” and Fluttershy quivered in fear.
Scootaloo, dressed in the traditional black colors of the stage manager, carried some very familiar blue-and-yellow-striped wood onto the stage, and Fluttershy moaned quietly. Her table had been turned into a facsimile of Applejack’s apple booth from the Ponyville market, but with nails sticking out at odd angles and providing obvious safety risks and oh goodness where had they gotten a hammer? After the first time they’d gotten to one of her tables, Fluttershy had made sure to bury all her hammers under the house whenever the crusaders visited.
But soon enough Apple Bloom was standing smartly behind the booth, wearing Fluttershy’s Ponytones uniform (which was much too big for her), and Fluttershy was being pushed onto stage by an impatient Sweetie Belle. She gazed out at the sympathetic faces of her friends, gulped, and looked down at the script.
“Once upon a time,” she read as confidently as she could manage, “there was a not-at-all evil apple seller named Apple Cocktail, who was the awesomest big sister ever! Except for big sisters who made dresses and only very rarely sell you to riverboat slavetraders, who are just as good. I would write more here but I don’t think Scootaloo has a big sister. She wants one, but the theater is not a place for making dreams come true.”
Rarity was looking very uncomfortable, but Fluttershy swallowed and kept going. “Every day Apple Cocktail set up her awesome apple stand in the marketplace of Ponyburg and sold apples. And apparently there was a mare in Ponyburg who was going to have a foal soon, and this made her really want some rapunzels. I’m not sure why this happened but it is in the original story too, so maybe having foals makes you hungry. Anyway, the husband went to Apple Cocktail’s apple stand.”
Fluttershy walked across the stage to the apple stand, making very sure to stay away from the nails sticking out at her. “Hello,” she said, reading from the script, “do you have any apples?”
Apple Bloom saluted. “Yes, ma’am! We’ve got… hold on, this says ‘see Appendix A.’ Okay…” She flipped through her pages and pulled out a sheet of paper with ‘APPLE BLOOM PLEASE LIST ALL YOUR RELATIVES’ written on the back. “We’ve got Applejack, Big Macintosh, Granny Smith, Apple Fritter, Apple Bumpkin, Red Gala, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Caramel Apple, Apple Strudel, Apple Tart, Baked Apples, Apple Brioche, Apple Cinnamon Crisp, Apple Cobbler, Apple Honey, Apple Pie, Gala Appleby, Lavender Fritter, Peachy Sweet…”
In the audience, both Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie were having a very hard time keeping their laughter in check as Applejack glared at them each in turn, so Fluttershy leapt to their rescue with the next line. “That’s very impressive, but do you have any rapunzel apples?”
Once again Twilight burst out laughing, though she tried desperately to cover it up as a peculiar cough; Rarity too was tittering, but Apple Bloom ignored them all. “Yeah! But we should probably show this part to Applejack before we start the play, just to make sure.” She looked up from the script and groaned. “Oh… right. Whoops.”
Fluttershy felt a pang of sympathy for Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle both. If she’d been in their position just then, she’d have felt frightfully embarrassed. Maybe the kindest thing she could do would be to keep reading from the script and pretend everything made sense. “How much for a lifetime supply of rapunzel apples?” Rarity’s tittering grew louder, and Fluttershy shook her head at her.
“One newborn foal, please.”
Fluttershy looked down at her next line, sighed inwardly, and read it verbatim. “Look, that can’t be right. Random apple sellers demanding foals for apples? Wouldn’t there be riots in the street or something?”
“Look,” said Apple Bloom, also reading directly from the script, “this is that suspicion of just belief stuff, all right? Besides, apple sellers are really well organized. If rapunzel apples cost one foal in Ponyville, they probably cost three foals in Manehattan, because of inflation.” She looked up and glared into the stage’s makeshift wings. “Dang it, Sweetie Belle, you weren’t supposed to write this part down!”
“Sorry!”
“Can I give you my wife’s foal after it’s born?” asked Fluttershy. “She doesn’t seem to like it very much right now so she probably won’t mind.”
“Sure, that’ll be fine.” Apple Bloom reached down and pulled out two red onions, which Fluttershy supposed must have been the most apple-looking things they’d been able to find in her kitchen. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Applejack trying to hide inside her hat. “Here’s the first couple of rapunzel apples. I’ll keep bringing you more as I grow them!”
Fluttershy’s next line was in her narrator role, so she walked forwards to the center of the stage while Apple Bloom and Scootaloo got the apple stand put away. “The husband took the rapunzel apples back to his wife”, she read, “and they ate nothing but rapunzel apples for days and days. Also they decided to make some more babies for after the one they were giving to the apple seller. We probably can’t show that part because there’s only one Fluttershy, though.”
“Ooh, ooh!” A blur of pink and slightly darker pink announced Pinkie Pie’s arrival on the stage, where she bounced happily next to Fluttershy in a completely unscripted fashion. “I can help! Do you need someone to make babies with, Fluttershy? I—aaaaaaah!” She’d been quickly enveloped in two magic glows, one blue and the other a sort of reddish purple, and Rarity and Twilight worked to pull her off the stage and deposit her safely back in the audience.
Rarity placed a shocked hoof over her mouth. “Really, Pinkie Pie!” she said. “Not in front of the children!”
“Aww, sorry, my bad.”
For her part, Fluttershy was very glad to look down at the script and see she was quickly running out of lines. The play wasn’t exactly triggering her stage fright, since her friends were holding absolutely no high expectations for her—which itself kind of hurt—but it was still a tremendously awkward experience and she would have quit in a moment if she hadn’t been doing it for Sweetie Belle and the others. That was the trouble with kindness, it led you to do things for other ponies.
Guided by the script, Fluttershy walked back to stage right, where Sweetie Belle presented her with Angel. Except that Angel was wearing what had to be a full box of Fluttershy’s tail extensions on his head and looking unambiguously murderous. Fluttershy grabbed him away as quickly as she could before anything bad happened, and looked at Sweetie Belle quizzically.
“He’s supposed to be me as a baby,” said Sweetie Belle. “I don’t think my ears are that big, though... ow, he bit me!”
Angel’s appearance led to a great deal of hoof-stomping applause and suppressed laughter, and then finally Fluttershy was allowed to hide offstage and calm down. Once she thought she could face her friends again without blushing furiously, she slipped away from the wings and into the audience, where she snuggled into Rarity’s side and was rewarded with a gentle kiss to the forehead. She felt safer already.
The next bit was a sort of bizarre montage of Angel growing up and turning into Sweetie Belle—or rather ‘Rapunzbelle’—accompanied by an offstage Scootaloo playing some song on a piano Fluttershy did not recall owning before, and then the next set was revealed and everypony gasped. An elephant stood in the center of the stage nee living room, its head draped with what Fluttershy miserably identified as her best bedsheets. Red onions and other apple-looking objects were glued to the bedsheets in various places, and Sweetie Belle sat on top of the elephant’s head in Fluttershy’s dress from the Grand Galloping Gala. Like Angel, she had some of Fluttershy’s tail extensions stuck to her mane to give it more length, and pink fabric was wrapped all around the elephant’s trunk in an imitation of the rest of her mane.
Fluttershy nudged Rarity, eyes wide. “That’s Denise!”
“What, my sister?”
“No, the elephant! I forgot she was visiting this week! I’m surprised Denise is all right with Sweetie Belle, though; she’s normally terrified of little white things. Mice and so on, you know.”
“Well, Sweetie Belle’s not so very little anymore.” Rarity coughed. “Incidentally, anything she may have told you about being traded to riverboat men, I ask you to take with a grain of salt.”
Fluttershy smiled at her friend. “I’m glad to hear—”
“It was a barrel of vintage hatpins, you understand.”
“…um, why don’t we just watch the play?”
Apple Bloom, still dressed in the Ponytones outfit, strode out onto stage and rapped sharply on Denise’s leg. Fluttershy, along with the rest of the audience, winced, but Denise seemed not to mind. “Rapunzbelle, Rapunzbelle, let down your mane!” Apple Bloom shouted, and Denise obligingly lowered her trunk for Apple Bloom to climb up, where she only got temporarily caught in the bedsheet foliage.
Sweetie Belle was waiting for her when she got unstuck. “I just don’t see why I have to stay in this tree all day!”
“It’s because you don’t eat enough apples,” said Apple Bloom wisely. “I give all my rapunzel apples to your old parents like I promised, because apple sellers are always honest and virtuous, and so you have to eat froufrou stuff instead and you’re afraid of getting your hooves dirty.” Applejack rolled over on her back in laughter. Rarity glared at her, but this only seemed to make her laugh the harder. Fluttershy looked around and saw her other friends were having trouble keeping straight faces too, except for Pinkie Pie, who had materialized some popcorn from somewhere and appeared completely absorbed in the story.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Sweetie Belle was saying. “Oh, but if only I was in love! Then I would be willing to put up with anything.”
“That’d be nice. I don’t see why you haven’t given me any grandchildren yet.” This made Applejack stop laughing abruptly and pull her hat back over her eyes, and Fluttershy couldn’t help a quiet chuckle at the sight. She couldn’t have been the only one to notice Apple Bloom sounding exactly like Granny Smith for her last line.
“It is terribly difficult to meet other ponies when you live in a tree.”
“Well, you do have wings… hold on a tick, that’s not right.” Apple Bloom frowned down at her script. “Sorry, I reckon that part’s from an earlier version. Uh, what I mean to say is… some ponies have wings! Maybe you’ll meet a pegasus who crashes into a bunch of apple trees!” This set off a veritable storm of choking, nudging, and knowing glances in the audience, all of which Apple Bloom studiously ignored. “I gotta go fix the barn again, Rapunzbelle,” she said. “You stay safe and don’t let down your mane for just anypony, y’hear?”
“Of course not, Apple Cocktail,” said Sweetie Belle, fluttering her eyelids far more lasciviously than a filly her age should have been able to manage, and Apple Bloom descended Denise’s trunk accompanied by a chorus of scandalized murmurs. Then nothing seemed to happen next. Apple Bloom showed no signs of coming back on stage, Scootaloo showed no signs of appearing, and Sweetie Belle cast several meaningfully unhappy looks at the audience but didn’t say anything.
Finally Twilight leaned over across Pinkie Pie to whisper, “Fluttershy, are you up next?”
Fluttershy looked down at her script. “Oh! Oh, um, yes, I’m sorry!” But by then she was too tangled up under Applejack’s head and Rarity’s forehoof to easily get back onstage, and besides she felt a lot more comfortable where she was, without a whole empty space around her and everyone staring directly at her. She smiled and read the next bit of narration right from the audience.
“But on that very day there was a pegasus flying through the apple orchard! Sir Scootalot was the second-bravest knight that Equestria had ever known, but she was very single, and also very eligibubble. Sir Scootalot had grown up a broke, homeless orphan in Ponyburg, pretending to be a normal pony like all her friends, until one day she just couldn’t take it anymore and announced her homelessness in the most obvious, most public way she could possibly think of!
“Then the brave Sir Galadash adopted Sir Scootalot as her little sister, and they lived in an awesome cloud house together and had all kinds of awesome adventures forever and ever, and nobody ever made fun of Sir Scootalot at school ever again because if they did then Sir Galadash would just fly down and beat them up, because Sir Galadash was way too cool to worry about things like assault and battery laws. But eventually Sir Scootalot got old enough to fly away on her own, and then she came to Apple Cocktail’s apple orchard totally randomly.”
Nopony dared say anything for several seconds after that, until Rainbow Dash finally spoke up from her corner of the room, sounding pleased. “Boy, what imagination these kids have got!” she said. “Come on, squirt! Let’s see some more acting!”
At this Scootaloo marched onto stage, no longer in her stage manager’s black but instead wearing Rainbow Dash’s first Gala dress, the one from the failed fashion show that Fluttershy had forgotten she even still had. Rarity was forever running out of storage space and passing older designs on to Fluttershy for safekeeping, but she had sealed that entire event out of her memory.
But there was no denying that Scootaloo looked great in the armor, even if it was rather too large for her, and they all burst into applause. Scootaloo smiled, waved a hoof, turned to face them… and froze.
Rarity looked away from Scootaloo’s horrified expression to whisper to Fluttershy. “What’s happened to her, darling?”
Fluttershy sighed. “Stage fright, I think. Oh dear, I had no idea…”
“Isn’t there something we can do?”
“I don’t know! She might not appreciate it if we tried to help. Oh dear, oh dear…”
But Sweetie Belle had no such worries, and promptly took over the play from her place on Denise’s head. “Oh my!” she shouted at several times a proper indoor volume. “A wandering knight! What’s that, brave knight?” She elaborately pretended to be listening very close to Scootaloo’s complete silence. “Yes, of course I will let my mane down for you!”
The next several minutes were some of the strangest Fluttershy remembered having in a long time, starting with Scootaloo’s very slow, very hesitant, very quiet scaling of Denise’s trunk and followed by the lovers’ conversation, in which Sweetie Belle did her best to play all the parts through necessity and determination. “This is all so sudden!” she said at one point. “Brave knight, you want to hold my hoof? Well, if… I said, you want to hold my hoof? Like, you hold your hoof up and I do the same thing? Well, if… okay, fine, we don’t have to do that.
“What? Marriage? Oh, Sir Scootalot, I couldn’t! Not unless you recited a whole big speech on the power of love… which you can’t, because you said you were gonna make up all your own lines on the spot. Ugh!
“What was that? Run away from this tree? You’ll need to cut off my long mane first, I’m not allowed to touch scissors anymore… come on, you can do this, just act like you’re cutting something and I’ll take Fluttershy’s extensions off and… oh, come on, Scootaloo!”
Finally Apple Bloom came to her rescue, though she wasn’t wearing the Ponytones clothes anymore so Fluttershy wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have appeared again. She could have checked the script but she got the feeling there wasn’t much point to it anymore. She settled in against Rarity’s side to watch the rest of the show.
“Rapunzbelle!” shouted Apple Bloom. “You found a pegasus!”
“Oh, yeah!” Sweetie Belle leaned over the edge of the bedsheet foliage and scowled. “She’s really brave and full of eloquent speeches and so on. We’re going to get married!”
“That’s great!” Apple Bloom looked up at Scootaloo’s still-frozen form appraisingly. “She looks plenty strong and all, too. Why, I reckon with her help around the farm, we might be able to grow enough apples for you to eat some and stop being so durn frightened of dirt!”
Sweetie Belle frowned—that had clearly not been in agreement with her attempt at a cutting-off-her-mane plot—but kept going anyway, determination written all over her face. “Oh, goody! Maybe I’ll be able to meet my parents’ other children!”
“I don’t see why not.” Apple Bloom grinned and turned to face the audience, who were somewhat divided between paying attention to the play and paying attention to Applejack and Rainbow Dash. “Way I see it,” said Apple Bloom with grave finality, “we’re all gonna live happily ever after.”
Fluttershy and Twilight started the applause, quickly followed by the rest, and Apple Bloom grinned hugely and bowed in one direction after another while Sweetie Belle climbed down onto the floor, at which point she joined Apple Bloom in the bowing while Scootaloo remained frozen up above. Everypony was laughing and cheering, and then Fluttershy’s eyes went huge with horror. Angel Bunny, drawn by the sound of applause and still wearing his makeshift wig, had come back out to take his own bows.
“Oh no,” breathed Fluttershy, and leapt forward to catch him before it was too late. “Denise, don’t…!”
But it was too late. Denise had seen the little white thing that was Angel and screamed and reared up, sending Scootaloo toppling back off her head. Denise’s trunk slammed into the living room’s ceiling, soon followed by the rest of her head, and Fluttershy’s house, which had never been built for collisions with elephants, creaked ominously…
An hour later, when Pinkie Pie found her under a bridge in East Ponyville, Fluttershy was still crying.
“It’s all my fault,” she said to Pinkie after the initial round of questioning had passed. “It was such a simple job, and I ruined it, ruined it for everypony…!”
“Awww!” Pinkie hugged her and Fluttershy sighed and wept into her friend’s pink coat. “It’s not as bad as all that, Fluttershy! I mean, yeah, your house kinda imploded and all, but we can build it again. Remember the parasprites? That was way worse and we fixed everything then.”
Fluttershy shuddered, but nodded. The aftermath of the parasprite invasion had been four long months of constant construction that were satisfying in their own way but would have made very bad television. “It’s not about my house,” she said, and hiccupped miserably. “It’s everything that happened before that! I was supposed to read them a simple story and put them to bed before their bedtime, and that was it! Instead they stayed up way too late and now nobody will ever think I’m remotely competent ever again!”
“Oh, bedtimes aren’t such a big deal,” said Pinkie, patting her like she’d done to Twilight earlier. “Even if it ended badly, the kids had a whole lot of fun, right? Isn’t that more important?”
“I guess so…” She sighed and wiped her runny nose on Pinkie’s shoulder, pretty sure her friend wouldn’t mind. “But the girls…”
“The girls all had a great time too! Even Twilight was laughing a lot! Come on, Fluttershy! Maybe the young’uns didn’t get to bed as early as they could have, but everyone had a lot of fun… except for you. It sounds like you were just kinda scared and guilty the whole evening.”
Fluttershy shook her head. “Not the whole evening. But you’re right. I was very frightened that it wasn’t going to go well.”
“Right! So now that you worked your cute little tushy off making sure everypony else had a good time, maybe you should have some fun too!”
“Um. What did you have in mind…?”
The hoof that Pinkie had been patting Fluttershy’s back with abruptly wandered downwards another couple inches, and Fluttershy squeaked. “Well,” said Pinkie, “we never did get around to that making babies thing!”
Fluttershy, face reddening, tried to get a look at her friend’s expression, but it was dark and Pinkie was never easy to read even at the best of times. But she supposed she had nothing to lose. “Do you, um… do you have any whips?”
“Do licorice whips count?”
Fluttershy smiled. “I’ll take what I can get.”
Then they made a portmanteau with a nautical component.